Asmodee and Kids – Holiday Fun – Animals Upon Animals

Last week Thursday – our regularly scheduled game night in the Roffel household – a big box of board games arrived from Asmodee Canada, two of which were aimed at young kids. While slightly outside my youngest age range – he’s 3, and the one game suggested 4+ – we still opened up two of them to see how he would like them. Let’s take a quick peak at Animals Upon Animals – Christmas Edition and, in a future article, Rhino Hero Junior. Let’s take a look!

Animals Upon Animals

The concept in Animals Upon Animals is actually pretty simple. In the centre of the table is a base that all players will stack their animals on top of – hence, Animals Upon Animals. In the Christmas edition of the game, each player will be given a certain number of wood pieces – a reindeer, sled, star, and rabbit to name a few. On your turn, you will roll a die which will determine what you will do on your turn.

A single pip means you place one of your pieces on the middle platform. 2 pips means you get to place two pieces on the middle platform. A hand icon means you can pass one of your pieces to another person. A question mark means OTHER players get to decide which piece you place on the tower. And finally you can have the option to place a piece on the table NEXT to the starting platform.

For my 2 year old, he was actually able to play the game with no issues. The deeper we got the harder it became for him to place pieces on the growing tower without knocking things off, but overall he understood the core concepts of the game.

What he had a harder time understanding – and even my 7 year old struggled with this for some reason – was the strategy behind who you should give pieces to (obviously the person with the least), and what pieces you should force others to place in certain situations. The difficulty level of playing the different pieces seemed lost on them a bit, which ultimately led us to realize this is best played kids-with-kids.

Still, for a kids game that adults can play, it is an easy recommendation. And even if you don’t want to invest in the Christmas version, there are lots of other great options to choose from, including standard animals, dinosaurs, and more!