Matthew BaileyOn the 12th day of Christmas, my children played with me… Twelve Hungry Hippos, Eleven jigsaw pieces, Ten Farting Canines, Nine Naming Words, Eight Hamster Homes, Seven Toiling Train Lines, Six locking safe keys… FIVE CARLSBERG CHIPS!, Four Sad Snowmen, Three Magnetic Mazes, Two “Unmatched: Witcher” sets, and a reaction game I played with all three!
It was never my intention to feature the ultra-mainstream game “Hungry Hungry Hippos” (who knew it had two “Hungrys” in the title? I certainly didn’t until we got the game). But the boys received this over Christmas as a present from a relative, and we actually had a really good time with it as a bit of fun.
I don’t really feel like I need to go over what “Hungry Hungry Hippos” is, as it’s such a well-known game. However, the reason I’m going out on a limb here—going very off-piste—and featuring this as the 12th and final game of my 12 Days of Christmas Showcase is that the newest version you can buy comes with some really good quality-of-life features that definitely weren’t in the version I played when I was younger… Also, my review of “Bullet 
” wasn’t quite ready, and I wanted to give that its own space to breathe later in the week.
As you know, “Hungry Hungry Hippos” is a game where you throw the marbles into the centre, and then you smash the levers as quickly as you can to make the hippos gobble up as many marbles as possible. This version has a yellow marble, which gives you double points. Obviously, the player with the most marbles wins. It takes about 10 seconds to play, but it’s fun and definitely something you can do with young children or non-gaming kids.
What really surprised me about this version—and I’m going to say my D&T teacher hat was firmly on here—was how well this game has been improved, design-wise, since the version we all played in the ’80s and ’90s.
First and foremost, the game comes with a little pot to hold all of the marbles. This is an unbelievably big quality-of-life feature. The other great thing about said pot is that there are individual dimples for each marble to sit in, making it very obvious if you’re missing any when you’re putting everything back in the box. This is a massive plus.
Everything then fits back into the box really nicely. A lot of these mainstream games often have throwaway boxes, but this one is really well-designed. Everything fits snugly, so things don’t rattle around or get lost.
They’ve also added a little gully where your marbles end up, rather than the kind of pit they used to have. The benefit of this is that, after scoring, you can flick the marbles back into the centre for the next game. This allows for a fun little mini-game where you and your opponents can simultaneously flick the marbles into the centre, creating a tense and slightly chaotic moment. If someone gets the yellow marble, they score double points. At the end of the flicking, you’re already set up and ready for the next round.
Now, don’t get me wrong—I’m not about to turn around and say this is some amazing game that you should all rush out and buy. In fact, I’ll leave this as a “maybe” in the sense that you’ll probably already know if this is something your children would enjoy. I just wanted to say that this version is a massive upgrade over the one we had as kids in terms of playability, storage, and ease of resetting.
This is an unusually positive review of an extremely mainstream game for me… Don’t worry, I’ll be back in a few days with “Bullet ” and an expansion to Jack’s favourite game.
