I love playing board games, but my children are quite young. So I’ve had the fun challenge of finding games which are easy enough for a child as young as 3, yet challenging and interesting enough for the adult parents as well. We have found several, and here are our absolute Favorite Family Games:

            The Secret Door. This cooperative board game is like an adventurous version of the classic Memory Game. Players have until midnight to match and remove valuables from the board and try to guess, by what is left, which three items the thieves have taken. Whenever you draw a clock tile, another hour passes. Once the clock tiles reach Midnight, the thieves have escaped with any goods you haven’t guessed correctly. We rarely stop the thieves completely, which makes it fun to try again. This game lasts about 20 minutes.

            Quests of the Round Table. This is a card game. Everyone starts out as a Squire and the goal is to be the first to become a Champion Knight, thereby joining the famous Knights of the Round Table. Players have cards which represent weapons, allies and foes. On your turn, when you draw a Quest card, you can use your foes to set up a quest for the others to go on. Anyone who completes a quest earns shields, which help you to go up a level of knighthood. When a player draws a Tournament card, everyone who wishes can stack up their weapons and allies secretly to compete against each other. The winner of the tournament receives shields. We never tire of this game. A player as young as three will need adult help, and someone has to be able to read the cards, but my four-year-old plays it without other help. The nice thing about a young child playing is that, contrary to the suggestion of the game to arrange your quests with easier-to-harder foes, a child will put any kind of foe in any order, making it truly random and hard and unpredictable, just like a real quest would be! This game takes from 20-40 minutes to play.