A Tour of the Games on yourkids.com — All Free, All Ad-Free

We’ve been quietly building games. Not as a sideline, and not as a way to keep children staring at screens on their own — quite the opposite. Every game on yourkids.com is designed to be played together: a class, a playgroup, a family around a kitchen table, or a parent and a toddler sharing a laptop. They’re all free, with no ads and no accounts, and we’d like to show you around.

Games for groups: circle time, quizzes and co-operation

The heart of our games section is a set of games made for groups — originally with classrooms and after-school clubs in mind, though they work just as well at a family gathering or a rainy birthday party.

Circle-time games are quick word and number games a whole group can play with nothing but a screen and some children — think counting chains, odd-one-out rounds and number-building challenges, each five to fifteen minutes long with natural stopping points.

Quiz packs are ready-made question rounds — six packs of general knowledge we’ve written and checked ourselves, pitched so a mixed-age group can have a genuinely fair contest.

Co-operative games might be our favourites. Everyone plays on the same team, and they’re deliberately designed so a four-year-old and a seven-year-old can play together properly — not the little one being humoured while the big one wins.

And for settings where a screen is the wrong tool, printable game cards give you the same games on paper. Print them, cut them out, and the game works exactly the same at the bottom of the garden.

A grown-up (or a confident bigger kid) holds the screen and reads things out; everyone else just plays. That’s the whole setup.

Across phones: What the Word?!

What the Word?! is our multiplayer game, and the one that gets the biggest noise in a classroom. It’s a fast, happy team word-guessing game: in pairs, one player describes the word on their screen without saying it, their partner guesses, and the points pile up. You set it up on one screen, teams join on their phones with a QR code, and there’s a scoreboard view made for the classroom projector.

Every category — animals, science, space, history, Shakespeare and more — uses word lists we’ve written and vetted ourselves, with three difficulty levels. Teachers can also paste in their own words, which turns this week’s spelling list into a rather good Friday-afternoon game. Games tidy themselves away an hour after you finish, and we nudge everyone towards made-up team names rather than real ones.

For the littlest ones: Working at the Farm

Our newest game is for the smallest players. Working at the Farm is a bright 3D farm where a toddler or young child drives a red tractor, a yellow digger and a blue dump truck around in the sunshine — digging up buried surprises, tipping out fresh garden beds, watering them until sunflowers grow, feeding the cows, and going to look for the lost baby calf when she wanders off.

There are two ways to play. Just Drive is for the very littlest: free-roam driving with animals that moo, baa and cluck as you pass, and nothing to get wrong. Farm Jobs adds a gentle connected story where the three machines work together, with the game telling the child which one to drive next. There are no timers, no failing and nothing scary, and honking is warmly encouraged.

It plays best on a computer, with the arrow keys or a game controller, which makes it a lovely one for sharing a laptop on the sofa. There’s a grown-ups’ corner with an optional play-time limit — and everything, from the stars earned to a first name if you add one, stays on your own device and is never sent anywhere.

And games without any screen at all

If what you actually need is something to play with a one-to-three-year-old right now, with no setup and no screen, our easy games for tired parents guide is a compendium of low-effort games — and every toddler stage guide includes games matched to that age.

Why we make them this way

We’ve written before about why we don’t treat screen time as a moral failing: what children do on screens matters far more than the minutes. Our games are our attempt to be on the right side of that line — played together, quietly educational rather than flashy, and finished in a quarter of an hour with everyone still friends.

A few promises hold across all of them. They’re free, and staying that way. There are no ads and no accounts. Nothing about your child leaves your device. And everything in them — every word list, quiz fact and farm animal — has been written and checked by us, against the same test we apply to everything on this site: would a knowledgeable, caring paediatrician be comfortable sharing it?

More games are on the way. The weekly email hears about them first.