Alana's Animals

I have a confession to make. When we received the last batch of games and we were going through what we had to review I picked up Alana’s Animals and judged it by it’s tiny tiny cover. I know I should be trying to be a better role model for Elidi, but I couldn’t help it. Just because games don’t come in a big box full of colourful components doesn’t mean they’re not as good.  

Sometimes they may even be better… 

Elidi has just started school, and like every responsible parent out there I know that the best way to prepare her for this is with copious amounts of board games. We recently got told that school were very impressed with her ability to read a dice without counting the spots. Thank you Haba’s Würfelwürmchen! 

Alana’s Animals (AA) is great at teaching Nursery, Early Years & Key Stage 1 Maths. So much so that it’s approved by National Numeracy. But you know what makes this a must have? It’s really fun too! In AA there are two ways to play one for 4+ (though I first played with El at 3) and one for 6+. Lets briefly go through the two modes: 

4+: You take all 24 animal cards (these are things like three pigs, one goat, two cows and even a couple of farmers) and place them in a face up grid on the table. Then you take 9 of the reward cards (these are things like “Have the most cows”, “Have more sheep than goats” or “Have an even number of animals”) and place them face up in a row or column. 

You then take turns revealing a new reward card and picking one of the animal cards. At the end of the game there will be a massive 21 reward cards up for grabs (meaning there were 9 that weren’t revealed #replayability) and you go one by one awarding apples (that are on the back of the reward cards) for each one. There’s even a couple of fun rewards like “Get the worm” and “Have at least 2 ducklings” that are hidden on other cards. 

6+: This mode plays very similar to the fantastic game Sushi Go*. You will deal each player 6 cards from the animal deck, and then deal 5 reward cards face up in the centre of the table, these are the public rewards. Then deal 2 face down rewards to each player, these are your private rewards. 

Choose one card to keep from the hand of cards and then pass the whole hand to the left. Everyone then reveals what they kept and repeats with the new hand just passed to them. This continues until every player has 6 cards in front of them. At this point the public rewards are scored. Then everyone scores their own private rewards also. Most apples wins.  

(I would go even further and add a 8+ variant to the 6+ mode that is played with 10 cards in hand wherein the hidden rewards are scored publicly. This way you could try and work out the other players hidden goals by what cards they are putting down and try and gazump them.) 

* If you are going to give Sushi Go a go, make sure you grab Sushi Go Party as it is a much better version of the original game.  

AA teaches maths terms effortlessly. Elidi came out of her first game with a better understanding of greater and less, odd and even and also a mild hatred for me after I snagged the worm from under her slow moving childlike fingers, mwahahahahaha, ahem, sorry.  

It’s fun, it’s educational, it has years of play to it, it’s a no brainer!