The prolific Cranium game company has launched a new line of games for preschoolers, Cranium Bloom. I recently had the opportunity to review two of them: Count and Cook and the Seek and Find Let’s Go to the Zoo puzzle. (Helen and I covered them in our latest vlog, but if you prefer text, read on.)
The object of Count and Cook is to collect the ingredients for any of several “recipes” in the included cookbook. The players first place tokens representing various food items (tomatoes, eggs, chocolate chips, etc.) around the oval game board, thus creating a different path to follow every time. It’s a thoughtful but easy way to keep the game from getting stale. Players then take turns rolling a die (six sided, but having two sets of the numbers one through three), and moving their pawns around the board. If a player lands on an ingredient needed for the recipe, it is placed in the appropriate spot in the cookbook. 
The player who collects the final ingredient wins, and gets to slide out a tab in the cookbook and perform a special action. (E.g., “Talk like you have peanut butter stuck to the roof of your mouth.”)
True to Cranium’s roots, there are plenty of opportunities for creativity. Two special tokens allow players to add any ingredient they can imagine to the recipe. The instructions suggest bringing out real (but kid-safe) kitchen tools and bowls to let kids act out adding the various ingredients. Families can even draw out their own “recipes.” Vegetarians will want to change the hamburger to a veggie burger, and those with peanut allergies may change the peanut butter to soy butter, but that’s easily done. (If your kids aren’t reading yet, you need do nothing but use the alternate names. Otherwise, take a permanent marker and edit the cookbook.)
The game is colorful but small, a boon for those whose closets are overflowing. The pawns are cute, cartoonish little chefs of sturdy molded plastic. My main complaint is in the packaging, which shows a pink-clad girl and her mom cooking in the kitchen. Not a bad image in itself, as I’m all for mothers and daughters cooking together, but it would have been nice to see both a boy and a girl. When one notes that another Bloom game, the Let’s Go Shopping Activity Deck, also only features females, it suggests a disturbing stereotyping. Thankfully the game itself is more evenhanded, with the cookbook showing both boys and girls.
The Seek and Find Puzzle is less a board game in the traditional sense than a puzzle with a twist. Two booklets give children things to find in the detailed scene: three tigers, or something red, or something that begins with G. Children can then circle the objects with a dry-erase marker, or add their own items. It’s a fun idea, although wiping the marker off gets to be a pain after a while. It’s also hard to keep track of the number of things circled once the number gets above five or so. The ink isn’t that obvious, and one has to re-search in order to see how many one has left. Using pawns of some kind to indicate “found” items would be more distinct and less messy.
I’m not sure there’s really value in this over and above a regular old puzzle, or a Where’s Waldo book, although it is fun and is not a bad product by any means. The big plus for LGBT families, however, is that the pictures of families cavorting around the zoo almost all show a single parent and child. This means that all types of families will feel included— single-parent families as well as families with two parents, same- or opposite-sex (who can pretend the other parent is just off somewhere else at the zoo. Yes, it would have been better to show same- (and opposite-) sex parents together, holding hands with each other and their children, but this is at least a first step in a more inclusive direction. There’s even an image of a white dad and a black child.
I’m a big fan of board games for myself, and think they’re also great for kids. They can teach not only “academic” skills like colors, letters, and numbers, but also the more ephemeral things like sharing, turn taking, paying attention, and learning to win and lose with equal grace. I do have a little trouble with the Bloom tag line, “Nourish your child’s natural genius.” It reminds me of that line from A Prairie Home Companion, about all the children of Lake Wobegon being above average. Yes, we each think our children are geniuses, but when other people say it, without even knowing them, it seems smarmy. Still, I admire Cranium’s efforts to create games that let children (and adults) exercise both the analytic and creative parts of their brains, and to include both “official” rules and a set of variations to keep things interesting. Count and Cook in particular has a lot of opportunities for imagination, like making up your own recipes, and the chance to use it as a jumping off point for real kitchen exploration. If you’re tired of Candyland (or want a more balanced view of the culinary world) and find the latest incarnation of the Chutes and Ladders board confusing, as I do, give Count and Cook a try. We play-tested it with our four-year-old and he gives it a big thumbs-up as well.
The games are available through the Cranium Bloom Web site, at Target stores, and through Amazon.
(This review was at the request of Mom Central Consulting, which gave me a $20 gift certificate to Amazon.com for doing the review. I also receive a referral fee from Amazon for any purchases made through the link above. My policy is that I will disclose any paid reviews, and will not accept payment directly from the company or creator of the product under review.)