If your junior players are also fans of the Gruffalo, you might like a go at playing a Gruffalo boardgame.
It works best when you know the Gruffalo description quite well, but it can be a good way of introducing grandparents and others to the rhymes – as well as the opportunity to say ‘I’ve got a poisonous wart, but I haven’t got knobbly knees’, and other such leading sentences.
The book(s)
The Gruffalo is a picture book by Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffer – the hero of the story, a mouse, invents a scary monster (the Gruffalo) to escape from other animals that might want to eat him.
All is going well when the mouse suddenly meets his nemesis – but who is the scariest in the end?
Donaldson’s verse sparkles, Scheffer’s illustrations have the right mix of accessible and a little bit scary. The book has been a huge favourite in the UK for over a decade, leading to a follow-up book, The Gruffalo’s Child.
Book to game
There’s been quite an increase of popular children’s books becoming the basis for board games – you’ll find the same with Going on a Bear Hunt, and I’m sure there’s more.
As a lover of children’s books, particularly picture books, I’m sometimes a bit unsure about all of this (and a lot of the other merchandising that goes with these books). Â Can’t the book just be the book?
At the same time, a good story works in retelling – and where a board game allows you to retell a story, through playing out the drama, I can see the appeal more straightforwardly.
Premise of the game
The game is quite like pairs, in that you have lots of counters turned face down, and you need to remember where they are to pick the ones you need.
The way this works is that the pictures on the counters match the different elements of description of the Gruffalo – here’s where the poisonous wart, the purple prickles, and all the rest come in.
There are 9 elements of description, split into 3 areas (‘bases’) on the board. Â You collect all 9 counters, and proceed on to the end of the game (where you can gain a nut – the reason for the mouse’s stroll through the woods in the first place). Â The person to get there first wins.
Starting off
Everyone has a counter with a picture of the mouse – each counter has a different colour so you can tell them apart.
You move by using a spinner – the needle on the spinner points to numbers (1-4). Â This makes it relatively easy to count, and move, for younger players.
The spinner is used both to identify how many spaces to move on the board, and how many counters you can turn over, when you get to on of the 3 ‘bases’.
All the counters are turned face down, and are in the middle of the board.
Picking your counters
Everyone also has a smaller board with a picture of the Gruffalo, and circles to indicate the different elements of him, matching the counters.
When you get to a ‘base’, you spin the spinner. If the spinner needle stops on 3, you can turn over 3 counters in the middle of the board.
If any of them match the ones you need for your smaller board, on this ‘base’, you keep the counter, and fill the space on your board. If they don’t match, you turn them back over again.
Moving around the board
It’s fair to say that the first base takes the longest – there are the most counters on the board, and therefore more ‘wrong’ guesses that you could make.
Once you’ve filled the first 3 circles on your board, you move on round to the next base, and try to collect the counters for those 3 descriptions.
Dependent on how well the guessing is going, some people may be ahead to the second or third base while others are still on the first.
The longer the game goes on, the fewer counters are left – and the more you may have seen them already. Â This speeds up the identification of counters you need, so that it’s quite quick by the 3rd base.
You need an exact throw to land on the end square and win, so sometimes you can be going back and forth in the final section for a while, even after you have collected all the counters you need.
Notes on playing
It tends to be luck if you get the counters you need quickly – but if someone ahead of you turns over e.g. 2 counters the same, you could remember where the other one is, and pick that up yourself on your go.
This is where knowing the story helps – if you have the rhyme of the Gruffalo’s description firmly in your head (as many parents do), you can run through this, and help remind yourself what counters you’re collecting at this stage.
Try to make sure that junior players put the counters back in the same place (and don’t turn them over and back too quickly), so everyone has a chance at remembering where the other counters are.
As with pairs, junior players have a bit of an advantage, as they tend to find it easier to remember what counter went where than the grownups. (At least, that’s my experience of it.)
The rules also suggest that, with younger players, you can leave the counters face up after guessing. Â This makes it much quicker to spot the counters you need, and cuts down on frustration in that first section.
Conclusions
All in all, it entertained both Junior Player, and both grandparents, and junior players may well enjoy the chance to recite the Gruffalo description to other players who know it less well.
As the counter positions are randomised, this is a game you could replay quite a few times. The quality of the board and pieces is good to play with. And the game element could mean that this would work for a range of ages, even where the junior players might have outgrown the books themselves.
If you get to the stage where the board game evokes:
‘Oh help, oh no,
It’s the Gruffalo!’
then it might be time to pass it on to another junior player of your choice…