Board Games

Wooden board marked with the numbers 1 to 90.

90 wooden number discs.

48 cards

28 cm across

Age suitability: 3 years +

BJ788

Outfoxed is an excellent cooperative deduction game.  Someone has stolen Mrs Plumpert's prize pie and you and the other players have to work out which fox is the guilty one. At each roll of dice, you get a chance of finding a clue or revealing a suspect.  If you are unlucky or you make a mistake, the fox moves three steps closer to getting away.

Children like this game because it's fun.  Parents like it because it also encourages the children's logic and memory skills.

Each game takes about twenty minutes.

Age suitability: 5 +

2-4 players

Here is an excellent review on Youtube from Tom Vasel of the Dice Tower:

Abalone is like chess played with marbles but thankfully the rules are more simple and straightforward.  It is two-person game that bright seven year olds will be able to play.  There's even an Abalone world championship.

You have a hexagonal board with 14 white marbles set up against your opponent's 14 black ones. When it's your turn, you move one of your marbles, or a row of two or three marbles, one step in any direction. When your marbles meet your opponents, on your next move you can push them backwards, forwards or sideways.  The aim is to push your opponent's marbles off the board and into the gutter that surrounds it but your column of marbles has to bigger than theirs.  So you need two of your marbles to push one of their marbles, three of yours to push two of theirs. The winner is the first to push off 6 marbles.  For most people, the game will last about 20 minutes.

Here's a video explaining it:

Introduce the delights of Scrabble to younger children.

For children starting to spell, one side of the board has pictures and clues for children to guess words that are already on the board (for example f--h paired with a picture of a fish).

On the other side of the board, older children can play a more conventional game of Scrabble, making up their own words but with bigger tiles and simpler scoring.

Contains : Double-sided board, 84 word tiles, 30 counters for scoring, and instructions.

2 - 4 players.

Age suitability: 6+

Here is a video from youtube with a very American voiceover:

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 Play the centuries-old strategy game on this wooden board.

Comes with 48 colourful acrylic 'stones'.

Two-player game for people of almost all ages (not suitable for the under 3 year-olds - small bits - choking hazard).

34007

 

Here's a board game with a difference.  There's no board.  Instead the players create their own planet, by sticking desert, mountain, ice, water or forest tiles on a magnetic dodecahedron, an ingenious feature of the game.  You do this in a way that creates the most suitable habitats for animals.  So for example penguins would need a large area of ice next to water whereas an arctic wolf would need ice but not water.  Each game lasts about half an hour.

2-4 players

Age suitability: 8+ 

Here's an excellent review from Tom Vasel of the Dice Tower on Youtube:

and a video from the game designers: