Why Garden Games Win the Summer Holidays
Six weeks. The same garden, the same faces, and somewhere around day three, the first “I’m bored.” Every parent knows the sound. Here’s why the families who sail through summer usually have one thing standing on the lawn.
Reason 1
The novelty of everything else runs out by week one
The inflatables deflate, the water balloons are gone by Tuesday, and the craft box has one glitter spill left in it. Long holidays don’t need more stuff — they need one thing that gets better with repetition instead of worse.
Reason 2
The afternoons are longer than they look
It’s the 3pm–6pm stretch that decides how the day felt. An afternoon with a game running in the garden has a shape: teams, turns, a score to settle before tea. An afternoon without one is just… long.
Reason 3
A lawn game changes how children play, not just what they play
Croquet, skittles, quoits, kubb — they all run on the same quiet mechanics: wait your turn, watch closely, try again. That turn-taking is a genuine workout for a child’s focus — twenty minutes of it asks more of their attention than most things they’ll do all day.
Reason 4
Everyone plays — that's the whole point
A five-year-old, a teenager and a grandparent can stand on the same lawn and play the same game on level-ish terms. Almost nothing else on a family holiday does that. The game is the excuse; the hour together is the product.
Reason 5
The right set outlasts the summer — and the childhood
We’ve made garden games since 1795. Solid wood, proper weight, no batteries — the sort of set that gets pulled out of the shed every June for twenty years and handed on still working.
Where families usually start
Jaques of London has been making games since 1795 — the family firm that gave the world the Staunton chess set and lawn croquet. Everything we make is solid wood, built to be handed down.