Matthew BaileyWe haven’t really featured much for really little kids so far this summer, so we’re going to start with our first tiny preschooler game, and that is Bubble Bath Bunny, part of the My Very First Games series from HABA.
Now, as with most of the games in this series, they tend to be a platform for a number of different games. For instance, when you open it up, the first thing you have to do is set everything up. You have the board, the bunny, and everything fits together nicely with the different ducks.
The first thing the instructions always say in these is to start with “free play,” which is unstructured play that lets your child just play with the materials. We had literally zero interest in doing this. If you have a really little kid, it might potentially be something fun. My worry would be that, even though the components are fairly strong cardboard, it’s not a robust toy. So, if your child is the sort of kid who starts smashing things together, these aren’t going to last very long.
The game is then broken down into a number of separate games, and I’ll talk about those briefly.
Where Are Bubble Bath Bunny’s Toys? is a simple memory game. The general concept is that you place the bathtub in front of the children and insert Bubble Bath Bunny and both the ducks into the slots. You then lay the tiles face down so you can’t see what’s on them. You roll the dice, which gives either a colour or an object, and you then try to turn over a tile that matches the result. You can talk and discuss, and if it’s correct, the child keeps the tile. If not, it’s someone else’s turn. Once you’ve found all the tiles, you count them up and the child with the most tiles wins. Alternatively, you could play it cooperatively and just see if you can match all the tiles. It’s fun, it’s simple, and the actual components are really nice. The bath and the ducks add a nice little bit of atmosphere to the game.
The second game is What’s Floating on the Water?. You set everything up in basically the same way, but the gameplay is slightly different. On your turn, you pick up a face-down tile and look at it without telling anyone else. You then say, “What is on my tile?” and the other children take guesses. If anyone gets it right, they keep the tile. If not, the tile goes into the slot next to the bunny and falls into the soap suds. This one was less popular, but I could see it working well with larger groups of children.
Finally, there’s the amazingly well-named What Is Bubble Bath Bunny Taking with Him in the Bathtub? game. This one is basically identical to the game Shopping List, where you say Bubble Bath Bunny is going to take something into the bath with him. The next player then repeats what the previous player said and adds something new. You keep going and the list gets longer and longer until someone can’t remember one of the items. It’s fine, but it’s kind of irrelevant to the game and doesn’t require any components. You could just play this at home without needing the actual game.
Judging the value proposition of something like this is difficult. The components are really nice – they’re the usual chunky HABA quality – and Henry definitely enjoyed playing these. But whether he would enjoy playing them more than something with a bit more substance is hard to say. Obviously, these are aimed at very young children, but if you’re going to play something like this with a two-year-old, I would potentially argue that you could do something similar yourself. You don’t really need to buy a game for it. But if you’re looking for something cute and relatively toy-like that your very, very tiny child might enjoy, this could potentially be a goer.
