Playing with the Shopping List game

As I mentioned earlier, we've already started celebrating Christmas with relatives that live further away, and so Harry already has some of his presents. I was so impressed with this one that I had to write about it - the Shopping List game from Orchard Toys. We suggested this game as a present for him, because it had good reviews on Amazon and was a bestseller, but I have only recently heard of Orchard Toys. Harry is nearly 3 now, and I thought that he probably had the understanding to pick up how to play simple games.

I was really pleased with the game, and Harry loved it. It has a simple premise - each player (of up to four players) has a shopping list with eight different items. Each of these 32 items is represented on a smaller card. The small cards are turned face down in the middle, and players take it in turns to turn over a card. If it is on their shopping list they add it to their trolley, if not they turn it back over and play passes to the next person.

The game involves matching the items to the shopping list, and also memory skills, as you can remember where other items from your list are if other players have previously turned them over. Harry picked up the rules very quickly and was quite happy to play the game properly. He was absolutely delighted when he matched something from his list.

But what I particularly liked about this game was how Harry developed it. When he had filled up his trolley he drove it over to me so that I could 'scan' the items. Then he loaded them onto his truck, took them 'home', then he 'ate' them for lunch. I could see that he could amuse himself with the game even by himself, and there are lots of other games that you could play with the pieces. You could make up a number of variations on matching and memory games. It could be played as a single player game, or else two people could play with two shopping lists each. It also works really well for players of different ages and abilities.

It's too late for us to be coming up with more Christmas presents for Harry now, but I'm definitely going to have a good browse of the website.