Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

This is an excellent board game for young children to practice color recognition and beginning team strategy. My children at 4 and 7 enjoyed playing this game and requested it quite often during board game sessions with me. They're now 5 and 8 and they still request it from time to time. I as the adult also enjoy playing it with them. In the game players work together to move from 4 to 6 owls (depending on the desired difficulty) down the colored track to their nest before the sun comes up. Owl tokens are placed on the start places of the track. Players then draw hands of three cards. Every turn they play a card and draw another one. Most of the cards have colors on them. Whatever color is on the card played is the color any of the owls can move to. Owls must always move to the next instance of a given color on the board, unless another owl is already on that space. If the space is occupied, the owl may skip along the board to the next instance of the color. In this way players can get their owls to move quickly down the board if they work together to choose the same color in a row on their turns. Some of the cards have a sun token on them. If one of the sun cards is drawn a little sun marker is moved along a sun path at the top of the board. All the owls must make it to the nest before the sun gets to the end of the sun path. Then everyone wins. This game can be thought of as a much improved version of Candy Land. While Candy Land might be okay for two year olds and younger three year olds, this game works much better for later three year olds up through about six or seven. I wouldn't buy it for an eight year old, but older children will enjoy playing this with their younger siblings, as is the case with us. In this game there are small strategic decisions that the children can make to affect the outcome of the game. The strategy is definitely not deep, but it is at a nice level for young ones. It is definitely enough strategy to get the children thinking and practicing working together. This ups the players' higher order thought usage well beyond Candy Land, where there is no strategy involved in gameplay at all. Even with the best use of strategy in the game, there is enough luck that you will still sometimes lose (as you can see us do in our video). This is particularly the case if you play the hardest level of the game with all the owls. Of course there are other times when the luck aspect works in your favor and you still manage to win while using less than optimal strategy. All told, the game strikes a good balance between luck and strategy. The components are colorful and the illustrations are cute. All the pieces are made of biodegradable recycled cardboard. Unfortunately the cardboard for the cards is quite thin and flimsy. For that reason I knocked it down a star because if this game were to be used in a classroom I would recommend laminating the cards. Of course then those cards are no longer biodegradable, which sort of defeats one of the advertising points of the company... So to sum up, I would definitely recommend this game to both parents and teachers, of children in preschool through first grade, looking for a fun game involving color recognition and light strategy. For another great game utilizing color recognition and light strategy in a competitive, rather than cooperative, format check out Monza.