Great Gift Review - Color Huey and the Four Seasons

My kids really like playing board games, but if I'm being honest... I don't find it quite as enjoyable as they do. For one thing, my oldest will be six in three months and my youngest turned three two months ago. In case you've never tried playing a board game with a three year old - it can be tricky. And since my son can handle more complicated games while my daughter doesn't want to be left out, trying to play a game that both of them can enjoy without me going insane is not easy. Plus, a lot of the games that are made for young kids are mind-numbingly boring for adults.

But my friend Sara recently started selling games through SimplyFun, and she asked if I'd like to try one out and review it. I wasn't totally sure until I looked through their catalog and saw that there were quite a lot of games that didn't look horrendously awful. (Actually, they looked so non-awful that I ended up buying three more games to give to my kids for Christmas.)

We picked the game Color Huey and the Four Seasons. Each player chooses a card with a picture of Huey (a caterpillar, worm-type-thingy) on it. For each turn, the player reaches into a bag full of colored circles and pulls one out, hoping to pull out a color he/she needs to fill in all of the circles.

The beauty of the game is that it's a challenge (and fun) for both my three-year-old and five-year-old. One side of each board shows Huey wearing a different-colored pair of shoes on each segment of his body, while on the other side, each segment has a color word spelled out on it (and no colored shoes) so that players have to match the color to the word. In kindergarten, colors are some of the sight words that my son has been learning, so it's great practice! My daughter, on the other hand, can practice matching colors. (The color words and the colored shoes are in a different order on every card, so the kids can't just memorize where the pieces go, they have to actually read/match the colors.)

There's also an element of cooperation. If you pull a color circle that you already have on your own card, you have to pass that color to another person who needs it. So players can strategize together and maybe decide to team up to ensure that one of them wins and their mom loses, for example. Not that MY children would do that (they totally did).

The game itself is well made. Each card is made out of a thick cardboard, and there's a cloth bag to store the colored circles in. I was happy that it wasn't flimsy, especially since my kids aren't exactly gentle with games. (As you'll see in the video. Yikes!)

My kids LOVED the game, and it's simple enough that after they learned the rules, they could play together without me (which was beautiful after I played it with them five times in a row and they wanted to keep going).

Simply Fun has a ton of games that are actually educational but kids just think they're fun. You can search for games by subject matter so that they can work on specific skills like reading or math, or you can search by age. (I bought my five-year-old the game Math Room for Christmas so he can practice addition.)

You can follow Sara's Facebook page here. And only until Sunday (11/19), they're having their biggest sale of the year on games! So if you need a good gift for a kid in your life and you DON'T want to give them a cartoon-themed toy (which, let's be honest, I'm also giving my kids for Christmas), now's the time to stock up on some fun games!

(Also, I tried to have my kids make a review video of it, and it was hilariously bad! So naturally I'm sharing it.)

*Disclosure - I was given this game for free in exchange for my honest opinion.*

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