A review of Orchard Toys “Can you guess?”

Helen and I LOVE the Orchard Toys games.  I have so many of them I have lost count.  It’s always great to see their new products and releases.  One of their new games is called Can You Guess and involves acting out or making sounds for a range of different things or actions.  I am really excited about this game as it is something  a bit different!  Orchard Toys very kindly gave us a free copy of the game to review, but the views are my own.

This game is currently £11.75 and is designed for 3-4 players from ages 4 and up. I know we always talk about it, but I continue to be impressed at the beautiful, bright images that Orchard Toys use in their products.  The cards are always durable and survive being used time and time again.  But what really excited me about this game is the acting out!  This is a great way to support language development.

Each player has a strip to collect stars on and you need 6 starts to win.  You win stars by correctly guessing what the other players are acting out.  The first person to guess correctly gets the star.  There are 3 categories of cards:

Action cards – you can act out ONLY and aren’t allowed to make any sounds. For example someone running.

Performance cards – you can act AND make sounds.  For example an elephant so you can make the noise and pretend to have a trunk!

Sound cards – you can make sounds only, NO actions. For example a bird so you can only make tweeting noises.

So each turn you spin the dial to see which type of card to take then off you go! If no one correctly guesses the action/ sound then no star is won.  This continues until someone has collected 6 stars and wins the game.

This games supports a number of different skills:-

– Observation and looking skills –   Obviously it supports visual skills and encourages looking at and really watching another person, or you can’t play the game.

– Turn taking – This game has a lovely balance of having to take turns to spin the spinner and acting out, but also allowing a bit of calling out and trying to be first to guess the action/ sound and win the star.  This led to quite a bit of shouting and competitiveness, but we all really enjoyed ourselves!

– Vocabulary understanding – This game isn’t just asking you to name the item, it’s asking for more information about the word – how you do it or what it sounds like.  When I was using this game with a group of children with word finding difficulties I changed the rules a little and if we couldn’t guess the item from the child’s clues, I got them to give more semantic information about the item.  So for example, if the action was swimming, but we couldn’t guess from the mime, I would ask questions like where do you do it or do you need anything special to do it? etc.

Verb vs Object – I have actually just used the fab pictures when teaching ‘verbs’ and had the children sort them into verbs vs objects.  We have then made up silly sentences with them e.g. the dinosaur was singing or I’ve never seen a swimming bee.  This could then be extended into discussing if the verb and object match e.g. can you sing a dinosaur? can you paint a dinosaur?

Speech work – As there is such a lovely range of images you could use them for supporting syllable work or to work on production of longer multisyllabic words.

So, another fantastic game from Orchard Toys which can be used to support a number of different areas of speech and language development.  The only issue I had with the game was that it is better with 3 players – so you might need to rope in a sibling, grandparent or friend!  It really isn’t as fun with two.  If you are in a school and have more children available to you, it can also work really well having teams of children working together.  I would recommend this game and have really enjoyed playing it!