The importance of play as a spontaneous and voluntary children's activity and its impact on children's development is indisputable, and thereby childhood without play is unthinkable. By playing, children learn about themselves, about the world and other people. Through play children process their experiences in a manner acceptable to themselves, and everything children cannot express in words, they express through play. This paper attempts to analyse children's preferences for spontaneous play in relation to gender, which should determine which games are favourite for children as well as if games are gender typical. Research was conducted taking into account children's viewpoint, thus enabling their active participation in the research. 82 children (40 girls and 42 boys), aged 4 to starting primary school, participated in the research, and it was conducted in the beginning of July 2021 in Zagreb in Kindergarten Kolibri, in several groups from all four buildings. The research determined that there are play preference differences according to gender. The children who participated in the research prefer the so called gender neutral games, such as playing with modelling clay, drawing, playing with building blocks, and similar, but the research confirmed that girls and boys have a greater tendency to games traditionally and stereotypically typical for their gender (e.g. girls prefer playing with Barbie dolls, doll houses, make-up games, etc., while boys prefer football, playing with toy cars and tools). It was also confirmed that boys prefer active, motoric games, but the hypothesis that girls prefer calmer, static games was rejected because this research found that girls, like boys, prefer active games.