FUN! FUN! FUN!  We were sent two learning games from USAopoly for review!  Our family had so much FUN playing Tapple: Fast Word Fun for Everyone and Wonky: The Crazy Cubes Card Game.

USAopoly has been encouraging families with fun creative board games and puzzles since 1994, that is over 20 years!

Games We Recieved:

Wonky: The Crazy Cubes Card Game

Ages: 8 to Adult
2 or more players
Retails for $19.95

Wonky Game Includes:

9 Blue and Green Wonky Blocks; 54 Strategy Cards;  Storage Bag to keep the blocks in; and Instructions.

If you like to build painstakingly, and don’t mind your creation leaning like the Tower of Pisa, this game is for you!

Each block is a confusing optical illusion as they are shaped normal on three sides and the other sides are curved and it causes the tower to wobble when a big block is placed on top of a smaller block.

The goal is to cause your opponents to make the tower fall and force them to have as many cards in their hands as possible at the end of the game as you stack a large block on a small one and make the tower wobble!   Two cards work in your favor, the reverse play card and the pass card, forcing those around you to take a turn instead of you.  The first player to get rid of all their cards without causing the tower to fall, wins the game.

AWARDS:

How We Used WONKY in our home:

My kids love to build, BUT they are used to building with things with flat, even surfaces.  WONKY is completely wonky!

It takes a lot of skill and patience to stack a misshaped block and keep the tower of blocks from falling over.

You literally concentrate and hold your breath with every block you stack on top!

This is a great game and so fun for several ages to play together.  You really don’t have an advantage if you are older in this one!  Lots of concentration and slowing down to find the right spot to place your block and stack them while following the clue cards.    We would definitely encourage our friends to look into getting this fun game for this family.

 

Now if speed is more your style, you might want to give Tapple a try.

Tapple: Fast Word Fun For Everyone

Ages: 8 to Adult
2-8 Players
10-20 minutes play time, depending on how many rounds you play.
Retails for $19.95

Tapple Game Includes:

The Tapple Letter Wheel, 36 Category Cards (each card has 4 categories =144 categories total), and Instructions.

Tapple is a game of speed and word association.  You have 10 seconds to name a word in a category and beat the timer.  BUT watch out because you only get 10 seconds to think of your word and the first letter of the word must match an available letter on the wheel.  There are 20 Letters available of the alphabet and six letters, (Q,U,V,X,Y,Z,) have been left off the wheel.   If the timer expires before you can think of a word, your turn in that round is over.  The last person to finish a round wins the category card.  The person with the most category cards at the end wins the game.  You can decide ahead of time if you plan to include all categories in a game, or limit the number of categories, for example, limit to 3 or 5.

This is a fantastic game and has won many awards in several categories.

Awards:

How we used Tapple in our home:

This game is hilarious!  We used this game as a supplement to our Language learning skills for the whole family.   Basically you have a random category on a card and everyone has to come up with a word for that category card that begins with one of the letters on the Tapple wheel.  If the letter has already been used, it cannot be used again in that round.  Each player takes a turn saying a word that starts with a letter available on the wheel.  After they say a word in the category that matched an available letter, then the player taps the timer and the play starts for the next player.  If you don’t answer within 10 seconds, the timer ends and that player looses the round.  If a player looses a round, they cannot begin to play again until the entire category round is through and there is a clear winner.  You win the round by being the last person standing and receive the category card.

The kids had so much fun with this game.  It gets more and more challenging as the common letters are used up and you still need to find a new word to match an available letter.

With this game, age is an advantage.  The older you are, the more words you will likely know and also the factor of thinking ahead for your turn, you can kind of plan out what you are going to say if there are several players in a round.  So at our house, if 8 of us are playing, you will have about 80 seconds or less to figure out your word (each player gets 10 seconds or less). When the game gets down to just a few players left, it goes very quickly.  We definitely enjoy playing this game and would encourage every homeschool family to have one on hand.

When not in game mode, you can use this one on one with a younger child and teach them words that start with a letter.  We did this and just did not use the timer for this activity.

Social Media

Be sure to follow USAopoly on their social media sites for all the latest news, special sales, and product updates.  Be sure to check out USAopoly’s blog.  They do giveaways!

Blog: http://usaopoly.com/blog
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Check out what other homeschool families on the TOS Review Crew had to say about using USAopoly Games in their homes.