My 5-Year-Old Keeps Cheating at Board Games: Would Trying a Cooperative Game from Another Culture Like Ghana's Ayo Teach Fairness?

Why Five-Year-Olds Cheat (And Why It Does Not Mean Your Child Is Dishonest)

If your five-year-old nudges a counter two spaces further than they should, peeks at a hidden card, or quietly revises the rules mid-game in their own favour, you are watching normal cognitive development in action, not a character flaw. At five, the prefrontal cortex, which governs impulse control and the capacity to hold another person's perspective alongside one's own, is still very much under construction. Piaget's foundational research on moral development showed that children of this age are in what he called the stage of heteronomous morality: rules feel external and arbitrary, and winning feels overwhelmingly important. The cheating is not cynical. It is, in the most literal sense, the best your child's brain can do right now.

The genuinely good news is that the right kind of game can accelerate this development considerably. When a game's very structure removes the temptation to cheat, because every player benefits from everyone following the rules, children absorb the emotional logic of fairness through experience rather than through lecture. Games rooted in cooperative or carefully balanced turn-based traditions, including the ancient West African seed-sowing game known in Yoruba-speaking communities as Ayo, are extraordinarily well suited to this moment in a child's life. They teach fairness not by punishing unfairness but by making it feel unnecessary.

What Makes a Game Cheat-Proof: The Case for Cooperative and Turn-Based Play

A competitive game places a child's desire to win in direct conflict with the rule that they must not cheat. For a five-year-old whose impulse control is still developing, that is a difficult tension to manage consistently. A cooperative game dissolves the conflict: there is no private advantage to be gained by breaking the rules, because all players win or lose together. Turn-based games with a physical, tangible mechanic, where each player can see exactly what the other is doing, are similarly self-regulating. The game itself becomes the referee.

Adele Diamond's research on executive function highlights how children learn self-regulation most effectively not through correction but through structured environments that scaffold the skill. A well-designed traditional game is precisely such an environment: it builds the habit of rule-following by making rule-following feel rewarding rather than merely obligatory.

Ayo and the Mancala Family: An Ancient Game from West Africa That Children Pick Up in Minutes

Ayo is the Yoruba name for a game belonging to the mancala family, one of the oldest and most widely played game types on earth. Archaeological evidence places mancala-style boards in ancient Egypt, Ethiopia, and across sub-Saharan Africa, with some estimates suggesting the tradition is at least 7,000 years old. The board consists of two rows of six shallow cups, with a larger store cup at each end. Players begin with seeds, pebbles, or shells distributed across the cups and take turns scooping up the contents of one cup and sowing them one by one into the cups that follow, in a fluid, rhythmic motion that very young children find deeply satisfying.

What makes Ayo so powerful for a five-year-old is the physical act of counting and sowing: each turn is visible, deliberate, and shared. There is nothing to hide. The rhythm of the game, one seed, one cup, naturally slows children down and invites a meditative attention that competitive race games rarely produce. In communities across West Africa, this game has been played by children and adults together for millennia, and its endurance is itself a testimony to how well it fits the human mind at every stage of development.

Explore Jaques London's collection of traditional games, many drawing on centuries of play traditions from around the world

How to Play Ayo With a Young Child: A Parent's Quick-Start Guide

You do not need a specialist board to begin. An egg carton, twelve bottle tops, and a handful of dried beans will do. Place four beans in each of the twelve small cups and leave the two large end cups empty. On your turn, pick up all the beans from any one of your six cups and sow them one by one into the cups that follow, moving anticlockwise. If your last bean lands in a cup on your opponent's side that contains exactly one or two beans after sowing, those beans go into your store. The player with the most beans in their store when the board is cleared wins.

For a five-year-old, simplify further: play with only two or three beans per cup to start, and do not introduce the capture rule until the sowing itself feels natural. The goal at this age is not strategic mastery but the pleasure of the ritual. Count aloud together as you sow. Make it unhurried. Let your child see that the counting itself is the game.

Beyond Ayo: Other Cooperative and Turn-Based Traditional Games That Build Fairness in Under-6s

Ayo is a wonderful beginning, but it belongs to a much larger family of traditional games that do exactly the same work. Skittles, one of the oldest European children's games and a long-standing speciality at Jaques London since our founding in 1795, is turn-based, fully transparent, and entirely without the capacity for hidden advantage. Each player bowls, the pins either fall or they do not, and every result is shared and visible. Nine-pins traditions appear in records from medieval Germany, Tudor England, and colonial North America, suggesting that cultures across the world have independently arrived at the same insight: a game where everything happens in the open is a game where children learn to play fair.

Similarly, traditional matching and memory games played in Japan as Karuta, or the paired-card traditions found across Scandinavia and South Asia, rely on turn-taking and shared attention rather than concealment or deception. The consistent feature across all these traditions is that the game rewards presence and patience rather than cleverness at rule-bending.

Browse Jaques London's wooden toys, crafted to the same exacting standards the company has maintained for over two centuries

What the Research Says About Play, Fairness, and Moral Development

The evidence that play is the primary vehicle for moral learning in early childhood is now substantial. Hirsh-Pasek and Golinkoff's research on playful learning consistently shows that children internalise social rules far more durably through play than through direct instruction. Trawick-Smith's long-term TIMPANI study found that the quality of play materials and game structures directly influences the complexity of children's social reasoning. And Vygotsky's concept of the zone of proximal development applies here with particular clarity: when a child plays a game slightly beyond their current moral capacity but with a supportive adult alongside them, they stretch into that capacity naturally.

Choosing the Right Game: What to Look for in a Traditional Wooden Game for This Age

When selecting a game for a five-year-old with an eye to building fairness, look for these qualities.

• Full visibility. Every move should be seen by every player, with no hidden hands, concealed cards, or private boards.
• Physical texture. Wooden pieces that must be picked up, counted, and placed slow the pace of play and engage the hands, which Montessori educators consistently link to deeper cognitive engagement.
• Cultural richness. A game that comes with a story, a country, a tradition gives a parent the opportunity to situate play in a wider human context, broadening a child's sense of how rules and fairness operate across different communities.
• Scalability. The best games for this age can be made simpler for a difficult evening or more complex as the child grows.

Common Questions

My child still tries to cheat even at cooperative games. Is something wrong?

Almost certainly not. Some children at five are still consolidating the understanding that rules apply to themselves as fully as they apply to others, what Piaget called the shift from egocentric to sociocentric thinking. In a cooperative game, gently narrate the shared goal: "If we both follow the counting, we might beat our score from yesterday." The aim is to make rule-following feel as though it serves the child's own interests, because at this age it genuinely needs to feel that way before it can become internalised.

At what age should I expect my child to genuinely understand the concept of fairness?

Most developmental psychologists place the emergence of genuine, consistent fairness reasoning between the ages of six and eight, when the prefrontal cortex has matured sufficiently to hold competing perspectives simultaneously. At five, children can understand fairness in concrete, immediate situations, particularly when a game makes the fairness visible and tactile, but abstract or delayed fairness remains difficult. The games you play now are planting seeds rather than harvesting fruit, and that is entirely as it should be.

We tried Ayo but my child lost interest quickly. What might we be doing wrong?

The most common reason is that the full rule set is introduced too quickly. At five, the pleasure of Ayo lies almost entirely in the sowing motion itself: the picking up, the counting, the placing. Try playing with no capture rule at all for the first several sessions, simply sowing and watching the seeds travel around the board. Let the child make up a story about where the seeds are going. The competitive element, and the strategic thinking it requires, can be introduced gradually once the physical rhythm of the game is genuinely enjoyed for its own sake.

Are there other cultural traditions of children's games that work the same way as Ayo?

Many. The mancala family alone spans the whole of Africa, the Middle East, and South and South-East Asia. Beyond mancala, the Korean game of Yut Nori uses turn-based stick-throwing with full visibility and shared decision-making. The Indian game of Pallankuzhi, played on a carved wooden board with shells, follows almost identical principles to Ayo. Traditional skittles games appear in every European culture as well as in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica. The cross-cultural consistency of these structures is itself a kind of evidence: across thousands of years and dozens of distinct civilisations, people have converged independently on games that teach children to take turns, count honestly, and find satisfaction in a shared rhythm rather than in private advantage.