PlayNook

Print & Play

Print a game and play it

24 boards and sheets to print at home or for a whole class. Pieces to cut out, the rules on one page, A4 and US Letter. No account, no email address, no watermark, and nothing to pay.

Start herePrintable paper games packEight games, nine sheets, one print job. Tick what you want and press Print once — the thing other sites sell as a PDF.Open tool

Print and play

Printable game boards: print one, cut out the pieces and play at the kitchen table. Every set comes with a one-page rules sheet, in colour or in an ink-saving version for a class set.

Play with a pencil

Games that need nothing but a printed sheet and something to write with. No pieces to cut out, no board to fold — the kind you want in a waiting room, on a long journey or in the last five minutes of a lesson.

What you need

A printer and paper. That is the whole list. Every sheet here is designed to work on plain white A4 or US Letter from an ordinary home printer — no card stock, no colour cartridge, nothing trimmed to size.

For the boards with pieces, something a little stiffer helps — the back of a cereal box glued behind the piece sheet turns cut-out counters into ones that do not curl. It is not required. Coins work for half these games and always have.

Colour or ink saver?

Every sheet comes in both. The coloured versions look like the board they are imitating — wood grain for chess, ochre earth for mancala, pale blue rules for the pencil games. The ink saver versions drop the fills and print outlines only.

Ink saver is not the cheap compromise it sounds like. A class set of thirty costs almost nothing, a coloured pencil shows up far better against plain white, and it is the version to choose if you are laminating: a dry-wipe pen wipes cleanly off an unprinted background and smears on a tinted one.

For a classroom

These sheets are yours to print as many times as you like, for a class, a club or a holiday scheme. There is no licence to read and nobody to ask.

The practical advice from teachers who use them: print the ink saver version, laminate one set rather than reprinting every term, and keep counters in envelopes taped to the back of the board. For a full class, the paper games pack is the one to reach for — eight games in one print job, and none of them need pieces at all.

Which board for which age

The pencil games start youngest: tic-tac-toe from about four, dots and boxes and four in a row from about five. The guide to games you only need paper for goes through all eight with an age for each and explains what makes them worth playing.

The boards with pieces suit six and up. Nine men’s morris and alquerque are the two that teach the most for the least explaining, and mancala is the one that will still be being played in a month.

Play the same games on a screen

Most of these boards have a playable version here too, against a computer opponent or a friend online — useful when there is no printer, and useful for learning the rules before you cut anything out. Start from the board games, or from the full toolbox if you also want score sheets, a turn timer or a diagram editor.