Hoot Owl Hoot! (game review)

Another great cooperative game is Hoot Owl Hoot! by Peaceable Kingdom. This game involves more strategizing than Count Your Chickens! does, and the way the game is set up encourages the players to work together.

Like Count Your Chickens!, Hoot Owl Hoot! has the instructions printed on the inside of the box lid. Not only does this prevent you from losing them, but it saves trees, too!

 

The game comes with the game board, a pile of cards with different coloured circles or suns on them, a sun token, and 6 owl tokens. 

To set up the game, you shuffle all the cards and deal three to each player. You place your owls on the start spots (number of owls played with vary depending on the difficulty level you want), and the sun token on the sun start spot. The goal of the game is to get all the baby owls back to the nest before sunrise.

While you can hold your cards in your hand, it is suggested to leave them face up for everyone to see so you can work together to plan the best plays to get the owls back in the nest. 

When it is your turn, you pick which colour you want to play from the 3 cards in your hand. If you have a sun card, you have no choice but to play that card and move the sun token one spot over to the right), then draw a new card. If you are playing a colour, you can move any owl of your choice to the next circle with that colour. If you are playing a green card and there is an owl on the next two green spots, you would play on the first available green spot (so you’d skip a lot of spots). If there are no more spots of that colour available, the owl gets to move into the nest. This is the sort of thing that makes this game all the more fun when working as a team, and precisely why everyone being able to see the other players’ cards is beneficial.

A yellow card was played allowing the owl on the Start 4 spot to move a good distance to the next unoccupied yellow circle.

Another yellow card was played and an owl from the Start 2 position was moved 3 yellow circles because the first two were occupied.

When all the owls make it to the nest, you win. If the sun gets all the way to the far right spot (aka: if the sun rises) first, the game is over. The beginner level is only played with owls on the first 3 start spots, the intermediate level is with owls on the first 4 spots, and the challenge level is with all 6 owls in play.

Hoot Owl Hoot! is recommended for ages 4 and up, up to 4 players, and should last about 15 minutes from start to finish. No reading is required for game play (provided someone can read to explain the rules at first). Great game for colour recognition and cooperative strategizing.

You can purchase Hoot Owl Hoot! for approximately $16 at select retail stores like Target (they carry Peaceable Kingdom games), or online at Amazon.com.

Disclaimer: Thoughts of Fluff is responsible for the content of this post. Hoot Owl Hoot! was purchased by me and all opinions are my own and may differ from those of your own.