Checkers and strategy games

Teach movement and capturing only, in that order, before you mention kings. A six-year-old can hold two rules at once; four rules at once loses them before the first piece is taken. When they reach the back row, stop and explain the king. The rule will make sense because they just earned it.

Do not correct their moves in advance. Let them make the bad capture, lose two pieces to one, and then say "Look what just happened there" after the fact. Pointing at the board together after something goes wrong is more useful than warning them off a move. They will forget the piece they left hanging, or walk straight into a jump they didn't see — that is the game working.

Around seven or eight, some kids start counting ahead one move. When you see it, name it: "You're thinking about what I'll do next." That is worth saying out loud because they often don't know they're doing it.

If this is the first time you've sat down together and the child is already seven or eight, start exactly here. The six-year-old entry and the eight-year-old entry are the same game. There is nothing to catch up on.

A nine-year-old who has played a few times will start asking why they keep losing the same way. That question is the moment to start talking about the board as a whole — which side is crowded, where the open lanes are, what happens if you control the center. You don't need to lecture. Point at a cluster of pieces and ask "What's happening over here?" and let them answer.

This is also the age to introduce other games in the same family. Connect Four, Othello, Blokus, and Mancala all run on the same underlying logic — plan a few moves ahead, think about what your opponent wants. Owning two or three of these means the choice of which game to play becomes part of the ritual, which keeps it from going stale.

A specific thing that happens around ten or eleven: they will start stalling between moves. That is not dawdling, and the silence is theirs to fill, so leave it alone.

If this is the first time you are sitting down with a ten, eleven, or twelve-year-old who has never played any of these games, do not start with checkers basics and work forward. Start with Blokus or Othello instead. The rules are clean, the game looks different from children's games, and a twelve-year-old will engage with something that doesn't feel like it was designed for a younger kid. From there, checkers is a natural comparison rather than a starting point.

A teenager may not want to play a board game with you. That is the plain truth of this age band, and it is worth naming before you plan around it. What you can do is keep a game on the table — literally, a board set up and waiting — and say "I'm going to play some Othello, want in?" without making the answer matter too much. Some weeks they will sit down. Some weeks they won't, and you play a few moves by yourself and leave it.

What changes at this age is the conversation around the game more than the game itself. A fifteen-year-old who is genuinely trying to beat you will sometimes talk through their reasoning out loud, or ask why you made a move that didn't make sense to them. Those exchanges are usually better than the ones you plan.

If you are starting here with no history of playing games together, skip anything that reads as an introduction and go straight to something with enough depth to be interesting: Othello, a good abstract strategy game, or — if they'll allow it — the beginning of chess, which is its own separate thing. Say "I found this and I have no idea if it's any good" and open the box. A teenager is more likely to engage with your genuine uncertainty than with a lesson you have prepared.

They may still say no, and you go back the week after with the same board.