If you see a crocodile

Boardgames form a big part of family life in our house. Part of our social life revolves around boardgames, and playing games together helped Charlie and me to re-ground our relationship and find time for each other in those post-baby chaotic months.

For those reasons, we’re keen to foster a love of boardgames in Little Man – but at two years of age, it can be difficult to find a game that’s simple enough for him to follow but engaging enough to keep him entertained.

Snakes and ladders doesn’t cut it. We got a giant Peppa Pig version but all Little Man was interested in doing with it was matching the Daddy Pig piece to the squares with Daddy Pig on them, and the Peppa Pig piece to the Peppa squares…

Enter the Orchard Toys boardgames. We first discovered these in the Wise Owl bookstore in our town, and since then I’ve seen their boardgames appearing in bookstores and toy stores everywhere.

Our current game of choice is “If You See A Crocodile.” The artwork in this game is bright and colourful, with cute little characters decorating the board, as well as those you choose to play with.

The game construction is solid. The board is cleverly made up of several jigsaw-style pieces, so the fun starts the moment you open the box and start setting up. Once you’ve made the board, you need to build the cardboard boat and boathouse. These pop together easily (and can be taken apart easily afterwards so that they lie flat for storage).

Then you take all of the coloured cardboard disks and place them, coloured side up, in the space in the centre of the board.

The aim of the game is to be the first person to make it all the way around the board to reach the boathouse. To move, you roll a dice with six different colours on it. But before you can move forward, you must first turn over one of the circular disks of the colour you rolled. If the other side of the disk shows empty water, you move forward to the next space of that colour on the board. But if it shows a crocodile, don’t forget to SCREAM!!!

I’ll be honest – we have yet to finish a game of this. Little Man doesn’t fully understand the mechanic of moving your piece around the board. And since it’s so much fun to scream at the top of your lungs whenever you see a crocodile, he’s convinced that that’s what you’re aiming for. So we play the game his way, and in our house for now, the crocodiles are a good thing!

This boardgame is fantastic for colour recognition. When he rolls the dice, I always ask Little Man what colour he rolled. And when I roll the dice, I ask him to turn over a piece of that particular colour for me.

I suspect it will be a few more months before we play the game as it’s intended to be played. But in the meantime, we’ll have plenty of fun hunting for crocodiles and screaming when we find them. 🙂

Disclaimer
I did not receive any compensation or payment for writing this point. The opinions expressed are honest and my own. This post contains Amazon affiliate links, which means that I may receive a small percentage of any purchase you make after clicking those links.