The June holidays have officially begun. Which, translated from school-calendar into parent, means the nightmare has officially begun.
Let me walk you through the cruelty of my exact situation. Elliot is now home. All day. Every day. The twin terrors, meanwhile, are still in preschool — and preschool, in its infinite wisdom, doesn’t do June holidays. So I’ve got one big kid loose in the house and two smaller ones I still have to pack off every morning. The worst of both worlds, expertly engineered.
Elliot and I already restarted our usual trek up Bukit Timah — Singapore’s tallest hill, standing proud at a dizzying 163 metres. Not a mountain. We don’t have one of those. We have a steep-ish hill with delusions of grandeur and a healthy population of monkeys eyeing your water bottle.
The kids’ hockey term also wrapped up with a carnival, which was an absolute blast. And as a lifelong Arsenal fan, the past few weeks have been an emotional rollercoaster I did not consent to nor sign up for — we finally won the league after 22 long years, and then promptly lost the big European final on penalties. Penalties. Naturally, every rival fan crawled out to have a dig — football tribalism at its finest and its ugliest. Let them have it. I wouldn’t swap places for a second.
Once the euphoria of watching Arsenal trip at the line wears off, they’ll sink right back into the quiet horror of realising the clubs they support are the actual problem — which is exactly why they were watching us in the first place. The one trophy we’re all still waiting for stays waiting, and so does my blood pressure. (Keeping this as short as possible since this is NOT an Arsenal blog)
Anyway. All of that kept me out of the blogosphere for a bit. But I’m back. And the comeback started the moment the holidays did —
The aircon was already working harder than I do during the cross-country season, Elliot was orbiting the whole house looking for trouble, hollering at the top of his voice, pretending he is a gorilla, and I’d run clean out of ideas by lunchtime. So I did what every cornered parent eventually does — I opened the game cupboard and grabbed Sushi Go, mostly because the box is tiny and I figured it’d buy me a quiet fifteen minutes.
The kids had other ideas. They’d been hooked on Draftosaurus for days and weren’t about to switch for anyone, least of all me. This was actual Vesak Day, and we were all killing time waiting for their favourite yiyi — Miley’s younger sister — to swing by and whisk Julian off for a stayover at her place. So while we waited, out came the dinosaurs. Again.
What surprised me wasn’t the dinosaurs. (Although Elliot did ask, with full sincerity, whether we could have actual Sushi Go for dinner. We had vegetarian food instead. And also a tableful of colourful plastic dinosaurs and one small boy mildly betrayed by his own father. He survived.)
Unlike some games where it could take a while for your turn, nobody was bored. Nobody was slumped in their chair waiting six years for their turn. Every round, everyone picked a dinosaur, passed the rest along, and started plotting again.
Turns out that “choose one, pass the rest” idea has a name, and a whole family of games built around it. Board gamers call it drafting. I call it one of the better ways to get kids thinking and talking instead of asking when the holidays end.
For readers in places with actual seasons: here in Singapore we don’t get a summer break or a winter break. We get the June holidays — roughly four weeks off in the middle of the school year — plus a longer stretch at year’s end. No snow days. No “school’s out for summer” anthem. Just four weeks of 33-degree heat, kids who declare boredom by Tuesday, and a dad quietly negotiating with the electricity bill. Same chaos. Different climate.
Why Sushi Go / Draftosaurus works so well
A few things, really.
Everyone plays at the same time, so there’s none of that long-turn purgatory where one kid takes forever and the rest stage a small mutiny. The decisions are simple enough for a six-year-old to follow — grab the tempura, or block the sibling who’s clearly hoarding dumplings — but meaningful enough that they actually feel like decisions. And the whole thing wraps up in about fifteen minutes, which is roughly the attention span of a child in week three of the holidays.
The passing is the secret sauce, though. There’s a real bit of drama in watching a card travel around the table and wondering if it’ll loop back to you. My middle child gasps audibly. Every time. It’s the cheapest entertainment in the house.
So what is drafting, exactly?
You get a hand of cards (or tiles). You keep one. You pass the rest to the next player. Repeat until everything’s been picked.
That’s it. Dead simple, surprisingly clever, and — the bit I care about as a parent — nobody’s ever just sitting there.
Right, here are the eight I’d actually put on your table.
8 Drafting Games like Sushi Go
If your kid is in their dinosaur era — and at some point, every kid is — this is the first thing I hand them after Sushi Go. You draft little wooden dinosaurs into your park instead of collecting sushi. Rules are simple, the choices sneakier than they look, and nothing goes extinct, which spared me a difficult conversation. More dinosaur games for the resident expert →
Drafting, auctions, and timing in one cheap little box. You buy properties, then flip them for profit — a fantasy my whole Singaporean family can get behind. Easy to teach, but every round has a real “ooh, should I?” moment. The adults get more competitive than the kids. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. See more games under $20 →
Everyone’s heard of 7 Wonders. Everyone’s also a little scared of it, because the original looks like homework. Architects is the gentle version — build a wonder, collect resources, race to finish, with the fiddly maths handled for you. The obvious next rung up from Sushi Go, and the one I reach for when the kids want to feel like they’ve levelled up.
One of the original drafting games, and it still holds up. You collect fantasy characters and magic items, trying to line up combos that actually do something. Nobody at the playground has heard of it, which makes your kid feel like they’ve found buried treasure. More fantasy games for family night →
Here you draft terrain tiles instead of cards and slowly build your own little kingdom. The big win with younger kids is they can see it growing — the board fills up in front of them, which beats an abstract pile of points. Easy to teach, quietly clever, over before anyone melts down.
Full honesty: this one isn’t strictly drafting. But it scratches the same itch for the same families, so it earns its spot. You build train routes across a map — handy, since half of Singapore is at the airport this June. Flying somewhere these holidays? Here are the best travel-friendly games →
The granddaddy — the proper 7 Wonders that inspired half the games on this list. You grow a civilisation through military, science, trade, and culture, all by drafting cards. Real depth, and older kids who like to feel clever will eat it up. If your eight-year-old’s been crushing everything else here, this is where they graduate to.
You draft cards to build a futuristic empire, and the game rewards planning a few moves ahead rather than just grabbing the shiny thing. Every decision feels like it matters. Keep this one in your back pocket for when the family’s properly comfortable with drafting and wants a bigger night out at the table.
Final thoughts
Sushi Go is usually the first drafting game a family stumbles into. It really doesn’t have to be the last. That tiny act of picking one card and passing the rest somehow turns into laughter, mild betrayal, and actual decision-making — and unlike anything with a screen, everyone stays in it from start to finish.
So when friends ask me for board game recommendations that are quick to teach, fast to play, and somehow still gripping, drafting games are the first thing out of my mouth.
Planning for June Holidays? Use the links below to give you some ideas for the board games you can play:
Best 9 Travel-Friendly Games for Kids (Flights, Cars, Waiting Time)
10 Easy Board Games for Family Game Night That Don’t Need Screens (2026)