One of the best ways to find the best online games for kids, is to ask your kids. Children are much more clued up about these kinds of things than we think they are. They know where to look for things on the web, and they know how to ask their friends in the social media for recommendations they will enjoy. For the most part, the hottest games they play follow the same pattern as the coolest shows they watch – their friends all start talking about them and presto, they’re hooked.

In fact, the most popular free online games for kids often have a direct link with favoured shows and cartoons. Children are great obsessives – they love to give huge amounts of enthusiasm to things, which of course makes them a marketer’s dream. Away from all the expensive toys and spin off sticker albums, though, you’ll find a range of free online games for kids designed to keep them interested in the antics of their favourite characters and keep them watching the most popular shows.

The reason these games remain popular? Because their simple gameplay is addictive, just like the old handheld console games; and because they feature favourite characters in the weird and wonderful worlds from whence they come.
The best online games for kids are generally the ones based on cartoons. First, because the quality of the gameplay, as alluded to above, is directly descended from games of proven quality; and second because the cartoons themselves are already known to be innocuous and entertaining. Given that an online children’s game based on a cartoon, is effectively just another way of creating an episode of that cartoon for the child’s entertainment, any questions you could have had about quality or suitability have effectively already been answered.

A cartoon is a simple, colourful piece of entertainment where nothing much ever happens. That is, whatever the world of the cartoon was like at the beginning of the show, that’s what it will be like at the end. It’s one of the first rules of drama, and no cartoon ever deviates from it. Fans of cartoons like the world and the characters – so any change is bad for the fan and ultimately for the cartoon too.

This recipe, applied to online games for kids, means lots of colourful fun ways to spend a few hours – but with no need to keep coming back to find out what happens next. You watch a cartoon because you like to laugh at the antics of the characters and enjoy the otherworldliness of the universes created by the writers. You play free online games for kids so you can dip into the same kind of zaniness for the same sort of length of time.

One of the best uses of an online game of this nature, then, is as an alternative to an actual episode of the cartoon – which, unless it has been previously downloaded to a computer and synced, can cause a serious dent in the data allowances of your package.