The best video games for kids, ranked by what they learn
27 games, from Minecraft to Roblox to Tetris, sorted by one question: what does your kid practice while they play?
By Lionel Mora · · 11 min read
Based on our Instagram reviews: the original video games ranking (1.3M views), part 2 (320k views), the retro edition (26k views).
The short answer
The best video games for kids aged 6 to 12 are the ones where the kid sets the goal and has to plan how to get there: Minecraft, The Legend of Zelda, Age of Empires and Tetris sit at the top, with Wii Sports for getting them off the couch. Skip the ones built around spending, strangers or endless loops: Roblox, Fortnite, GTA, Valorant and Subway Surfers.
Every parent gets the same advice about video games: limit the hours. Fair enough. But an hour of Minecraft and an hour of Subway Surfers are very different hours. In one, your kid plans a house, budgets materials and fixes the roof when it caves in. In the other, they swipe left and right until the battery dies.
So I ranked the games kids ask for by one thing: what a child practices while they play. Graphics don't count, and neither does fun (kids will tell you that part themselves). These rankings started as three videos on our Instagram, watched more than 1.6 million times. Here's the full reasoning.
How we rank games for kids
I ask five questions about every game:
- What does the child practice? Planning, problem solving, creativity, reading other people, moving their body. Or mostly reflexes.
- Who sets the goal? The best games hand the goal to the kid. The worst ones hand them a loop.
- How does it make money? Pay-to-skip timers, loot boxes and slot machines teach a lesson too: paying beats waiting.
- Who can talk to your child? Open voice or text chat with strangers is a hard no under 12.
- Does it end? A game with levels has natural stopping points. A game with no ending has a business model.
A game can be great fun and still land in C tier. You can still say yes to it. Just count it as entertainment, and don't expect it to train much.
S tier: the best video games for kids
Minecraft S tier
One of the rare games where the content is whatever your kid decides to build. To make a castle, they have to plan the structure, gather the materials, work out what they can afford and put it together piece by piece. When it collapses, nobody fixes it for them. Research reviews of Minecraft in classrooms link it to creativity, spatial thinking, collaboration and problem solving, though the studies are still small7.
The Legend of Zelda (Breath of the Wild, Tears of the Kingdom) S tier
Awesome game. You arrive in a beautiful world and nobody tells you where to go. It's all about exploration: your kid has to set their own goals, read the terrain and solve problems along the way. Most games tell children what to do every ten seconds. Zelda trusts them.
Wii Sports (and Nintendo Switch Sports) S tier
Your kid is standing up, moving their body. It's also the only game on this list where the other players are usually in the same room. Coordination, balance, taking turns, losing to your grandmother at bowling. Studies on active video games show kids burn real energy while they play, at light to moderate intensity10. It won't replace the park, though: longer programs show little change in overall activity.
Tetris S tier
Forty years old and still excellent. Kids get better at picturing a shape and turning it in their head. That's called mental rotation, and the improvement is well documented. To be fair about it, the gains are strongest for Tetris-like shapes, and the evidence that it carries over to wider spatial skills is weak8. Still, it's fast to learn, it ends, and nobody is selling your kid anything.
Age of Empires S tier
I love Age of Empires. Your kid wants to build an army. For that, they need wood. For wood, they need villagers to cut trees. So they send people to do it, and then they wait, because nothing is instant. It's planning, strategy and resource management, with some history thrown in. Best for the older end of the range, around 9 and up.
A tier: great picks
Animal Crossing: New Horizons A tier
A great cozy game. Your kid runs an island, pays off a loan, decorates, fishes and visits neighbors. Waiting is part of the game: the shop closes at night, and a tree takes days to grow. I think that's really good. An Oxford study found a small positive link between time spent playing Animal Crossing and well-being3. One caveat: those players were adults, and the study shows a correlation, not a cause.
Minesweeper A tier
Everybody thinks it's a random game where you click squares and hope. But each number tells you exactly how many mines touch that square, so your kid has to reason their way to the rest. Pure logic that looks like luck, and it's free on most computers.
B tier: good, with caveats
Among Us B tier
One player is secretly the impostor, and everyone else has to figure out who. Kids practice reading other people, arguing their case and changing their mind when the evidence changes. Those are useful skills to build. The catch is public lobbies, where chat with strangers is open.
The Sims B tier
You run someone's whole life. If your Sim doesn't sleep, they're useless at work. If you don't pay the bills, the lights go off. So your kid learns that things stack up, and that ignoring them has consequences, which is a real thing to learn. It's rated T, so it suits the older end of the range, with a parent nearby.
Rocket League B tier
Soccer with cars, and nobody talks. Your kid has to figure out where their teammate is going and stay out of the way, so they learn to read what someone is about to do without words. Narrow, but I guess that's alright.
Splatoon B tier
It looks like a shooter, but you win by covering the most floor in paint. A kid can lose every fight and still win the game. So what they learn is that being the best is different from being the most useful to your team. I like that lesson a lot.
Pac-Man B tier
Four ghosts are coming at your kid, and they have to decide which one to deal with first. That's looking at a situation and prioritizing, fast. Simple game, useful skill.
Super Mario B tier
You have to time your jumps perfectly, and you'll fail a lot before you get it. That can make kids angry. It's also great for resilience: fall, restart, try again, get a little further. The newer games are kinder to beginners than the originals.
C tier: fun, not much learning
Mario Kart C tier
Mostly a great party game. One interesting finding, though: in a 2016 study, people who played Mario Kart with a steering wheel for ten one-hour sessions improved their visuomotor control, the skill behind steering a car2. Those players were adults with no gaming experience, so file it under fun facts. It's no reason to buy the wheel.
Tomodachi Life C tier
You fill an island with cartoon versions of your family and friends. They argue, they fall in love, and you manage the drama. Cute and sweet. You don't learn much from it.
D tier: watch out
Clash Royale D tier
When I first reviewed it, kids won treasure chests that stayed locked for hours unless they paid gems, and gems cost real money. So the lesson was basically that paying beats waiting. Supercell removed chest timers in an April 2025 update6, which is an improvement. Gems and passes still cost real money and sit one tap away, so it stays in D tier for now.
FIFA / EA Sports FC D tier
Your kid learns how a real soccer team works: positions, formations, tactics. That part is great. Then the game asks them to spend real money on packs of random players, which works a lot like a loot box. The good part is buried under the shop.
PUBG D tier
Most of the match, your kid is lying in a bush waiting for someone to walk past. Maybe they're learning patience, but that's about it. And the matches are full of strangers.
Street Fighter D tier
In theory, players learn to anticipate the other person's move. In reality, they're 8 years old and smashing every button at the same time.
Pong D tier
Good game, very simple. It kind of started all of this. It teaches a little about angles and basic physics, and not much beyond that.
Space Invaders D tier
Your kid shoots and dodges at the same time, so there's some anticipation and reaction to movement. Average.
F tier: skip these
Roblox F tier
Roblox is millions of user-made games, and many of them are designed around purchase mechanics aimed at children. Your kid can meet strangers there, and a lot of the games are overstimulating. Several US states sued Roblox over child safety in 20254, and in January 2026 the company made facial age checks mandatory for chat5. That helps. I still wouldn't put my kids on it.
Fortnite F tier
In 2022, Epic Games agreed to pay $520 million after the FTC found it had collected children's data without parental consent, set voice chat with strangers on by default, and used design tricks to push kids into purchases1. The game is rated T. The building mechanics are clever, but the whole package wasn't made for a 9-year-old.
Subway Surfers F tier
One thumb, three lanes, no ending. It's designed to keep going forever, and there's nothing to figure out. Clearly overstimulating for kids.
GTA F tier
I love GTA, and GTA 6 is due in November 202611. It's still a game where you beat someone up, steal their car, get chased by the police, hide, and nothing happens. The series is rated M for Mature. Not a game for kids.
Valorant F tier
Good teamwork: players cover each other and call out positions. But it's rated T by the ESRB and 16 by PEGI, and open voice and text chat with strangers is part of the game9. Not for under 12s.
Sonic F tier
I was a big fan of Sonic as a kid. But it's mostly about going fast to the right and hoping good things happen. There's no lesson in there.
What to look for in any game your kid asks for
- Can your kid explain what they're trying to do? If the answer is "get more coins", that's a loop. If it's "build a bridge to the other island", that's a goal.
- Is there a button to skip waiting with money? Then the game is selling impatience.
- Is chat on by default? Check before the first session, not after.
- Does it end? Levels, chapters and matches give you a natural place to say "last one".
- Would you play it with them? The S tier games are the ones parents enjoy too. I don't think that's a coincidence.
Not sure about a game that isn't on this list? Look it up on the Marble Index, our free score out of 100 for kids' shows, games, apps and books.
Questions parents ask
Is Roblox safe for an 8-year-old?
I wouldn't. Roblox mixes in-game purchases, open chat with other players and a huge range of user-made games, many of them built to keep kids spending and clicking. Several US states sued Roblox over child safety in 2025, and in January 2026 Roblox made facial age checks mandatory for chat. If your kid already plays, turn chat off in the parental controls, set a spending limit of zero and play alongside them.
Is Fortnite OK for kids under 12?
Not really. Fortnite is rated T (Teen) by the ESRB. In 2022 its maker, Epic Games, agreed to pay $520 million after the FTC found it had collected children's data without parental consent, turned on voice chat with strangers by default and used design tricks to push purchases. If your kid plays, switch voice chat off and require a parent PIN for purchases.
What is the best educational video game for kids?
Minecraft. The content is whatever your kid decides to build, so they plan, gather resources, fail and fix things. Minecraft Education is built for classrooms, and research reviews link it to creativity, spatial thinking and collaboration. For younger players, Animal Crossing and Super Mario are gentler places to start.
Are video games good for kids' brains?
Some are, in specific ways. Tetris makes players better at mentally rotating shapes. In a study with adults, action games like Mario Kart improved visuomotor control. Active games like Wii Sports get kids moving while they play. The gains are narrow, though: a game trains what the game asks for. So I rank games on what a child practices while playing and ignore what the box promises.
What games should kids avoid?
Watch for four things: buttons that let you pay to skip waiting, loot boxes or slot machine rewards, chat with strangers turned on by default, and loops with no ending. Subway Surfers, Roblox, Fortnite, GTA and Valorant each have at least one of these. That's why they're in F tier.
Sources
- FTC: Fortnite video game maker Epic Games to pay more than half a billion dollars over FTC allegations (December 2022)
- Association for Psychological Science: Playing action video games boosts visual-motor skill underlying driving (Li, Chen and Chen, 2016)
- University of Oxford: Time spent playing video games can be good for your well-being (Johannes, Vuorre and Przybylski, 2020)
- Tennessee Attorney General: lawsuit against Roblox (December 2025)
- Biometric Update: Roblox rolls out facial age estimation for chat access globally (January 2026)
- Supercell: Clash Royale April 2025 update release notes
- Slattery et al. (2025), Minecraft in education: a systematic review, Review of Education
- Pilegard and Mayer (2018), Game over for Tetris as a platform for cognitive skill training, Contemporary Educational Psychology
- ESRB rating: Valorant
- Biddiss and Irwin (2010), Active video games to promote physical activity in children and youth, JAMA Pediatrics
- Variety: GTA 6 release date delayed to November 2026
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