By the time I was 7, I had finished Civ1 and MoO2 on the highest difficulty... And you have problems with Creatures ???

Giana Sisters is a good platform game, colorful and not violent perfect for kids.

Yeah, everything just seemed uphill with that game ... you played creatures much? (I tried the Exodus version)

Exodus is the only one I played... I literally couldn't lose at it. Seriously, how can you not play it right ? It's so simple...

Wow, so many boring recommendations. Children want games where you do stuff, not games that put you to sleep.

These are all games that are available on GOG and that I personally have played. I avoid shooters and games that are heavy on numbers and statistics and reading, but you'll have to decide it that's a problem.

Of course the best thing to do would be to just get them a NES or SNES or hook up an emulator, as those were the best games for children ever.

Tyrian 2000
You fly through space and shoot space ships, very good game in the genre in general. Vibrant graphics, cool sound, adjustable difficulty and you don't die in one hit like many other games in the genre. best of all, it's free.

Stronghold & Stronghold Crusader
Fairly easy to grasp real-time strategy. The reason i put this up is because it's a game grounded in reality, so no weird fantasy-units that don't make sense. For example, if you want to have bread you need to build wheat farms, a windmill and bakeries, then workers will start working there and set up the production chain. Chat makes more sense than for example Age of Empires where food is just an abstract concept that's used to build people.

Pinball Gold Pack
Well, it's pinball. There are a ton of tables in this pack, so chances are you'll find some fun ones for everyone. On cool feature is the hot-seat multiplayer where players can take turns and everyone has their own score counter.

Torchlight
Colourful Diablo-clone. It's not as good as everyone says, it's being over-hyped because some of the original Diablo team worked on it. It's really just OK, but whacking monsters over the head and getting loot is inherently fun and Torchlight doesn't do anything to ruin the experience either.

Rollercoaster Tycoon series
Build and manage your own theme park. It's somewhat stat-heavy and requires reading, but it's based in reality. You be the judge.

Theme Hospital
Similar to the above, but managing a hospital instead.

Sim-City series
Manage and build a city. Possibly the most stat-heavy of the three managers.

Re-Volt
Racing game with RC cars and some Mario Kart style weapons. It's not as good as Mario Kart though.

Terraria
Kind of like Minecraft, but it 2D and more stat-heavy.

Wait, there is one more I really loved when I was 6-7: Battle Chess. If he's interested in chess...

<span class="bold">Algodoo</span>. It's a 2D sandbox physic simulator that will let you build practially anything. The game started out as freeware under an different name, then became a commercial product, and is now yet again freeware!

The intial attraction is creating huge towers and splitting them apart (Ctrl-Shift dragging lets you clone stuff easily) but the real attraction comes once you set out to create a specific goal, such a creating a working gun or a mechanical watch. There's 64603 user-created inventions that can be dowloaded from the program itself.

The one thing that drag the game down is its (very) cheap-looking graphics. But dispite this, the game has an almost unlimited potential, even without using its scripting system. The hard part is that you have to figure out what you want to build for yourself.

Here's a few thousand youtube results on algodoo + machine:
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=algodoo+machine%2C+hd

Scribblenauts Unlimited, but it's not available on GOG.

Not every kid is the same and not all of them are suffering from attention deficiency disorder.

I noticed that my friend's kids really enjoy simple stuff like Plants vs Zombies and Call of Duty but there's no "one fits all" solution, what is boring to one kid is exciting to another and vice versa. Patience levels vary massively from kid to kid.

PS: same goes for grown-ups :)

Reminds me of the fact that Sierra's Mixed-up Mother Goose isn't present on GOG.

Simple stuff is great, my favourite games ever are simple, but they are games where you are in control. I was saying that in reference to recommendations like Broken Age, which is a "game" where you just click stuff to make the story go forward (like most point & click adventures). It's like having to spin a wheel to make the story move forward, you're not playing the game, the game is playing you.

In Plants VS Zombies you are actually doing something. In my recommendations I only filtered out the games that are either too violent or too much driven by statistics.

I generally agree with your recommendations but OP has a 7-year old kid so I'm not sure Rollercoaster Tycoon, Stronghold Crusader is the right thing... of course it's difficult to make any recommendations, as I said every kid is different.
But I doubt normal kids at that age would enjoy those two games, unless they have high-functioning Asperger's or something along those lines.
Instead of Stronghold, I'd recommend Advance Wars. It's super easy to learn, cartoony and perfect for all ages. As for managerial stuff like the Tycoon and Sim series, that's probably better for kids aged 9 and older - in general.
My best friend lets his 6 year-old daughter play Atari 2600, that's perfect because the low pixel graphics are simple and the gameplay is just as simple but in a good way (Boulder Dash etc)

I agree with you, and I think it's hard for people without kids to accurately gauge what a typical 7-year-old really is capable of -- and as you say every kid is different. That, and there may also be a high percentage of autism spectrum individuals on GOG, which while I am somewhat joking, is actually probably not entirely without warrant.

I was contemplating making a similar topic, but actually gear it more towards parents of GOG. I probably will start/maintain a thread eventually, but in the meantime this is pretty good for getting some interesting recommendations. I think it's also great to get input from non-parents, although I do think that actual parents tend to have a better grasp of age range capabilities and interests.

When I select games for my kids to play, I am pretty conscious about it in terms of what sorts of things they can learn or experience from them. One of the main goals I have in game selection for my kids is to encourage multilingualism and to instill a love of reading in the non-dominant language. At 7 years old, it can be pretty rough for a kid just learning to read to deal with complex sentence structures and vocabulary, particularly in a second language, so I usually play these games together with my kids so I can help teach and guide them through it. Kids at this age also just love to spend time with their parents, and can tell when their parents are genuinely enthusiastic about things they are doing together with them. Foremost, choose a game that YOU will enjoy and then share that joy with your child -- you get to spend time with your kid doing something that you both love and also help your child learn something.

At the moment, I am playing FTL with my 6-year-old. I didn't think he would be interested at first, but it has really captivated his imagination and I am using the text parts to teach him new vocabulary and practice reading/pronouncing some of the easier words. It is also an excellent game for teaching some life lessons on decision making, logic, probability, and morality. When your kid asks you why you blew up a pirate ship begging for mercy because you *need* the extra scrap, it also forces *you* to learn something as well.

Classic console games have also been fun for my kids at this age, but I often find that I usually need to introduce the game to them at this age (6-7) a little before they can really run with it on their own. I found that my kids tend to not yet have great hand-eye coordination yet, so while some of the old NES classics like Legend of Zelda, Super Mario Bros., and Mega Man are pretty great -- having an emulator with some tool assists like rewind can help them develop their dexterity while allowing them to advance in the game. From my own memory, it wasn't until I hit maybe 9-10 that I had the coordination required to really beat these games on my own, so I think this is not atypical or being too coddling. Rewind is nice since it allows the child to practice the same isolated skill over and over -- so they actually do learn how to do it properly the next time it comes up and they can rely less and less on rewind as they progress.

I haven't delved too much into recent computer games actually designed for kids 6-7 years old, so I have a strong interest in this thread and associated topics. I think it's right at this age that keyboard/mouse interface becomes feasible to properly use, and I want to get my kids comfortable with desktop computers. I remember when I was this age Apple IIe edutainment games like PAWS Microtype typing tutor, Number Munchers, Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego, and Oregon Trail were all well-designed and made it fun to learn. I'd love to track down these titles, but I feel like there must be some new stuff that can do it even better than they did before. So far I have seen some great suggestions, and looking forward to seeing some more!

I suspect so, too, and I'm also not actually joking because I've read many posts on this forum that gave me lots of autism vibes. I must point out that I know very little about autism, but the way I see it so do professionals. This is a very wide and complex topic and considering the brain is the least known part of the human body there is yet a lot of unexplored and unexplained stuff to be learned about it.


Absolutely!
I don't have kids myself but since all my friends kids are young (mostly between 1 to 9 years old) and always want to play with me when I'm over, I do have a fair idea of what kids like to play even if I know only little about other areas of parenting. I don't play video games with them because board games or LEGO etc are more fun and I too believe that you need to have fun when you play with kids so it's not just you 'entertaining' them or 'keeping them busy'.

Wow, now I feel dumb: I just installed FTL a couple days ago to see what that's all about and a couple minutes later all my crew suffocated to death due to lack of oxygen. I thought "wtf is this, did I pay for this, to choke to death??" and put the game aside. And now I hear 6 year olds can play this? Either your kid is super smart or I have gotten dumb, or both :)

Maybe I should give this game another chance, it's still on my HD.

When I was 4 or 5 my dad got me Steel Panthers III, it was difficult since there was a lot of reading and I couldn't read yet. However, I loved playing with tanks and soldiers.

That said I also played Humongous Entertainment games like Freddi Fish, Pajama Sam, and Spyfox. Those were great, simple, unfrustratingly difficult games. I remember watching my dad play Flight Sim 98, as real as it gets. Ooh, when I was 7 I would play my older brother's Commandos: Beyond the Call of Duty. Tyrian, Stargunner, and Worms would be good choices.

RTS games like Rise of Nations, Age of Empires, or Stronghold Crusader would be good. I wasn't good at Stronghold when I was young, but I still loved it. My first FPS was Delta Force: Black Hawk Down.

If you have access to a Gamecube some of my fondest memories of my siblings and cousins are playing Smash Bros and Mario Party together.