Richard Scarry's Best Board Game EVER

The best Concept books ever are written and illustrated by Richard Scarry. His Busytown series is amazing for both knowledge and comprehension. The Busytown board game takes all of those concepts and puts them into one clever Eye Found It! game. While playing this game you’re working on numerical understanding, vocabulary and deductive reasoning skills (since part of the game is finding objects hidden within the board). The game Clue is much the same and offers the same benefit, but I doubt it would keep my 6 year old’s attention; nor did Candy Land for that matter. This game, on the other hand, kept her engaged for quite a bit.

The object of the game is to get your pieces to the end of the board before the pigs eat all the food at the picnic. You spin the spinner and can advance in one of two ways. You can move forward the numerical amount listed, or, if you land on the goldbug symbol, you can draw up a card. The card has an object that you must find in a timely fashion, allotted by a sand timer. Then you may advance the numerical value set forth by however many objects you are able to find within the board. If you spin a pig symbol, the pigs get to eat one of the food items at the picnic. Those are the rules, but The Boog and I always see room for improvement and almost always will end up playing a second time making the rules up as we go along. Sometimes the Hubby will get in on the Busytown madness and voila!, family time is created.

I have written about Richard Scarry quite extensively in the past (here) and I am quite a fan. Not too long ago I sold a Look and Learn Boxed set (here) to pay for The Boog’s summer camp program a couple years back. Although I miss it immensely, and hope it found a great home, I do have many of his titles that remain in print. They seem to have redesigned some of the images and changed a few characters, but The Boog is none the wiser. I don’t know if that’s a good or bad thing, but Richard Scarry remains one my favorite illustrators to date.

P.S
You will need a lot of floor space since this game is set up like a puzzle of sorts and is a bit on the loooooong side. :)