Raya’s Journey: An Enchanted Forrest Game is Ravensburger newest game for school-aged kids. Based on Disney’s Raya and the Last Dragon, this board game combines math, memory, strategy and family fun.
Let’s start with math. Players move around the game board, which is Kumandra’s dragon shaped river. On their turn, each player rolls two dice. They have the option to add the dice together and move forward that many spaces, split the dice and move forward and backwards, or just choose one of the rolled die to move either forward or back that many spaces. Our game testers were using one-to-one correspondence for counting in dynamic ways, as they tried to get their game piece as close to the teak sculptures as possible (more on the teak sculptures soon).
The memory component was a fun challenge. Underneath each of the 7 teak sculpture is one of Raya’s character allies. Players must land on the special teak sculpture spots to peak (and remember!) who is underneath. The goal of the game is to collect the most character cards by getting as close to their corresponding teak sculpture as possible, thus collecting the card. When playing with younger kids, we allowed “free peaks” to modify as necessary.
Exercising memory skills in younger children is excellent for building attention, concentration, and focus. Our game testers used language to create strategies and stories to help them recall a character’s location and used visual recognition too. There was tons of language and cognitive skill building with this gaming element.
There’s also some strategy involved. If a player lands on an already occupied spot, they can send another player to the start – further away from their intended spot. Though our game players were mostly kind and wanted to modify rules to share spots. Using the dice to your advantage was also a fun way to incorporate strategy.
Raya’s Journey: An Enchanted Forrest Game is a fun choice to spark conversation, retell parts of the movie and describe favorite characters, and incorporate memory and math for an entertaining learning flare.
