Intro/First Impressions

Hurry little owls! The sun is coming up and it's time to get back to the nest! Work together to help all the owls make it back to the nest before the sun rises. If you're looking for an extra challenge help a couple more owls find their way.

It's about time that we wrote a review for all the tiny gamers out there. Hoot Owl Hoot is one of our favorite games to play with the kids in our lives. A few reasons why we love it are that It is simple, engaging, and educational.

Thoughts

The game is played by first deciding how many owls to play with (3-6), the more owls the more difficult the game. One piece of advice, don't let your kids know there are more owls until they are ready for the challenge. In our experience, once they knew there are 6 owls available they wanted to play with all of them.

Next each player draws 3 cards and places them face up in front of themselves. On your turn, if you have a sun card you have to play it first and move the sun marker forward one spot. The goal is to get all the owls back to the nest before the daylight meter moves across the sky from the moon to sun. If you don't have a sun card you can pick any card and move any owl forward to that color spot on the board. If the closest circle of that color is already covered up, your owl gets to keep flying to the next circle of that color. Remember to say "Hoot Hoot" as you fly over the other owl. This is our favorite part, its super interactive and helps the kids to remember to find their best move!

They suggest that players be 4 years old and up, but we played with 2 year olds that were able to grasp enough of the game to play along with help. Hoot Owl Hoot is a game that you can buy when your kids are young and will be able to keep in rotation for many years. The strategy that can be implemented makes it a great game to grow with!

Once your kids understand the idea of moving to the closest circle of that color and flying over that circle if its already covered you can discuss more strategy with them. Each player can see the other players cards at all time meaning you could choose to play a card that will match up with another players and move an owl farther.

When playing with a 4 year old we found they were able to understand the concept of the game and could figure out which card was their best move when we talked them out, but were a little too excited to take the time to figure it out sometimes. Sometimes they were too excited by moving the farthest ahead owl closer to the nest and left his fellow owl behind. Reason being, “when the owl gets to the nest, that's when we high five!” Which is a pretty good reason if you ask me.

Prior to Hoot Owl Hoot, we had found our 4 year old had moved past cooperative games. He is all about accomplishing things on his own right now, and found co-op games too simples. In all fairness we played Count your Chickens a lot and it’s very rare that you lose. We were able to get him really excited for HOH and he has loved winning and losing as a team every time we play.

The one thing I would love to see is more sun cards added to the box. There are 14 sun cards and 14 spots to move it so the odds of winning are high. Of course we love to win, but winning too much makes a game to easy and thus unexciting for our littles. Currently, we win almost all of the games we play. This is because there is always an adult playing and they can make moves that will catch an owl up or set someone up for a better move. While we could eliminate the strategic plays to make it more even, we keep them in and discuss as we make them to build our kids understanding of the strategy available to them.

The addition of more suns would help us to extend the lifespan of Hoot Owl Hoot in our game collection. It would fun to be able to up the difficulty by adding more suns in the same way that you add more owls. That way you can keep it simpler with smaller gamers and make it harder for the olders.

Even without the extra difficulty our family can't get enough of this game. We love the cooperative nature that gives us a chance to work together and help guide our tots choices as they build on their strategy and gaming skills and the low price tag makes this an easy buy. 

Some of the skills we like to target when playing Hoot are concepts suc​h as near, far, ahead, behind, counting, and turn taking. Board games provide an easy way to work on these skills without your kids even realizing! For more information on how to work on mental, social and physical skills through board games check out our article on Why are board games important for kids.

Peaceable Kingdom, is an amazing kids board game company. They created Hoot Owl Hoot along with many other favorites of ours such as Count your Chickens and Stack Up! One great thing they advertise is that if a piece gets lost or broken you can message them for a replacement. I’m sure I could message them for more sun pieces as well and will be doing so soon.

All of the games they create are cooperative which fosters teamwork and confidence in players. It also works on their social development along with all the other skills involved with a traditional board game. Most of their products are 100% green as well which is great for our environment. We love what Peaceable Kingdom strives to do and would recommend their games to any young gamers! (No this review is not sponsored we just love their games)

Conclusion