A game of chess where every move has to account for what the opponent might do three moves from now, or a Dungeons & Dragons campaign where a character’s whole history has to stay consistent across sessions. Strategy and Fantasy Games ask eight to twelve year olds to hold a lot in their heads at once, and plan several steps ahead.
Why this game matters
Strategy games like chess, Go, Battleship, or Clue require a child to keep multiple possible moves in mind while planning their own, building real memory capacity, and to adjust their plan when an opponent does something unexpected, building genuine mental flexibility. Fantasy and role-playing games like Minecraft or Dungeons & Dragons exercise similar skills from a different angle, tracking goals, remembering rules about how characters and resources work, and adapting a plan as a story or a world changes around them.
What you need
A strategy board or card game (chess, Go, Battleship, Clue, and many others all work). Alternatively, access to a fantasy or role-playing game suited to your child’s age and interests.
How to play
Introduce a strategy game appropriate to your child’s current level, starting with simpler versions of the rules if needed, and build up complexity as their understanding grows. Play together regularly enough that the rules and strategic thinking genuinely develop over repeated games, rather than a single one-off session.
For fantasy and role-playing games, engage with what your child is building or tracking, ask about their character’s goals, the rules they’re working within, the decisions they’re weighing, which shows genuine interest and often reveals just how much planning and memory work is actually happening behind the scenes.
Variations
Introduce a genuinely new strategy game periodically rather than only playing the same one repeatedly, since different games emphasise different kinds of planning and different ways opponents can be unpredictable.
For a child who prefers fantasy or role-playing formats over traditional board games, look for a local or online group matched to their age and interests, playing with peers adds a social dimension on top of the cognitive one.
Why libraries are worth checking first
Many public libraries lend out board games and strategy games for free, which makes it easy to try a genuinely wide range before deciding what’s worth buying. This is particularly useful at this age, since interests can shift quickly, and a library loan lets a child sample several different strategic challenges without a real commitment to any one of them.
Whether it’s a quiet game of chess or a sprawling, ongoing fantasy campaign, what both formats share is real demand on memory, planning, and flexible thinking, the exact skills that matter well beyond the game itself, dressed up as something a child genuinely wants to keep coming back to.
