Customer Reviews

Peaceable Kingdom / Hoot Owl Hoot! Award Winning Cooperative Board Game

This game is a new favorite at our house! My 3 year old loves racing against the sun to try to get the baby owls back to their nest. I love how this game teaches him counting, colors and teamwork. Unlike other board games where you play against your opponents, this board game is based on cooperative play so everyone works together toward a common goal. None of the other preschool-aged board games that we have offer this concept of teamwork, so that's something I definitely appreciate about this game. I also love the cute drawings, bright colors and sturdy, environmentally-friendly materials. We love Hoot Owl Hoot and another one (Count Your Chickens) that is made by the same company. Both are great for this age group. Highly recommend for preschoolers!

My daughter is three and has just begun to show an interest in games. The first game we purchased by Peaceable Kingdom was the cooperative game "Count Your Chickens". It was a great first game - counting, repetition and familiar farm animals. "Hoot Owl Hoot" is equally as great and a perfect next step in building your game library.

"Hoot Owl Hoot" is a little more of challenge for a 3 year old. They recommend 4 years old, and I agree that would be the appropriate age. What is nice is they offer three different levels of play so that you can play a simpler version of the game (as in 3 Owl play) -- and then change levels to continue to play the game and feel challenged (as in 6 Owl play) as they master their level.

The goal of the game is to get your Owl home before the sun rises. You pull colored cards from the deck and move your Owl around the board back to their nest. You also pull sun cards and this moves a small sun across the top of the board (the sun rising). This too is a cooperative game which I can not say enough about. Working together as a team makes so much sense for the pre-school set I just wish I had thought of it! It really reinforces all the things they are being taught by parents and teachers - share, take your turn, work together, teamwork! As well as, colors, counting, matching.

The game is beautiful! And Owls are so popular right now so my daughter was delighted to see them. I like that it helps her work with her colors. Switch between two concepts and strategies - as in move the owl to the colored spot, and move the sun as it rises.

The box is a perfect size -- easy to store, easy to take to a friend or grandparent's house. It is also environmentally friendly!

I really am so happy with "Count Your Chickens" and "Hoot Owl Hoot"! Just really fantastic, easy, fun, short games to play with your little one.

They also have great games for the Kindergarten set - check out Lost Puppies, Stone Soup and Mermaid Island!

We purchased this game for my 4 year old son and have since purchased it for many of his friends for birthdays. Here is what we like about it:

- It's an easy game to learn but is still engaging and keeps his attention.
- The fact that you have to work together to win eliminates hard feelings and tantrums if my son doesn't win.
- It is a beautifully illustrated game.
- It's a bonus that the the company who manufactures it is so conscientious about their impact on the environment.

I would recommend this game for any preschool-aged child.

I really like the idea of a "Cooperative Game," especially at young ages. I am not big into competition and while some is healthy, it is also healthy to learn to work together. A Cooperative Game allows families (and kids) to share in decision-making, learn to share, build confidence and work as a team. It is also nice if you have a sensitive child who doesn't cope well with loosing.
In "Hoot Owl Hoot!" I could help notice how bright and colorful the game is. The board game is also smaller (think half a Monopoly board size) so it is not too overwhelming for kids. The game can also be played in less than 20 minutes, which is a great for young kids who have short attention spans!

I tried to play this game with my 2 and 4 year old and they are just good at board games. While this game is for ages 4 and up, I think a 5 year old would be better at it and understand it more, and I think it would be fun for kids up to 12! The game does have a few things you need to watch and pieces to use, which is why I felt it was a little hard to play with my 4 year old, not to mention my 2 year old kept jumping in.
Hoot Owl Hoot! reminds me of Candyland as you have cards with colors on them and that's how you know where to move, but there are also owl tokens and a sun token to use in gameplay. We played this basically by drawing cards and moving together to the right colored spot to start off and will slowly work our way up to playing with the extra cards and sun token. It is great though because once you start playing and get the hang of it you can make it more challenging by using the extra owl tokens and spaces. There is also a time in the game where it encourages everyone to hoot like an owl, which is fun and cute! There is no reading required, no spinner or money, just some cards and a board game. Oh and there is a nice paper envelope included to store all the gameplay pieces in so they are not just thrown in to the box. Can't find the instructions? That's because they are actually printed on the inside of the box so you can't loose them and can easily reference them!

Overall, I think Hoot Owl Hoot! is a great game for younger kids to work on their colors and playing together, it is a nice change of pace from trying to beat one another!

We really enjoyed this game. You can play start the game with anywhere from 3 to 6 owls to increase the difficulty of the game. We played our first game with just 3 owls and worked together to get the owls home by choosing one of our colored cards to move an owl of choice to that colored space on the track. You are racing against the sun that is rising as you play to try to get all the owls home before the sunrise. We have played this game a TON of times and have increased the owls up to play with all 6. I like that the game is short enough that neither my 4 year old or I get bored playing the game. The game board and pieces have very vibrant colors and are are well made. I liked that my son was practicing his colors as well as having to think about which card would be the best to choose in a way that was easy and fun!

Disclosure: I received this game free to do a product review on my website. You can view the full review at [...]

This was not our favorite Peacable Kingdom game, but that being said, it is a neat concept. I am wondering if playing some of the other game like Stone Soup, Willys Wiggly Web, and Race to the Treasure might have changed our opinion on this one.

This game is nice for teaching colors, but it also does not have a "true red." When teaching my son colors, I like to have something that is recognizable as that color. This is more of a bright pink than a red. But a plus about the colors is they are fun and bright.

Our cards were not cut properly. Some of them have "half" of one card and half of another. I know that their quality is usually top notch, so I am sure this was just a quality control issue.

All in all, my son enjoyed himself for one time around, but then wanted to get out Stone Soup :) I think he likes those other games so much more, because they are a different game each time- you never know what the outcome will be! We love Peacable Kingdom and will keep trying more games :)

Length:: 6:10 Mins

This is an excellent board game for young children to practice color recognition and beginning team strategy. My children at 4 and 7 enjoyed playing this game and requested it quite often during board game sessions with me. They're now 5 and 8 and they still request it from time to time. I as the adult also enjoy playing it with them.

In the game players work together to move from 4 to 6 owls (depending on the desired difficulty) down the colored track to their nest before the sun comes up. Owl tokens are placed on the start places of the track. Players then draw hands of three cards. Every turn they play a card and draw another one. Most of the cards have colors on them. Whatever color is on the card played is the color any of the owls can move to. Owls must always move to the next instance of a given color on the board, unless another owl is already on that space. If the space is occupied, the owl may skip along the board to the next instance of the color. In this way players can get their owls to move quickly down the board if they work together to choose the same color in a row on their turns. Some of the cards have a sun token on them. If one of the sun cards is drawn a little sun marker is moved along a sun path at the top of the board. All the owls must make it to the nest before the sun gets to the end of the sun path. Then everyone wins.

This game can be thought of as a much improved version of Candy Land. While Candy Land might be okay for two year olds and younger three year olds, this game works much better for later three year olds up through about six or seven. I wouldn't buy it for an eight year old, but older children will enjoy playing this with their younger siblings, as is the case with us. In this game there are small strategic decisions that the children can make to affect the outcome of the game. The strategy is definitely not deep, but it is at a nice level for young ones. It is definitely enough strategy to get the children thinking and practicing working together. This ups the players' higher order thought usage well beyond Candy Land, where there is no strategy involved in gameplay at all. Even with the best use of strategy in the game, there is enough luck that you will still sometimes lose (as you can see us do in our video). This is particularly the case if you play the hardest level of the game with all the owls. Of course there are other times when the luck aspect works in your favor and you still manage to win while using less than optimal strategy. All told, the game strikes a good balance between luck and strategy.

The components are colorful and the illustrations are cute. All the pieces are made of biodegradable recycled cardboard. Unfortunately the cardboard for the cards is quite thin and flimsy. For that reason I knocked it down a star because if this game were to be used in a classroom I would recommend laminating the cards. Of course then those cards are no longer biodegradable, which sort of defeats one of the advertising points of the company...

So to sum up, I would definitely recommend this game to both parents and teachers, of children in preschool through first grade, looking for a fun game involving color recognition and light strategy. For another great game utilizing color recognition and light strategy in a competitive, rather than cooperative, format check out Monza.

At first glace at the game, I thought how cute. It has cute little owls fluttering about. I don't get too many cutesy things in house full of boys! I sat down to play this with my little one, one afternoon. It does state that it is best for ages 4 and up, my little one will be 4 in a few months. There is no reading required and plays very quickly, in about 15 minutes. That is nice when you have kids that don't/won't sit still for very long. It took him a few tries to get the hang of it. He kept wanting to pick cards from the pile. But he did like it! The pieces to the game come in a paper envelope that has been sealed, so you have to tear it open. I do wish that it was a reusable or close-able package to keep all the pieces in. Overall, this is a very fun game.

Cooperative play sounds like a good concept, but honestly my kids, while age-appropriate, didn't really enjoy this one. They didn't know which owl to play (since it's a free for all) and it just wasn't as exciting as a more traditional, competetive game. Though I am intrigued by the concept, I think cooperative games are not really necessary. If kids get upset when they lose a game (which 3 & 4 year olds will do), I think it is an opportunity to teach good sportsmanship and tell them "let's try again". Unfortunately, my little ones don't go asking for this one because it's just not that much fun.

This game teaches a lot about working together to achieve a common goal, meanwhile teaching preschool topics of colors and counting. My 7 year old nephew would get really excited if the sun was getting close to rising and not all the owls were in the nest. Preschoolers will love this!