Matthew BaileyNote: This is a short really early legacy review before I started posting longer form reviews in our Facebook Group. It is not up to the usual standard of our more recent reviews but I feel it is important to include it.
This morning we decided to push ourselves and play a game of Mariposas a game created by award-winning designer Elizabeth Hargrave (maker of the critically acclaimed Wingspan)
Let me preface this with the fact my kids have grown up playing games and therefore can usually manage beyond their years.
Mariposas tells the true story of the monarch butterflies generationally migrating from Mexico to North America and back stopping at milk thistle patches and man built weystations along the way to reproduce and feed.
In the game you use cards to move your butterflies and then pickup flowers or colour cards as you land on spaces. You use the flowers to reproduce when you land on milk thistle patches and gain new generations of butterflies. Each season last a set number of turns and at the end of the season your previous generation of butterflies dies so you have to balance gaining points by picking up cards and achievements with breeding your butterflies so you have pieces to play on with. At the end of the game you have to get as many 4th generation butterflies back to the start to score for them. You add everything up at the end more points wins.
The game is thematically outstanding and the component quality is very high (you even get little trays for the tokens).
Jack(6) loved this and its also a wonderful teaching tool to learn about the Monarch butterflies. Toby(3) struggled to get exactly what he was doing and in the end thought it was too simple as he didnt really understand where to go.
I myself really enjoyed it and it is very different to the sort of thing we would normally play. I would recommend this to older kids but not to younger ones. There is very little reading in the game and I could see this being a hit with kids with SEN… lovely game.
