My Top 5 Favorites: Fun Fine Motor Board Game Picks
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Fine motor skills – so many games and toys purport to build them, but do they?
As a pediatric occupational therapist, fine motor and fun are my forte! 🙂 Let me help point you in the right direction as you look for the right game for your child, your classroom, or your clinic.
If you are weary of endless scissor cutting worksheets or tracing or shoe tying or whatever task is dominating this stage of your child’s development, let’s mix it up with a game! Let’s take a break and make it fun with some skills that generalize to support those other areas that they are working on.
Here are my five favorites for all ages:
Ages 2-4
What it works:
- Bilateral coordination
- Grasp
- Force grading
- Motor imitation
This is one of the most – if not THE most – beloved game in my personal therapeutic game collection. While initially lovingly kept in orderly fashion in its box by my daughter (who is now a teenager), it has been besieged at the clinic by a hundred tiny hands, and it has still held up. It delivers on both fun and function, every single time. This is one of the games that I use with a child who frequently avoids tricky fine motor tasks and their parent (shocked) says, “can I get a picture of that? I need that for home!” There is also a new version now that features Toy Story, Stitch, and Mickey if your child doesn’t care for princesses.
The current version has been updated with new princesses since my daughter and I first played it, but the concepts remain consistent. Cupcakes separate into 4 parts and each princess has a specific cupcake that she likes to order, which is marked on a card in a clear visual sequence. On the reverse of the card, a combination order of four different princesses mixes things up.
Bilateral hand skills for scissor cutting and buttoning are challenged as your child puts the pieces together. Grasp and more specifically, precise and functional grasp are necessary for success putting the pieces together. Many pieces need a fine pinch, gentle pressure, and a slight twist, so some hand-over-hand help may be needed as your child learns the new motor pattern (if they cannot learn from demonstration alone, which is common with dyspraxia).
The game actually has tile-laying and turn-taking, but honestly, with my littlest friends, I focus on the fine motor skills, sequencing, and grasp. Your child won’t outgrow this at 4, so they will be able to keep playing with it and you can add the additional components like taking turns and managing frustration when they are ready.
The Sneaky, Snacky Squirrel Game
What it works:
- Bilateral coordination
- Grasp
- Force grading
- Hand strength
- Endurance
Kids love this cute little game with a spinner, acorns, and hungry squirrel! Following the rules and taking turns is great, but if your little one isn’t quite ready for that yet, you can allow free play with the items to build fine motor coordination.
Okay so I have to put this out there right away. While I love this game – and the kids I work with do, too – I have a beef with the squirrel tongs. Very cute, yes. But for some kids – wayyyy too hard! So I suggest that you grab some other simple small tongs (I went to a dollar store and got 3 different kinds and sizes) to have alternatives if the included option doesn’t work well for the stage of development your child is at. The compromise I’ve found for this to keep kids engaged is to then “feed” the squirrel the acorn with the tongs that they can manage.
As for the other aspects of coordination in the game, the spinner (and any games with spinners) is a great bilateral hand task because children have to brace it with their non-dominant hand without blocking the spinner from rotating when they spin it with their other hand. The acorns are small and have to be picked up with a fine pinch, which works on pincer grasp. When holding the squirrel tongs (or other tongs) utensil grasp and hand strength are challenged, too.
What it works:
- Bilateral coordination
- Grasp
- Force grading
- Motor imitation
This game is loved by children older than 7, too, but I think it is ideal for this age range because it forces children to delay gratification in a fun way, and that helps to build fine motor skills, frustration tolerance, and attention. Because the game must always be rebuilt between each round, there is a natural break and quiet repetition that teaches resilience while also working on bilateral coordination.
Let’s dive into the coordination and motor planning a bit more. Laying the blocks in rows is fairly simple, yes, but because they are not anchored to anything during the building phase, they easily move around when bumped. And for little hands that are learning, there are a lot of bumps! This gives the child instant, visible feedback on their motor performance; it tells them to be more gentle. Then, at the end of each row, more pressure is needed to place the final block and the second hand must help to stabilize and adjust, which is a very important bilateral hand skill for the additional life skills kids in this age range are learning, like buttoning buttons, zipping coats, and shoe tying (emerging skill). When the game is fully built, it must be flipped over to be played, and the penguin must be gently placed on top – too much pressure, and the blocks move or fall.
This game comes in several varieties, such as Frozen or the special multicolored Mammoth edition. In investigating these other options, I found the Frozen one to be kind of flimsy because half of the pieces are cardboard. 
So I don’t think I’d recommend that version, but the Mammoth one looks to be of good quality.
What it works:
- Error checking
- Pinch
- Force grading
- Visual Motor Integration
This is my favorite pick when I’m working with a child who needs help with both motor coordination and emotion regulation skills, because all four of the Zones of Regulation colors are represented. I haven’t made a handout for the Zones with Suspend, but you can find my handout for Twister here.
Anyway – back to the fine motor aspects of this game which are really the focus both of this post and of the game itself. This game is all about balancing little metal pieces with different numbers of bumps on another metal piece. To select a piece, players must roll a dice and grab that color. Rolling the dice means that the game piece placement will be different every time, and that children cannot select specific colors to optimize the balance of the structure. So, it’s going to get pretty wonky, which is good!
When placing the pieces, children must be gentle or the entire structure will fall over. Placement closer or farther from the center of mass will impact the outcome and is also a good learning conversation point.
When things can’t be perfectly planned, we learn how to adapt. We learn to look at what we just did and consider if it was the best choice (retrospectively), and then look forward to upcoming things and consider how we might tackle them differently. When children are working on handwriting, this ability to check their own errors and adjust is very important.
What it works:
- Visual Motor Integration
- Ideation
- Bilateral coordination
- Pinch
- Force grading
- Motor imitation
This fast-paced and goofy dexterity game is one of my top therapy picks for kids working on motor coordination and visual motor integration. I always like to tell a little story and ask for their “wizard name” because it really helps get everyone in the mood for some whimsical nonsense.
Players have a collection of six dice that they all roll simultaneously trying to match the images on a spell card. The first one to get their dice to match shouts out the spell. But wait – it’s not that easy, because every round a different Feat is chosen (I like to call them curses, it fits our wizard-pretend theme, but call them whatever you like). The Feats require you to do something silly, like put your hand behind your back, or make your arms like a t-rex, or cover one eye and say “arrrgh” like a pirate while you try and roll your dice.
I always use this game when working on handwriting or spelling, because the words are nonsensical, so kids have to listen & focus when trying to write letters in an unanticipated order. It is also way less boring to write “Flippidus Floppidus” after you just used your hands like flippers than it is to sit at the table and write all of your spelling words over and over. I’ve heard some pretty good dolphin impressions over the years, too.