For Christmas, my eight year olds received The Amazing Animal Trivia Game. They love animals, and have really enjoyed playing the game. It’s a cross between a trivia game and Memory. Only you don’t have to just find two cards that match, you have to find three.
On the board, ten sets of three matching animal cards are laid face down. At the start of the turn the player gets to flip over one card. They then roll the dice, and try to answer a trivia question about animals. Questions are either True or False, or multiple choice. My children surprised me with the things they knew. Did you know that a skink is a lizard? Or that sharks eyes roll back in their sockets as they attack their prey in order to protect their eyes from being scratched by a desperate victim?
I will warn you that there are a couple of mating questions in the stack of 200. Nothing too racy, most are about mating calls. One was about the female praying mantis eating her partner after mating. I wanted to caution so that no one is surprised.
If you answer the question correctly, you get to flip over two more cards. If they all three match, you get to remove them from the board. The game pieces are moved in a circle around the board. You get to move if you get the question right. A few spaces are “wild” and the player gets to flip the extra two cards without answering a question, or the player can challenge another player and steal one of their matches. The person with the most matches at the end of the game wins.
I like that the game doesn’t just provide answers, but elaborates on many of the cards. An example would be the card “True or False – Birds have teeth.” The answer explains that this is false, and that having teeth would make birds too heavy to fly. I like that my kids are learning as they are playing. I also like that it’s a good game for kids and adults to play together. The kids know as much or more than I do about animals, and we all have to concentrate on remembering where those three dolphins were placed. And I’ll tell you, finding three matching cards instead of two is much more challenging!
After a few more times of playing, I’m going to suggest that the boys look through their animal books and make up some extra questions.
More Games that Sneak in Learning:
Monopoly as a Learning Tool
Scrabble as a Learning Tool