I was recently in touch with Speye Game on twitter as I had seen them tweeting about their educational geography board game and I wondered if they fancied sending me a copy of it to review on my blog. I’m pleased to say they agreed and they kindly sent me the Family Edition of their ‘Know The UK’ Board game.
The family edition of the game is aimed at everyone aged from 7 to 100+ years whereas the Junior Edition of ‘Know The UK’ game is more for 7 to 11 year olds (approx).
The games retail at £21.99 for the Junior edition and £23.99 for the Family edition. I think this is a reasonable price when you consider the amount of geographical knowledge you or your child will gain from the board game and of course the amount of time they have had to spend creating the game in the first place. You are not just playing the game for the sake of fun but also to gain knowledge that will stay with you for a lifetime.
The aim of the game is to teach you where places are within the UK. Now I will be the first to admit that my knowledge on this subject matter is very poor! I vaguely have an idea where places are but I am in now way confident about my knowledge. I do not want my daughter to grow up the same so having this game in the house means that as she gets older we can play along together and learn where UK counties and towns are as we play and have fun.
My little girl is still too young to be able to get proper use out of this game but I can whole-heartedly tell you that this board game will be played lots when she is older. I will make sure to find time to play the ‘Know The UK’ game with my family and friends as I know it isn’t just me that doesn’t know where places are. Yes, I have a map in my car and also Google maps on my phone but it goes without saying that a solid knowledge of the location of places would be much more useful for my own piece of mind.
The ‘Know The UK’ game can be played a few different ways. You can read the full instructions here. The main premise of the game though is that you need to take it in turns to place your hexagonal shaped jigsaw pieces on to the map board – by doing this you are learning where each place is situated on the UK map. The game comes with educational knowledge and challenge cards that have a range of questions and challenges on them, divided up by age range. You can choose to use these cards as part of the game (by answering the knowledge and then challenge cards correctly you will be able to play either 1 or 2 of your jigsaw pieces onto the map) or you could use them on their own to test each others knowledge. The knowledge cards cover curriculum subjects Maths, English, Science, UK Geography, UK History and UK General Knowledge while the fun challenge cards test each player’s cognitive skills, memory, language and speech abilities. So as you can see – by playing this game you and your child will be learning lots of useful information.
Personally I think the Know The UK board game will do for Geography what Scrabble ® has done for Spelling!
If you would like to buy yourself a copy of the game please visit www.speye-game.co.uk/#shop
It would be great if you could take a moment to pop over and say hi to the ‘Know The UK’ team on twitter and facebook. They are ever so friendly and would love to hear what you think of their new game. It only launched at the beginning of 2014 so I’m sure they would love it if you could all spread the word about their fun, educational game to fellow parents and if you could mention it to your child’s school it’d be fantastic!