Printable Game Cards: Our Games, On Paper
Print-and-play versions of our circle-time and co-operative games — for classrooms with a photocopier, screen-free afternoons, long car journeys and the bottom of the garden.
Sometimes a screen is exactly the wrong tool. The reception class is sitting on the carpet; the family is around a picnic blanket; it’s the third hour of a car journey; or you’d simply like an afternoon where nobody looks at anything that glows. For all of those, our printable game cards are the same games we make for the screen — on paper.
Key takeaways
- Free print-and-play cards at yourkids.com/games/print: print, cut out, play — no screen needed once they’re made.
- They’re paper versions of our circle-time games, co-operative games and quiz packs, so the rules are identical either way.
- Designed to print cleanly in black and white on an ordinary printer or school photocopier.
- Laminate them (or don’t) — a printed set in a rubber band lives happily in a kitchen drawer or a teacher’s desk for months.
What you can print
The card sets cover the games that work best in the hand: Odd One Out rounds to hold up to a circle, Buzz! rule cards, Chain Reaction category cards to deal out, full quiz pack sheets for the quizmaster, prompts for Find It Together scavenger hunts, and Story Circle cards for building a tale one teller at a time. The rules stay exactly the same as the on-screen versions — a deliberate choice, so a class that knows the screen game needs no re-teaching when the cards come out (and vice versa).
Why we bother with paper
Partly practicality: plenty of the places children gather — forest school, the garden, a church hall with one temperamental socket — are places a laptop doesn’t belong. Partly pedagogy: cards can be held, dealt, hidden behind backs and solemnly handed to the smallest player to turn over, and that physical turn-taking is half the value for young children. And partly honesty — we make screen games we’re proud of, but we’ve written before that what matters is what screens displace. A game that works both ways lets you choose.
Making them last
Print on the heaviest paper your printer will forgive. If you have a laminator, these are what it was born for; if not, a sandwich bag and a rubber band is a perfectly good card wallet. Teachers: the sets photocopy well, so one printed master makes a class set — and sending a set home makes a rather nice end-of-term gift that costs a school nothing.
The screen versions, and everything else we’ve made, live at yourkids.com/games — including the quiz packs, What the Word?! for phones-and-projector energy, and Working at the Farm for the tractor-obsessed.