Hungry as a Bear

My second review from Haba’s ‘my very first game series’ is ‘Hungry as a Bear’. This is another dexterity game – although definitely a bit trickier than ‘Here, Fishy Fishy’ which I reviewed last week.

In the box you get a cardboard plate, large spoon, and several small food tokens. You also get a bear, that you can prop up inside the box, and a cap that helps to hold him in place. Whilst they are mostly all good quality, I have found that the bear hasn’t stood up to my daughter’s ‘exploring’, and we have had to glue it back together.

To set up the game you put the bear in place, and put the food tokens onto the plate. Confusingly, not all of the food tokens are used in the main game (many of the games in this series claim they contain 3 different games, but in my experience there’s clearly one main game that’s designed with the other 2 being a bit of an afterthought). You roll the die to choose a type of food, and then pick up the food token and balance it on the spoon. You then have to manoeuvre the spoon into the bear’s mouth to feed it the piece of the food. There are two other faces on the die, one that lets you choose any food token, and one that makes you ‘spill’ a piece of food by placing it in the box in front of the bear. The idea is that you count up the number of food tokens that the bear ate successfully, and the number that were ‘lost’ down his front, and if he ate more successfully you win!

For an adult this is very easy! But for our daughter this has been very challenging. When we first started playing when she was 18 months old, she needed a lot of support to be able to do this. She’s now 22 months, and she can now do it independently around half of the time. By the official rules, you have one chance to get it into the bear’s mouth, or it counts as ‘lost’. So far we’ve not been playing with this rule, as I know it would just make her very frustrated. But given how much she’s improved, we could probably start introducing it!

To play this game, your little one is going to need to be able to match pictures, and have some quite advanced fine motor skills. Obviously you can offer lots of support, but the manoeuvring was almost impossible for my daughter when we first started, and we were pretty much doing it for her. She did still enjoy playing it though!

The rule booklet suggests using the extra food tokens to play a traditional matching pairs game. We haven’t done this as we have a proper matching pairs game we play instead. The third game in the rules booklet is a ‘20 questions’ style game about favourite foods, which doesn’t actually utilise any of the game components… (see what I meant about them being an afterthought!).

Would I recommend getting this game? It’s a complicated one – my daughter does really enjoy this game, it’s another one she asks for daily (the ‘Hungry Bear Game’!). However, personally I think that Here, Fishy Fishy is a much better game, and the two are very similar. If you think your child is going to play these often, it’s nice to have this one as a bit of variety. But if you’re only going to buy one, I would get Here, Fishy Fishy.