Put Them on One Team, They Said. It Rarely Works at Our Table.: Board games for kids of different ages

Our girls are six and ten. One can't read yet and wants to be done in 20 minutes. The other wants to build engines and bluff and could happily play for two hours, with cookies and hot chocolate.

So what do you play when both are at the table? Most advice on this says the same things: cooperative games, handicaps, put the kids in teams. Some of it works for us. One part, the most popular one, rarely does. Here's what we've learned.

Player count, play time and age are taken from the box or the publisher.

The quick answer

• What works for us with both: Skull King, Uno and Uno Flip, Flip 7, Skip-Bo, Karak, Andor Junior, Topp die Torte! and Autsch!.
• Our house rules: small advantages for the youngest, as long as it still feels fair to the oldest.
• What rarely works: siblings on one team. The older one takes over.
• Who picks: no rule. Something everyone is at least okay with.

What works with both at our table

Card games

• Skull King: a trick-taking game where you bid how many tricks you’ll win. 2 to 8 players, about 30 minutes, 8+. Before bed we often only play up to six cards.
• Uno and variants like Uno Flip or Uno No Mercy: numbers and symbols, no reading. Our youngest picks Uno Flip herself.
• Flip 7: push-your-luck with cards. 3 to 18 players, about 20 minutes, 8+. Our youngest wins without help, because it’s mostly luck and gut feeling.
• Skip-Bo: sort cards in order from 1 to 12, no reading.
• Cockroach Poker, sometimes: a bluffing game. 2 to 6 players, about 20 minutes, 8+. Our youngest loves it, but when she gets fooled, the mood sometimes tips over.

Adventures

• Karak: a dungeon crawler for kids. 2 to 5 players, 7+. At our table, the youngest plays for the adventure, the oldest for the company.
• Andor Junior: a cooperative fantasy adventure. 2 to 4 players, 30 to 45 minutes, 7+. Both play it, our 10-year-old less often these days.

Something different

• Topp die Torte!: stack cake layers by eye so the fillings line up. Kinderspiel des Jahres 2025, 2 to 4 players, about 20 minutes, 6+.
• Autsch!: a German game we play with both. We haven’t reviewed it yet.

Our house rules

We give our youngest small advantages:

• Skull King: her bid still counts if she’s off by one trick.
• Flip 7: she sometimes gets two lives, so one duplicate number doesn’t knock her out.

The important part is the other side of the table. Usually our 10-year-old is fine with it. But as soon as she feels the game isn’t balanced anymore, she finds it unfair. So we keep the advantages small, and we’d rather drop one than lose the older one.

In the community you hear similar ideas: younger players draw an extra card in Ticket to Ride or place their starting settlements first in Catan. Some families phase the advantage out once a kid has won a few times in a row.

The tip that rarely works for us: siblings on one team

Almost every guide recommends teams. Put the siblings together against the parents, and nobody has to lose alone.

We tried. Sometimes it works. Mostly, our older daughter takes control, and our younger one hates that. So it rarely goes the way we’d like.

There’s a small piece of research that fits: in a lab study with sibling pairs between four and eight years old who had to split up toys, the older sibling usually led the negotiation and came out slightly ahead (Ram & Ross, 2001). That was about toys, not board games, but it sounds very familiar.

What works better: our youngest on a team with one of us parents, especially in games that are too hard for her alone. The catch: after a while, she gets bored, because she’s watching more than playing.

Who picks the game?

We have no fixed rule. No rotation, no list. We look for something everyone is at least okay with right now. Sometimes that’s a short card game everyone likes. Sometimes it’s two rounds of something for the little one, then something bigger after she’s in bed.

And sometimes she simply doesn’t join. During strategy games, our youngest often sits with us and draws. That’s fine.

What the community recommends on top (we haven’t played these)

These come up most often when people talk about games for kids of different ages:

• Dixit: describe a dreamlike picture card, the others guess which one was yours. No reading needed, and imagination counts more than experience.
• Sushi Go!: a quick card-drafting game. Younger kids chase their favorite cards, older ones count.
• Outfoxed!: a cooperative whodunit, everyone against the fox.

Two from the community lists we do play with our older daughter: Ticket to Ride and King of Tokyo. For both girls together, we’d pick the games above first.

Common pitfalls

What the community warns about matches what we see:

• Pure luck bores the older one. Roll-and-move games lose our 10-year-old quickly.
• Kids’ games bore the older one, too. She rarely plays the games of her younger years anymore.
• Long waits lose the younger one. Short games you can play twice beat one long round.
• Reading is a barrier. Text on cards rules a game out for our 6-year-old.

How far apart are your kids, and what works at your table?

Sources

• Ram, A. & Ross, H. S. (2001). Problem solving, contention, and struggle: How siblings resolve a conflict of interests. Child Development, 72(6), 1710–1722. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8624.00374