It’s 4pm on a Tuesday in the school summer holidays. Lunch is done, and your child is standing in front of you with that look — the “what are we doing now?” look. Your brain scrambles through the usual suspects: hide and seek, again? Tag, again? The same board game as yesterday, again?
If that scene sounds familiar, you’re exactly who I built this for.
Why I made this
This summer, more than once, I found myself in that exact spot — needing a game, needing it now, and drawing a total blank. Not because I don’t know games. I know plenty. The problem was different: in the moment, standing there with an impatient twelve-year-old, my brain would default to the same three or four games every single time. Hide and seek. Tag. Maybe a board game if I was feeling low-energy.
Nothing wrong with any of those. But my daughter deserves more variety than my tired brain can produce on demand at 4pm on a Tuesday. And I suspect I’m not the only dad standing in that exact spot, reaching for the same handful of ideas because nothing better comes to mind fast enough.
So I built a tool to solve my own problem — and now it’s live on Dad Diary for anyone who wants it.
What it actually does
It’s called the Game Finder, and it’s exactly what it sounds like: a free tool that recommends games to play with your child, based on your actual situation right now — not a generic list you have to scroll through hoping something clicks.
Here’s how it works. You answer five quick questions:
- Where are you playing? Indoors, outdoors, or either.
- How long have you got? A quick burst under 15 minutes, or something longer.
- What’s the energy level? Calm and low-key, or active and silly.
- How old is your child? Under 6, 6 and up, or any age.
- Who’s playing? Just your child, the whole family, or friends over too.
Answer those, and the tool searches through a library of over 100 games and hands you back a curated shortlist that actually fits what you’re dealing with. Not “100 games for kids” dumped on a page for you to scroll through — a proper shortlist, filtered down to what makes sense for you, right now.
Every game on that shortlist comes with a short blurb explaining what makes it worth playing, a fun rating out of five, and a “How to play” button that expands into clear step-by-step instructions — because half the battle with a “new” game is remembering the actual rules once you’ve committed to it.
Can’t decide? Let it choose for you
Sometimes the problem isn’t a lack of options — it’s too many. You’ve got a shortlist of five decent games and genuinely can’t pick one. That’s exactly what the Randomise button is for.
Hit it, and the tool does a proper little drum-roll — flashing through the options — before landing on one game and jumping you straight to it. No agonising over which one, no decision fatigue. It picks, you play. It’s a small thing, but it’s the difference between standing there deliberating and just getting on with it.
Built from real trial and error
I didn’t sit down and write out 100 games from a blank page in one go. This tool grew in batches, tested and refined as I went — starting with the obvious classics (hide and seek, tag, 20 questions), then deliberately filling gaps I noticed. Not enough calm, indoor options for a rainy afternoon with a toddler? Added more. Nothing for when it’s just you and your child, no siblings or friends around? Added more of those too.
Each game got a proper honest fun rating rather than a made-up number — the kind of rating you’d give a mate if they asked “is this one actually worth playing?” Some genuinely aren’t a 5 out of 5, and that’s fine. Not every game needs to be a home run; sometimes you just need something to fill fifteen minutes before dinner.
Why this matters more than it sounds
There’s a bigger point buried in something this simple. A big part of what Dad Diary is about is giving fathers practical tools for the actual, unglamorous moments of parenting — not just the big milestones, but the “what do we do for the next hour” moments that make up most of a day with your kids.
Decision fatigue is real. By the time you’ve navigated a full day of parenting — work, meals, the general chaos — coming up with a genuinely fresh idea for entertainment can feel like one decision too many. The Game Finder isn’t solving a huge problem. It’s solving a small, constant, slightly annoying one. And honestly, those are often the problems worth solving.
Give it a go
The Game Finder is completely free, lives right here on Dad Diary, and takes about ten seconds to get your first recommendation. No sign-up, no faff — just answer five questions and see what comes back.
Next time you’re standing in the kitchen at 4pm with a bored child and an empty brain, give it a shot before you default to the same old favourite. You might rediscover a game you’d genuinely forgotten about, or find something new that becomes a regular in your rotation.
And if you’ve got a favourite game that isn’t on the list yet, let us know — this tool is only going to get better the more ideas we add to it.
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