I am always looking for great products to take on our travels and that’s when I came across the newly launched Animal Families and Little Bug Bingo from Orchard Toys.
For our long haul flight to Orlando we took these new games to keep the girls entertained during the journey.
The games are compact, colourful, and easy to use. They are designed for specific age ranges and to help engage and educate children at the same time.
We found that the games were fun and a good way of spending a small amount of time together as a family. The travel size games were compact enough to fit on a plane tray table and didn’t have any small fiddly bits that could get lost.
The first game we played was based on an Orchard Toys classic Monster Bingo, but the travel version is called Little Bug Bingo.
The game consists of 4 bingo boards, 20 picture cards and 34 leaf counters and is for up to 4 players. Setting up the game on the limited space we had on the plane was easy and only took a minute with each player having their own bingo board.
The picture cards had to be shuffled and placed down on the table. Each player takes it in turn to turn over the picture card and if the bug on the picture card matches a bug on anyone’s board then that player would place a leaf counter over the matching space.
The winner is the first person to cover all the pictures on their board and shouts out “bingo”. We found this a fun game and the girls kept wanting to play it over again.
The game also had an educational element as it’s a great way for children to learn the names of different insects and also helps with their reading skills.
The second Orchard Toys game was called Animal Families which was the travel version of the Happy Families game, which up to 4 players could play. The game consists of 30 animal cards with 10 different families to collect and 2 wild cards.
What is great about Orchard Toys travel games is that they are so easy to set up and within minutes all of the cards were shuffled and spread out on our tables ready to play.
We had to take it in turns to select 2 cards and try and find matching families from the playing cards. This was so much fun as we tried to remember where each card was located. The game really encourages observational skills for children and helps improve memory skills for both children and us adults! When you find a matching pair of animals you get to keep the cards.
To make the game a little more competitive when a wild card is picked up it gives that player the opportunity to steal a complete animal family from another player – my eldest daughter liked this competitive edge. The winner is the player with the most sets of complete families.
Overall
What’s great about these games are they are timeless and are excellent for travel as after playing these two games we were well into our 9 hour flight.
The compact size of these travel games ensured they were easily stored in the girl’s hand luggage.
Little Bug Bingo and Animal Families are great products that we plan to take with us on all our future trips, we enjoyed them so much that we regularly play them at home.
Orchard Toys are great at inventing such imaginative and educational products, that help children learn through play.
Both the Little Bug Bingo and Animal Families games cost £4.99 making them excellent pocket money toys, birthday gifts and stocking fillers.
You can purchase direct from Orchard Toys or from the following stockists:
Amazon UK (online only) www.amazon.co.uk
John Lewis www.johnlewis.co.uk
We were sent Little Bug Bingo and Animal Families for the purpose of this review.