At the beautifully rendered www.yetisports.org, the kids can throw snowballs at penguins in Orca Slap, surf waves in Hawaii, or hurtle down a mountain in Snowboard Freeride. Yetisports, you’ll be delighted to hear, can also be downloaded to a mobile. A bright collection of single-player Shockwave games at Netbaby World (www.netbabyworld.com/playcom/games) cleverly reinterprets arcade classics such as Boulder Dash. The pick of the bunch is Tune Inn, a colourful puzzler set in a music shop, where you must produce and sell records to succeed.

Lego’s neat range of arcade and puzzle games at club.lego.com/eng/games, designed in the classic Lego style, brings the retro fun up to date for a new generation: build on-screen models, race buggies and play a cute platform game in Junkbot. Online games provide instant gratification and it should not take hours to decipher the instructions: flying a radio-controlled helicopter through a tunnel at tinyurl.com/7hn is simple and fiendishly, carpet-chewingly addictive. Nasa’s excellent kids’ website (tinyurl.com/8v2m3) has a lively games section with an educational twist — proof that learning can be made fun online. Explore vector co-ordinates by navigating a car to the launch site in Vec-)Touring, solve gravitational crosswords or play a board game called Black Hole.

Grown-up kids need not feel left out. Lobbing scrunched-up paper balls at the bin is a long-standing office tradition, and at www.ebaumsworld.com/papertoss.html the action is transferred to cyberspace. With the Ashes still raging, head to tinyurl.com/a6kka, where you can play the role of the England cricket legend WG Grace in Channel 4’s amusingly non-PC take on the gentleman’s game. If you still have time to burn, why not practise your penalty shoot-out skills at www.georgiapacificsoccer.com? It may be an American site, but it’s better executed than most online football games.

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