Robot Turtles

Robot Turtles is a lovely programming game for kids by Think Fun.  The game says four and up but you should be able to play with a three year old as well with help. Important abilities for children to be able to play are: playing a card, knowing colours and waiting their turn. Aside from that it's simply using a turtle to capture a gem of the matching colour.

Robot Turtles is great because you can start very simply and add difficulty in a few different ways: increasing the number of cards you play per turn OR adding obstacles OR  both!

Game Play

You start with a board and set up based on the rule book as to roughly what "level" you want to start. This tells you where to place the gems and any obstacles you may need from the start. Each player has a coloured turtle and needs to get their turtle to their gem to win. First player to the gem wins.

The fun bit of this game is that you move the turtle with cards that move for example: forward, left, right, turn 90° etc. This aspect is the programming side of this game. A very simple version of play is just using one card at a time per player so children (and adults) can see immediately what they are asking the turtle to do. 

To make this game more challenging you can ask players to pre-set a run of 3 or more cards before "playing" or running the program, just like simplified programming, funny that.  Currently my son can do 4-6 cards without obstacles or 4 cards with obstacles.

The only challenging part of this game for adults is that one adult/older player needs to be the computer or controller who "runs" the program following the cards correctly in exact order they were placed.  When my son is ready to play his program I need to run it through, which means he can't stop a mistake from happening. I think older kids can definitely be this controller person. But I only warn about this as it's easy for littler kids to want to be the controller and stop their program part way through and fix any mistakes- which sort of defeats the point of the game.

A further way to add challenge to this game is to add obstacles that the kids have to go around or get through to get to their gem.  There are three main obstacles pictured here and they are all fun to play with!

Review

I love this game as it's a board game about programming and so many programming games are screen based. I don't always want him to be on a screen but that doesn't mean I can't satisfy his desire to do logic activities. This game is really perfect for anyone really as it is fun even if you don't like programming that much and the rules are beautifully thought out and written.

I also love that I can make it easier or harder based on my mental capacity or child's desire that day. Sometimes we even make the turtles get the gems and return home to make it even more challenging - something that isn't in the rules.

You can easily find this online or possibly at your local game store or toy store. I noticed also that you can find it at GAME which might be a useful place to look as well for it.  It retails for around £22-25.  We found our complete at a charity shop that sold games so were lucky enough to get it for less then £10, its really worth looking on ebay or second hand selling for kids games as there are lots you can fine there.  Just check it has all the pieces first (usually you can find out how many pieces a game has from either their own website or Board Game Geek summaries)