This year, National Parks Week was April 17-25, an extra special week to spend learning and playing games all about our nation’s most amazing places.
One of our favorite National Parks games is this one, GET WILD! It’s a fast-paced, simultaneously played animal-swapping game, a race to return North American wildlife to their native parks.
Each player gets a Park Player Board. There are 6 included in the game and they’re each double sided. Parks included are
- Acadia
- Yosemite
- North Cascades
- Crater Lake
- Badlands
- Yellowstone
- Great Smoky Mountains
- Rocky Mountain
- Grand Canyon
- Zion
- Everglades
- Cape Hatteras
Each park includes a beautiful illustration, some fun facts, and an animal native to it. Each cards front and back has the same native animal, so there are 6 sets of animal tokens included in the game PLUS 1 National Park Map Board to be placed in the center of the play area.
Players each also get a set of 3 dice (number, movement, and animal).
Players begin the game by placing 2-3 of each non-native animal on their Park board. If my park is Cape Hatteras, I take 2-3 (depending on the total number of players) of each animal EXCEPT turtle.
All remaining animal tokens go in the center on top of the National Park Map Board.
Players begin rolling their dice all at the same time. For each roll, identify the ANIMAL, QUANTITY, and DIRECTION.
ANIMAL: Move the specified animal type (eagle, bison, snake, bear, turtle, lynx)
QUANTITY: Move this many animals (1, 2, or 3).
DIRECTION: Move either left, right, center to the map, or to a location of the player’s choice (L, R, Map, or ?)
Players continue rolling and moving animals. Move non-native animals away from your board in the quantity and direction specified by the dice roll. Move native animals TO your board IN the quantity and FROM the direction indicated by the dice roll.
Continue playing until the first player has ONLY native animals on their player board.
SCORING: The player who ended the round gets a 3-point token. Everyone takes a 1-point token for each native animal in their park and subtracts a 1-point token for each non-native animal. Scores can’t be negative. The first player to 20 points wins!
We also spent some time during National Parks Week testing our WILDIFE trivia with this Professor Noggin trivia card game. We pulled out the animal cards that matched GET WILD and quizzed each other. All the cards are amazing, but it was fun to learn more about the animals in GET WILD.
These trivia science games are excellent reading practice for new readers. Some of the words are hard, but a good first grade reader can do it with some help. Reading these cards makes for very fun practice!
Younger children will just enjoy looking at the beautiful pictures while they listen to older siblings reading off the questions. They learn a lot this way, little ones are so smart and have such good memories for interesting information!
National Parks Week is over for the year, but these two animal games should be played together all year round!
Thanks to The OP Games and Professor Noggin for sharing these fantastic science games with us!
