Holiday Gift Guide 2020

It's my favorite time of year! The time when friends, family, and coworkers start texting me, asking for gift ideas. "Hey, Kent, I have a niece who is in 2nd grade, what game should I get for her?"

Longtime readers of Games for Young Minds know that I've made a habit of creating gift guides for the holidays (here is last year's, for example). Below, you'll find two recommendations for each age group. Some of the games are more explicitly mathematical than others, but all the games involve the sort of math reasoning and spatial thinking that helps kids grapple with new math material.

Pre-K and Kindergarten

As my siblings start having kids, I am relishing my self-appointed role as Games Uncle. For my niece and nephew, who are both quite young, my first choice has been Pattern Play Blocks.

These brightly colored blocks fit together to make hundreds of pleasing designs. The toy also comes with cards, where your child can try to mimic a specific design.

I love this toy because, as with all wooden blocks, toddlers love to build (and destroy) all kinds of creations. But the gamier elements, such as the puzzles, are quite a spatial reasoning challenge for early elementary kids.

If you're looking for a first board game, I'd recommend Qwirkle. This game is sort of like Scrabble, except you create "words" with tiles that share a color or a common shape. This game gets your kids thinking about attributes, such as shape and color, but it also helps them with spatial reasoning as they determine where they can place their tiles safely. And of course, there's some simple addition as they keep track of their scores each round.

And, like the Pattern Play Blocks, the Qwirkle tiles are a fun math toy to play and build with, even when your child isn't playing the game!

1st & 2nd Grade

Battle Sheep is one of my favorite discoveries of 2020. This game is so quick to learn, so quick to play, and yet so rich and complex in its strategy!

Essentially, each player places a stack of sheep tokens on one of the game board's hexes. The goal of the game is to spread your sheep out onto their own individual tiles. Your opponents, however, will be trying to block you in, cutting off your access to areas of the board with their own sheep tiles.

This game is such a pleasure to play with three or four players, when the board grows in size and the complexity increases even further. You and your child might not do a lot of counting or addition during this game, but you'll certainly be doing some deep mathematical thinking.

Another huge hit at the Haines house this year is Blokus Trigon. This game, a variation on my favorite board game, is equally fun for newbies and fans of the original. The goal of the game is to get rid of all your pieces, which are composed of equilateral triangles. Like many of my favorite math games, Blokus Trigon places a strong emphasis on spatial reasoning and logical deduction, as you plan the best way to get rid of all your pieces.

If your kids are tired of the competitive version, you can always play the cooperative variation, where you work together to collectively play every single piece in the game. It's harder than it sounds!

3rd & 4th Grade

If I could choose only one game from this list to recommend, it'd be MULTI. I really can't say enough about how playfully mathematical this game is.

Two players are competing in a giant game of tic-tac-toe where each cell contains a mini version of tic-tac-toe. You claim spaces by choosing a pair of factors. So, for example, if you choose 3 and 4, you claim all the 12s on the board. But you can only move one factor at a time, so your choices are constrained by your opponent's last move. 

I really think this game belongs in every house and classroom with upper elementary kids. I haven't seen another game that makes the connection between multiplication facts so fun and meaningful.

But if you're looking for a game that is less explicitly mathematical (while still containing a deeply mathematical strategy), I'd recommend Splendor. In this game, you use five different colors of gems to purchase cards that allow you to create more gems, which in turn enable you to buy more powerful cards. Your child will have to plan ahead with their resource management, yet remain flexible enough to deal with a change in strategy when their desired card is bought by an opponent. These decisions all require a combination of arithmetic and informal, intuitive probabilistic thinking.

Splendor is a wonderful gateway into the world of "real" board games, the sort that I play with my nerdy friends on Zoom after the kids are asleep. The rules are simple enough for any 3rd grader, but the structure of the game will help kids understand more complicated games as they get older. 

5th Grade & Older

My first recommendation, Patchwork, is one of those games that combines several math domains without feeling explicitly mathematical. In the game, two players take turns placing polyomino tiles on a game board that is meant to be a quilt. Your goal is to fill as much of the quilt as possible. This is quite a challenge, since the polyomino tiles are hard to fit together perfectly in a square space. You also earn buttons along the way, which you can spend for advantage or keep for points at the end of the game.

Patchwork is one of many games developed by Uwe Rosenberg, who has come up with all sorts of games using polyominoes. As you might imagine, these games are endlessly fascinating to me (after all, Blokus is my favorite family board game). If you and your child like Patchwork, definitely give some of Rosenberg's other games a shot.

My last recommendation, 7 Wonders, feels like a more complex variation on Splendor, but with some common elements. Each player gathers different sets of resources, using those resources to buy more powerful cards and, importantly, Wonders, which are modeled on the Seven Wonders of the World and provide even greater benefits to the player who buys and develops them.

7 Wonders is not a game that I would recommend to a family that is just getting into games for the first time. But if you've got a family of gamers, this game is wonderful. There is also a two-player version called 7 Wonders Duel that is my son's favorite game of all time.

If you don't see the perfect game, you can check out my old guides from 2019, 2018, and 2017 here, or just reply to this email! I am sure I can come up with a good recommendation for you.