Rainy day games for when nobody can go outside
The bar for a wet Tuesday is not a magical afternoon of enrichment. It is one hour, no shopping, no mess you will still be finding in October.
Games using nothing but the house
Everything here needs things you already own.
The texture hunt
Find something rough, something smooth, something that should not be soft but is. Better than a colour hunt indoors because a house has more textures than colours.
Smallest and biggest
The smallest thing in the house with writing on it. The biggest thing you can lift. Ranges wildly and provokes argument, which is the engine of it.
Museum of the boring
Each person curates five objects from around the house and writes a label explaining why it is important. Runs long, and the labels are usually the funniest thing that happens all week.
Blanket fort with a purpose
A fort on its own lasts twenty minutes. A fort that has to be big enough for everyone, or has to have a door, or has to survive a cushion thrown at it, lasts an afternoon.
Hunt for the wrong thing
Hide something obviously out of place, a rubber duck in the bookcase, and let them find it. Then they hide one for you. This is the one that runs longest with under-sixes.
Getting more than ten minutes out of them
The same rules as anywhere else: keep score, set a finish line, and vary difficulty per child instead of aiming at the middle.
The indoor-specific one is to change rooms. A game that has gone stale in the living room is often fine in the kitchen, because the material has changed. Moving is cheaper than inventing a new game.
When the rain is not going anywhere
On the third consecutive wet day, the honest answer is that the game needs to run itself, because you have run out.
This is what the daily hunt is for in the app: one prompt, one thing to find, indoors if it has to be. It takes a few minutes rather than an afternoon, and the streak is usually enough of a reason for a child to go and do it without being asked.
For a longer session, the indoor packs work in a flat with no garden, which is a constraint most scavenger hunt content ignores completely.
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 indoors with a four-year-old?
Hiding games and simple find-me hunts. Anything with rules more complex than 'go and get' will not hold, and does not need to.
How do you entertain kids indoors without screens?
Give the house a job. Most indoor boredom is because the space is over-familiar, so a game that makes them look at it differently works better than a new toy.
What if we live in a flat with no garden?
Everything on this page works in a flat. Texture and object hunts do not need space, and the indoor packs in the app were written for exactly this.