2009 Best Children’s Game

The Judging Panel for the Best Children’s Game congratulates the designers of the following games, which have been shortlisted for the Best Children’s Game Award.

The award was won by Viva Topo!

Viva Topo!

Viva Topo! is a fun game of a cat chasing mice that are on a quest for cheese. Each player has their own family of mice, while everyone gets to move the cat. The game has beautiful and fun pieces and a lovely board. There are some tactics based on the cat’s location and you will have to make decisions about whether to play safe and sneak into a house for cheese, or take a risk and perhaps sacrifice a mouse to the relentlessly pursuing cat!

Blokus 3D

Even though the suggested age range is 8+, we believe that the game is simple and elegant enough to be played by younger children who will enjoy constructing an Incan building using specially shaped “stones”. The building “stones” are three-dimensional pieces (think Tetris in 3 dimensions!) and are all of different shapes. Each new stone that you place must touch one of your already placed stones. The objective is to cover up as many of your opponents’ pieces as possible, so that at the game end, more of your pieces are visible than anyone elses. This game is a fun challenge to your spatial imagination!

Double Shutter Junior

This fun family game helps develop math skills while being fast to learn, easy to play, and more than a little addictive! Roll the dice and add up the dots, then shut the tiles of your choice. The tile total must match the dot total, but the tiles may be shut in any combination that you want. Then roll again – you keep rolling until you can’t close shutters to match your roll. The more shutters you close the better your score.

Giro Galoppo

Gira Galoppo is a horse racing game that allows kids to have fun outguessing their parents. Each turn, everyone chooses one of their cards, and then the cards are simultaneously revealed. The player with the lowest card gets to move first, followed by the others in order. If your horse and rider land on another player’s horse you bump them backward, but if your figure’s movement would land you on an obstacle then you lose your turn, so you need to be careful! First & farthest across the finish line wins in this simple but exciting game.

Hula Hippos

It’s a fun game of flicking hippos! Your aim is to be the first to trap all of your hippos. Each player has 6 little wooden hippos and must flick them into positions on the table so that when the spinning ring falls, it will trap as many as possible inside. Repeat this until all your hippos are gone! Mayhem and hilarity with a bit of room for skill.

King Toad

Get rid of bug cards from your hand and onto the king’s feasting table by playing them in numerical order. If you can’t follow the required number, then playing the King Toad card lets you say “Ribbit” and stick out your tongue from one to four times to signal the card you want played. The first player able to fill your request after you “Ribbit” again gets rid of their card. The first player out of cards gets to be King Toad for a day!

Spaghetti Junction

Kids get to match the traffic cones to build crazy roads in this fun twist on an old favourite. It’s a dominoes-style traffic game, where the tiles show roads with vehicles and traffic cones. The number of traffic cones must be matched along with the direction of the traffic flow to place a new tile. You can build bridges or add corner pieces to create a 3D spaghetti junction.

Whirlpool

This is a fun Australian memory game that you play on the floor rather than on the table! First place the 25 stepping stone tiles in a 5×5 grid on the floor: this represents ‘the swamp’. Your objective is to cross the swamp from one side to the other. This sounds easy, but at each step you must reveal what is under your new stepping stone, and it could be quick sand, a crocodile, or the dreaded Whirlpool! The Whirlpool makes everyone shift to a new side of the swamp as well as turning all the tiles back down… and the kids laugh when the new perspective causes you to lose track of where the danger tiles are! Very simple, but you will laugh and have a good time.