Games to play with kids on holiday
Holidays with children are a series of gaps. The wait at the airport, the hour before dinner, the afternoon when you have run out of plan. These are for the gaps.
The airport, before you have even left
Airports are the worst gap of the lot because you cannot leave and there is nothing to do that does not cost eleven pounds.
Things that work: count how many different languages you can hear. Find a suitcase of every colour. Guess where that plane is going, then check the board. Spot someone who is clearly going somewhere hotter than you. Find the most ridiculous thing on sale in duty free, which is a game that has never once failed.
The advantage of the airport is that everything is unfamiliar, so almost anything qualifies as a find. That is not true at home and it is why travel games are easier than they look.
A new city, without a forced march
The standard failure mode of a city holiday with children is the death march between landmarks. Two adults want to see the cathedral, two children want to sit down, everybody ends up cross outside a cathedral.
The fix is to give the walk a purpose that belongs to the children rather than to you. Not 'we are walking to the cathedral' but 'find five doors older than Grandad on the way to the cathedral'. Same route, entirely different afternoon.
Good universal targets in any city: an animal that is not real, a door big enough for a giant, something older than your house, a window with something strange in it, the smallest window you can find, a face carved into a building. All of these exist in every old European city and none of them require research.
The pool, the beach, the long afternoon
Beach and pool time does not need a game for the first two hours and desperately needs one for the third.
Things that hold: a shell hunt with categories rather than quantity, the biggest, the smallest, the most broken, the strangest colour. Building something and photographing it before the tide takes it. Burying an adult, which is not a game so much as a public service.
The rule for the third hour is that the game should not require you to get up.
Restaurants and the hour before dinner
The waiting-for-food gap ruins more holiday evenings than anything else. Screens work and everybody knows they work, and also everybody feels slightly bad about it.
Non-screen options that genuinely last: draw the person at the next table without looking at your paper. Guess what the couple opposite are arguing about. Find every item on the table that came from an animal. Menu roulette, where each person orders the thing directly beneath what they wanted.
If you are going to use a screen, a hunt that sends them looking around the restaurant beats a video, because they come back to the table having engaged with where they actually are.
Why we built the city trails
Scavvi started as a home game and turned into a travel one, because that is where families kept using it. The city trails exist for exactly the walk-to-the-cathedral problem: a route through a real place where each stop is something to find, verified when you get there.
Basel and Bangkok have full trails today. Everywhere else, the standard packs work fine on holiday, because 'something older than your house' is a better prompt in Lisbon than it is in Luton.
Want the version that runs itself?
Scavvi does the list, checks the finds and keeps the score, so you get to just be there. Free on iOS and Android.
Get Scavvi freeQuestions
What can you do with kids on a long flight?
Sticker books and drawing for the youngest, story games for the middle, and anything with a running score for older children. Window games work above cloud better than you would think.
How do you do sightseeing with young children?
Give them their own objective for the walk between the sights, rather than expecting the sights themselves to hold them. The walking is where it goes wrong, not the destination.
Do we need internet abroad to play?
Scavvi needs a connection to verify a photo find, so on holiday most families play on hotel wifi or a local data plan. The finding itself works without signal and catches up afterwards.
What about jet lag and tired children?
Low-effort spotting games in the late afternoon, nothing competitive. A tired child can play 'find something blue' long after they have stopped being able to play anything with rules.