Dots and boxes.
I even created a version using triangles instead of squares, and photocopied it to play with classmates. I highly recommend it.
Speaking-aloud games: "Twenty Questions," "Ghosts" (a spelling game).
Group games: Hide-and-Seek, Sardines in a Can, Simon Says
Card games: Solitaire, War, Go Fish; simple Draw Poker with chips (no money), Blackjack.
Not sure what category Anagrams belongs in.
Classic board games: Chess, checkers, Chinese checkers.
Write-on-paper games: Tic-tac-toe, Hangman, Dots, Battleship.
Commercial board games: Candyland, Chutes and Ladders, Monopoly, Risk.
Puzzles: Jigsaw puzzles. That peg-jump thing that has so many different names. The "16 puzzle," a sort of forerunner to Rubik's Cube--a little frame with fifteen square blocks labelled 1 to 15 that need to be put into order.
Does the "Magic 8-Ball" count? It's a fortune-telling device. You ask it a question and turn it right-side up, and an icosahedron floats to the top and one of twenty possible random answers appears: "Outlook Good," "Reply Hazy, Try Again," "My sources say 'Yes.'"
Girls' games. I really wanted to play hopscotch, jacks, and jump-rope, but I couldn't, because those were for girls.
By the way, in the 1970s there was a "cooperative games" movement, and I must tell you that if you ever need to organize games for a children's party, "A Cold Wind Blows" is absolutely wonderful. Nobody gets put out of the game, nobody feels that they're winning all the time or losing all the time, it works with children of different ages and agility, and children can play it for a very long time without getting upset and fighting.
