The part of me that likes to have a plan and a list is coming out through my Christmas Gift Guide series. There’s so much in life we can’t control, but a list? I can have as many lists as I want! Nice, organized lists.
Putting together a Christmas Gift Guide serves a few purposes, one of which is to curate some great gift ideas for not just my family but hopefully yours. We don’t buy a ton of gifts and I don’t want to waste money guessing what gifts to give our boys. But games? Our family plays games together, in fact we have a lot, and educational games are a great idea for students.
Awhile back our youngest son, Jack, declared Fridays to be game night in our home. Some of our games are multi player and some are single player – like certain educational challenging games. A game that challenges and teaches is a game I appreciate (homeschool mom, here). I am using my affiliate links.
If you follow my blog regularly you may remember that I did a STEM Kit Gift Guide post for kids who like science. Somehow one of the brands behind one of the kits saw my post and wanted to send me some of their games. I’m featuring those three “new to us” games by ThinkFun in this post, opinions are my own.
- Balance Beans
- Circuit Maze
- Clue Master
These games are educational and we actually own a fourth ThinkFun game called Rush Hour which I received years ago through a different sponsored campaign. That game gets pulled out and played with from time to time by just about all four of us.
So far we’ve played with two of the three. Jack is playing Circuit Maze as I write this post! Balance Beans is challenging. It involves logic. You pick a challenge card and have to figure out how to set the bean-characters so that they balance the seesaw.
Clue Master (see in the first picture and the one below) is a one player game similar to Sudoku except it uses shapes and colors vs. numbers. The game is a spiral bound book with a magnetic board. I love this concept because it is travel-friendly! Our family travels often and this game can go with us and can be stored in the pouch behind the driver and passenger seats in the van.
I asked my husband and boys what their favorite games were and this is what they told me. This is not an exclusive list, fyi.
Monopoly
Connect Four
Bingo
Carcassonne (there are other Carcassonne themes to choose from here)
Checkers
Balance Beans (linked above)
I would add Sequence, too.
There are so many games out there to choose from and today many games have a number of different themes and versions – which can make it even harder to know which to choose. I hope by sharing some of our family’s favorites you walk away from this post with some new ideas! Feel free to tell me you or your family’s favorite games in the comments.
For more educational games specifically from ThinkFun visit their website here.
PS –
I have a son who is interested in learning to code so if you know of a game that in some way teaches coding please tell me in the comments!
