Kids games

Kids games

The first thing anyone notices on this shelf is that two of the six cards carry the same title, letter for letter: Math Game For Kids. It looks like a fault in the listing. It is not. They are two separate files, they open to different artwork, and even the window titles the two games set for themselves are written differently — one abbreviates, the other spells it out. The reliable way to tell them apart before clicking is the cover image on the card, because the names will not help you.

What each of the six asks you to do

Recognise a written colour. Kids True Color stands the screen upright over a bright sky with pink flowers along the bottom edge and a large red pencil pointing down from the top. Under the pencil tip sits the name of a colour written in English, with a green tick and a red cross beneath it to judge with.

Read numbers. The two arithmetic titles want nothing more than digits recognised, which is a separate ability from reading words and worth separating when you are choosing.

Nothing at all. Professor Bubble opens on a pale yellow menu with two large buttons, play and sound, a pile of patterned balls at the foot of the screen and a figure in a lab coat standing beside them. The two dress-up titles are likewise entirely pictorial — nothing on screen needs decoding before you can start.

The assumption this shelf breaks

The common expectation is that a shelf with this label contains nothing that hurries anybody. That is not what we found. The colour game runs a countdown clock in the top-left corner while you play, so every judgement has to land inside a window. We mention it because assuming the whole shelf is unhurried leads to picking the one title that is not.

If an unhurried game is specifically what you want, choose from the set with no game over rather than from this label, because that set was assembled around exactly that property.

Arithmetic and colour-sorting are not the same exercise

People file both under thinking games and then find one much harder than the other. The reason is rhythm rather than difficulty. An arithmetic game hands you one question, waits, accepts an answer, and moves on — a staircase, with a flat step between each riser. The colour game asks for continuous true-or-false judgements while a clock runs — a straight line with nothing to stand on.

The practical effect is that somebody perfectly comfortable with the sums can find the colour game the more pressured of the two, even though each individual question in it is easier.

The gentlest starting point on the shelf

The dress-up titles, which have no clock and no wrong answer anywhere in them. There are two here; the fuller description of how that kind of game works lives on the dress-up shelf, where the same title also appears.

Answers from what is on the screen

Which of these can be played without reading?

Both dress-up titles and the bubble game, all of which work from pictures and can be started immediately. The colour game is the exception — it requires reading the English word naming the colour.

Is a tablet better than a phone?

For the two dress-up games, distinctly. Their option strips are packed tightly down both sides of the figure, and on a small screen it is easy to catch the row above the one you meant. The other titles use buttons large enough for any screen.

How many titles carry this label, and are any counted twice?

Six. One of them, a dress-up game, also appears under the dress-up label and is therefore counted on two shelves. The remaining five sit under this label alone.