Publisher: Huch! & Friends

Designer: Friedemann Friese

Time: 45-60 minutes

Players: 2-6

Ages: 8+

I am not a very big fan of trivia style games.  The fact that all answers in trivia style games have to be so specific to a very specific topic is very unrealistic.  OR you could just memorize all the answers to beat everyone.  I mean who has the time to learn and memorize all that information.  Not to mention a lot of trivia games are roll a dice and move this far kinda thing.

Fauna is a fantastic trivia game because you don’t need to know the exact answer to get points…you just have to be close or piggy back on other player’s answers.

In Fauna, you have a huge board of the earth that has different regions on it.  At the bottom of the board, there are three different measurement rulers for weight total length and tail length.

Each round the first player will draw an animal card.  The card will give the name of the animal and what information you will be guessing about that animal.  Sometimes it will be weight, and body length.  Many times it will be weight, body length and tail length.  It just depends on what type of animal it is.  You will always guess where the animal is found on earth, but how many areas it is in will change drastically.

Once everyone has the information about the animal and what they need to guess about it, they will take turns putting their cubes on any of the available places in each category.  After everyone has either played all of their cubes or passed the round now ends and we score points on the answers.  Here is the best part……..not only do you get points for being correct, you also get points when you close.  Any answer that is adjacent to the correct answer also scores points.  This is what makes this game great, you don’t have to know everything, just be close, or if you have completely no idea but you think someone else does, just follow their lead.

Fauna is just a blast to play with the family.  We love learning about animals in our family and the benefit of playing a game while learning is fantastic.  Fauna really allows kids all the way down to 5 to play.  Many times the kids just piggy back off of the parents answers and still do well in scoring.  Other times, the kids know better than the parents.  This also teaches kids about measurements and relationship to space and size.  It also works well because there are 360 different animals and you only see about 5-7 animals each game.  You would have to play this game many times to see all the animals in the game.  The game is great and our family loves it.

Until next time…..piggy back on others!!

-Tim