Snow Day Games

Keep Kids Entertained Without Going Crazy

• What: Single player games for kids
• When: Stuck at home
• Why: Entertaining, affordable, wide age appeal
• Where: Amazon

Stuck inside and already used up your supply of snow day craft ideas? Or maybe you’re home with a sick kid for the third day in a row. They feel good enough to be out of bed but haven’t recovered enough to return to school or other activities outside the house. Or perhaps you find yourself in need of ideas for keeping kids busy during a scheduled school break. These single player games will use up a lot of time without requiring huge amounts of brain power on your part, yet still keep kids entertained.

In Three Little Piggies, kids can work through one or many of the different puzzles, and the game requires zero literacy skills, so it works well for a variety of ages. Siblings can work together to try and keep the pigs safe from the marauding wolf, day or night.

For other single player games for older kids, try Roller Coaster Challenge. This single player games has kids choose a card, create the set up, then try to connect the pieces so the tiny roller coaster can go from start to finish. Much like the piggies game, kids can play once or many times in a row. It takes some adult assistance to understand the cards themselves, but once kids figure it out, they don’t need any reading skills to play.

ChickyBoom can be played with one or more players. This balancing act requires kids to load pieces onto a seesaw, then remove them without knocking the whole game off balance. Kids can take turns removing pieces or play on their own to see how many pieces they can take away before it crashes. An advanced version lets kids add points for different types of pieces removed to tally scores and try to win or beat their own previous record.

If your kid can read, check out Cat Crimes for some whodunnit fun. This single player game helps kids practice logic skills while they try to solve puzzles of which cat got into trouble. Each card presents a different problem, and kids can work from easy to hard, though they will need the ability to read the cards themselves or an adult to read the cards to them.