Get your climbing gear and stretch your muscles, the King’s Contest is about to begin!
Simply Fun’s The Climbing Knights is a great tactile and physical challenge with moving parts, strategy, and lots of suspense that kids will love! Master gameschool skills like spatial reasoning, strategy, and fine motor skills in this Medieval game of might!
The game is easy to learn and so much fun! Simply Fun has the best quality components. The castle is made from a very thick cardboard. It’s super sturdy but also folds up compactly to fit in the box.
Players must consider two things:
- How to move so as to avoid being caught by the Guards.
- How the dice result impact the Guards’ positioning.
The castle is magnetic and each player gets a Climbing Knight magnet piece and two matching Coats of Arms. The Knights are initially placed anywhere on the first row of any climbing wall and the Coats of Arms get stacked at the top of the castle. The Black and Gray Guards get placed on their starting spaces.
On each turn, players will roll all three dice (black, gray, and white) and follow three steps:
- BLACK DIE: Move the Black Guard. If a knight is in a straight line away from a Knight, the Knight falls down a level. If the Sleepy Zzzz is rolled, the knight falls asleep and is turned around to the sleeping side of the token.
- GRAY DIE: Move the Gray Guard in the same was as the Black.
- WHITE DIE: Move your Knight, avoiding being seen by a Guard. NOT moving is an option.
When a Guard sees a Knight, the Knight falls straight down to the first row of the level below and can potentially be seen by the other guard and fall even further. Two knights can’t occupy the same space. If that would happen, put the second knight one space to the left or right.
When a Knight reaches the top of the Castle and claims his Coat of Arms he must climb back down the castle wall. The Black and Gray Guards get moved as usual after rolling the dice. Knights can’t slide down when a Guard is on the front side of the castle. If there’s no Guard, Knights can slide all the way down to the bottom in a single move.
One Coat of Arms down, one to go! The first player to collect and return BOTH Coats of Arms to the bottom of the castle wall is the winner!
Climbing Knights is a fun way to practice some important skills and uses a different part of the brain that many other games because it is so tactile and spatially oriented. It’s a great game to throw into a school day for a brain break, even though it’s still totally educational!
This is one my kids pull out whenever they have friends over. Everyone loves it! Thanks so much to Simply Fun for another great learning-through-play resource!
