Jungle Speed – a #Bloggerboardgameclub review

Buy at amazon (affiliate)

Hardly seems possible that it’s time for our second blogger board game club review, but it is. (In case you missed it, our first game was Codenames)

I was quite hopeful when I saw Jungle Speed that it would be a good game to play with the younger children – it basically looks like snap, but with a few tweaks.

The cards are nicely sized and hefty enough to feel like they’ll survive repeated games, the wooden totem is pleasingly solid. There’s even a bag you can keep it all in so it could become a camping game (it packs down a *lot* smaller than the somewhat oversized box it comes in).

However, it turned out to be a bit too tweaked to work well with the 5 year old. He couldn’t keep track of the special cards (to be honest, I could barely keep track of the special cards!) which change the rules of play when they are turned over (there are three special cards, each has a different effect on game play, and two of them look very similar which doesn’t help much either) and he kept completely forgetting to grab the totem. I’m sure with a bit more practice he would get the hang of it, and it does actually suggest 7 up as a starting age, so he is a bit young for it. I’ll try to round up Smallest for a game at some point and report back, but I was having quality time with Tigerboy which is why it was just the two of us.

Given all of that though, I’m not sure that there’s enough in the game to make it all that interesting for older players? Big did suggest it might be quite amusing after a few drinks, (no idea where she could get that idea from!) which is a possibility but I’m not sure that I’m quite going for it.

So, nice idea, well executed, just slightly missed the mark for me.