This Sunday (27 June 2017) sees us celebrating National Unplugging Day. A day on which parents are pledging to #GoGadgetFree and spend from sun-up to sun-down without technology. It’s like a return to a previous time; a time when children weren’t glued to screens all day long and played together either using their own imagination or playing a board game together.
As part of National Unplugging Day we were asked to review Ravensburger’s fantastic game Bugs In The Kitchen. Now I first saw this game when I visited the Toy Fair in London back in January. At the time I was blown away by how great it looked and I just knew that the kids would enjoy it. The opportunity to review it was one that I grabbed with both hands.
With Bugs In The Kitchen, Ravensburger have combined the concept of an old fashioned board game with modern Hexbugs Nano. I think we were a bit late to the Hexbugs party, as we only really discovered them when we went to stay with friends last summer and they had a load in their playroom. Master C spent ages getting them to run around tracks and was somewhat obsessed by the end of our visit.
The aim of Bugs In the Kitchen is to simply catch the (Hex)bug that is loose in the kitchen. The way this is done is by moving knives, forks and spoons to try to encourage the bug towards your trap. The playing space consists of a series of knife, fork and spoon “walls” that can be rotated so that they are in either horizontal or vertical positions on kitchen floor. In each corner of the board is a trap and each player is chooses the one that they want the bug to go into.
The game works for 2 to 4 players (you can block off one or two of the traps if you only have 2 or 3 players), and each player takes it in turns to roll a dice which tells them if they need to rotate a knife, fork, spoon or any piece of cutlery that they want on their turn. Their aim is to get the bug to go towards their trap, but there’s absolutely no guarantee that he will. These (Hex)bugs tend to have a mind of their own!
The recommended age range for Bugs In The Kitchen is 6+, but in actual fact it worked really well for everyone from 4 year old Master C, up to his mum and dad. The random nature of where the Hexbug decides to go means that there really is an equal chance of any of us winning the game. That makes life so much easier than a game where 7 year old Little Miss C always beats her brother.
The kids absolutely loved Bugs In The Kitchen, and if I’m honest, so did I! It was a great fun game to play with the children and I love the fact that they needed no help at all to play it on a level playing field with their parents. It’s a real leveller of a game. I’m also really impressed at the idea of combining a Hexbug with a board game – complete genius in my opinion.
Bugs In The Kitchen is available here online, or from all good toy shops. RRP £23.36, but available for less elsewhere.
Disclaimer: We were sent a copy off Ravensburger’s Bugs In The Kitchen for National Unplugging Day to help us #GoGadgetFree for the purposes of this review. This post contains affiliate links.
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