Tabletop Tuesday- For Kids!- Count Your Chickens

Today we’re going to take a look at a game for the younger audience. By younger audience I, of course, mean those to young to be able to read this blog and are therefore not really our audience.

Count Your Chickens! by Peaceable Kingdom is a cooperative game designed for kids ages 2-4. It’s a very simple game. You are helping a mother hen collect her chicks and bring them to the chicken coop before the evil fox gets them. On their turn, each player spins the spinner and moves the chicken to the next space on the board that matches the spinner. You can land on a pig, dog, sheep, cow or tractor. You count the spaces from where you were to the animal you are moving too and then add that many chicks to the chicken coop.

by picto:graphic

A fox occupies the final space on the spinner. If he turns up you have to remove one chick from the chicken coop and return it to the box. As there are exactly the same number of chicks as there are spaces on the board foxes keep you from winning. A few of the spaces on the board are special and help counter act the fox. Should you land on a blue space you get to collect an extra chick. To win you must land on a blue space for every fox you spin.

Like I said, very simple. But hey, it’s designed for 2 year olds. My son got this for Christmas and he loves it. It’s got colorful animals and it involves counting; something he thoroughly enjoys doing. The spinner is also a big hit. Who doesn’t like spinning those? I’m in my 30’s and I still get joy out of giving it a powerful flick.

For us parents, the game works as a teaching tool. It helps with counting skills. The greatest distance you can move on one turn is 12 spaces, plus one if it’s a blue space. Finding a way to get them counting over 10 is harder than you’d expect. Most everything seems geared toward teaching kids to count to 10.

Beyond counting, the game serves as a great transition to learning rules and how to take turns. There aren’t a lot of rules so it’s not overwhelming. Aside from just moving spaces there’s the extra rules of the blue spaces and the fox. No kid wants to remove a chick so it works to get them use to following game rules even if you don’t want too.

I personally also like that it’s cooperative. Those are my favorite type of games and this is especially great for kids. They still have a chance to learn to lose gracefully but instead of Mom or Dad beating them, it’s the game beating the kid and the parent. That helps give a good foundation for how to handle loss before learning how to lose to someone else.

The only downside to the game is the same as most games for 2 year olds; it’s pretty dumb and entirely luck based. You win or lose based on the luck of the spin. But that’s how it works for the little ones. They need to learn how to play a game first. Then they can learn how to think in games. That’s when the actual fun games start.

To summarize:

Positives