At Love and Care Social Adult Day Center, we offer a variety of fun games. Games provide convenient ways to have fun, either alone or as part of a group. They eradicate boredom, relieve stress, and make parties and other social engagements easier, more enjoyable, and less intimidating. They also help exercise our brains.
For some people, playing certain types of games might be beneficial for things like mood, memory, concentration, reasoning, and imagination. Games might be especially helpful for your brain if they require you to learn something new.
Plus, countless games can be modified for seniors or elderly people who have physical or cognitive limitations. The variety of senior-friendly games that are now available is astonishing. So to help you narrow down the possibilities, we’ve provided some of the best examples within seven main categories:
The best board games for seniors are fun, absorbing, and challenging (without being too complicated). They are also great for multi-generational play. Here are some popular examples:
- Backgammon—Beat your opponent by getting lucky, planning your moves, and being the first one to get each of your 15 checkers off the board.
- Chess—Use your most creative strategies to protect your king while outwitting your opponent and putting his or her king into checkmate.
- Mahjong—Be the first player to build a winning combination of tiles based on rummy-like groupings of symbols and characters.
- Checkers—Capture and remove all 12 of your opponent’s game pieces before he or she can do the same to you.
- Dominos—Play all of your domino tiles before the other players by laying them down end-to-end with matching tiles that have already been played.
- Qwirkle—Mix and match tiles with different shapes and colors, scoring points by completing or adding to lines of the same shapes or colors.
- Dixit—Out-bluff your opponents while using your imagination to match stories to beautifully illustrated cards.
- Ticket to Ride—Claim as many North American railway routes as you can by collecting illustrated train cards and reaching more cities than your opponents within a short amount of time.
- Rummikub—Be the first one to play all of your numbered tiles by placing them in consecutive sequences or groups of the same numbers or colors.
- Ubongo—Race against other players as you try to solve puzzles of interlocking geometric shapes in order to grow your treasure of gems.
- Jenga—Beware of gravity as you try not to be the one who pulls out the wooden block that makes the whole tower come crashing down.
- Chronology—Put your historical knowledge to the test by trying to be the first one to build a 10-card timeline based on the correct order of events.
- Latice—Play all of your tiles before anyone else by matching them on different sides and strategically using sun squares and wind tiles based on what you think your opponents still have in their possession.
- Cranium—Be the first one to circle the board by successfully solving puzzles and other challenges that will have you acting, guessing, sculpting, sketching, and humming.