Matthew BaileyIt’s been quite a while since I’ve reviewed a game from Haba. Now that Henry is well into playing games, I picked up a few new ones the other day, as I’ve been out of that scene for a while.
So therefore Game 28# of the “Now & Then Summer Marathon 2024” is “Web Weavers” played with Jack(9), Toby(6) and Henry(3).
“Web Weavers” is a really simple game aimed at children aged three and up. Essentially, you have your spider on the end of a piece of string, which is attached to a cardboard web. You roll the dice, and as you roll the dice, each player threads their web through the matching food.
When you run out of string and can’t thread your spider, or your “Wincy” as Henry enjoyed calling them, you are out of the game. The last one standing wins.
I have softened on these types of “games” in the last few years. A few years ago, I would have instantly written this off as a bit of a waste of time, but what this game is really good at is helping kids with manual dexterity. Weaving the string through the web is something that Henry found fairly tricky but was able to do and found quite enjoyable. Equally, the patterns that you get at the end are quite nice, and the whole thing is made of high-quality components and works really well.
Unfortunately, while this is quite a nice toy, it’s not actually a game in the traditional sense because there is no decision-making. It’s all just down to the luck of the dice roll, making it completely random who wins. However, I have learned to accept that for games aimed at very young children, this is not always a bad thing.
From the three or four games we played, all were really close, so no one ever felt like they were badly beaten, which obviously helps.
Henry really liked it, and even the older two didn’t mind playing it. They were quite happy to play a couple more games, which surprised me. But hey, it’s quite fun to do and it’s a fun little game to play.
In terms of whether this is worth picking up, if you are looking for more games to play with extremely young children and you don’t really mind the lack of strategy, this is a good choice. It’s great for teaching skills like object recognition, threading, and weaving dexterity. If, however, you are looking for a game that introduces children to decision-making, then this definitely isn’t it.
I am not going to give this a recommendation or not either way as this is going to appeal to some and very much not to others but for what it is it’s all lovely and well done.
