Eureka has just brought in four new games from FoxMind, whom our customers may know for Abalone, the Architecto series, and other excellent starter games of logical and strategic thinking. These new games, aimed at the seven- to ten-year-old set, are superb primers with few rules but lots of thinking, intended to be playable by the youngest kids but interesting to the oldest.
Two of the new FoxMind titles are new takes on classic games. Paradisio takes after the Italian game Sedici, in which players vie to fill in a 4×4 grid with black-and-white tiles, matching colors on all sides. In Paradisio, the tiles are islands in the midst of water. Your goal is to make it impossible for your opponent to fit any of their tiles into the expanding map.
Taiga is a memory game based on the German game Findevier, in which players search for taiga animals hidden inside the forest. As players search for the elusive creature that matches the card revealed in each round, they will incidentally flip over other animal tokens, showing everyone their location for future rounds – if the players can remember!
The third new game from FoxMind is a game of bluffing and deception set in the school halls. In Rise or Fall, eight different cliques compete for dominance, gaining and losing popularity through secret actions. Using your hand of action cards, decide every turn whether to attack another clique, defend your own, or attempt a boast – but you won’t know how your move turns out until every other player reveals their card too!
Finally, Fauna is a beautifully designed educational game concerning animals of the world. As with all the best-designed learning games, the key to winning isn’t trivia or dull recitation of facts on the cards, but rather each player’s own native wits and instincts. Each turn, a new animal card will be revealed, and players will have to make educated guesses about its size, weight, and where it lives. Think carefully – only correct guesses and near misses will score points – but you’ve also got to be quick, because once a player has chosen an answer, no other player can make the same guess! Fauna is fast-paced, packed with new challenges – 360 different animals! – and best of all, sneaks a lot of knowledge into the gameplay without hitting kids over the head with it.
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