Children's First Games

i played civ1 back then at around that age, and battle chess

so check out freeciv and openttd, those are both great free games

There are a lot of mobile games which children can play. Match-3 is apparently as addictive at 5 year old as it is at 50.

My 5 year old daughter also plays some Mario Kart Wii occasionally, but my kids really love Double Fine's Action Theater / Kinect Party. It's not really a game per-se, more like an experience, but it's definitely the funnest thing for little kids on a console/PC.

Personally I'd love to have my daughter play some hidden object adventure games. These can be good when you learn to read (but since English isn't her native language they won't be as practical as for English early readers).

I also had fun playing Scribblenauts Unlimited with my daughter.

I have two nieces. When the younger one was five, they were both playing Plants vs. Zombies. As they are both young girls, you might think they would be playing games like Barbie's Make-Up Factory, and they do play that, but that's not all they play. The girls have actually played quite a variety of games, thus far.

When they were five and seven, they played...

• Castle Crashers (this one was a huge hit)
• FlatOut
• Torchlight
• Spore
• Secret of the Magic Crystal
• Toki Tori
• Global Agenda (AKA "Gobo Majenda")

When they were seven and nine, they were playing...

• Monster Loves You
• Terraria
• Theme Hospital
• DC Universe Online
• Star Wars: The Old Republic
• The Longest Journey (the seven year-old plays this)
• Left 4 Dead 2 (that same seven year-old has almost completed the full campaign)

Now that they are eight and ten, they are getting into more complicated stuff like Defender's Quest. This is not to say that they no longer revisit some of the older games (Plants vs. Zombies, Terraria, and Castle Crashers are all still popular), but other games have captured their attention. The latest "hot game" is Worms Armageddon where they get to blow up their uncle with a sheep.

I still remember some weird PC games from early 2000's like Alawar's mediocre Bomberman clone. Also playing Megadrive version of the Sonic The Hedgehog series on my crappy Celeron 400MHz PC. Time by time it stuttered, even freezed when i play that kind of games on emulators. And ridiculously i couldn't be able to play Gameboy Advance games on that machine because of FPS drops.

Now, i have hundreds of games (might be side effect of those years) but sometimes i can't even decide what should i play. Also most of games seems bad and not unique. They are not like Hogan's Alley, Lode Runner, Crazy Machines, foolish PC trials, discovery of Age of Empires etc.

If you have a 3DS (or 2DS), i recommend to show Ubisoft's Rabbids 3D to children. That's like a training for all platformer games. I liked it. Also 3D function is really well-made, you don't crosseyes.

I also used played a lot of the Humongous Entertainment games when I was a kid. Today for a 5 year old I would recommend

Mario Kart

Portal

Lego games

Tonka Monster trucls, I had this game when I was a kid and i loved it

For a kid I would highly recommend buying a Wii or a Nintendo DS. 95% of games on there are for young kids.

Chex quest is pretty much a doom clone but based off a cereal and more oriented for children.

I loved harvest moon for the ps1/64 when I was a kid. I know they have newer versions but I haven't played those.

Nintendo Games

Thanks again for all the great suggestions. I am putting everything I pick on an old XP computer with a new install of Linux Mint.

Strangely, no one in the history of Linux seems to have bothered getting Myst to be playable in any way on it. Might need a VM or something eventually.

I'm expecting a kid too and I've been collecting some child-friendly games lately.

Try the following, all on Steam:
Castlestorm (action/arcade), Last Knight (action/arcade), Wallace & Gromit series (adventure), Lilly Looking Through (adventure/puzzle), Tiny Bang Story (puzzle/hidden object), Tiny Thief (puzzle/casual).