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dren have had enough; everyone flees the city. While the rat catcher helps to lower
the anger level at times, he cannot stem the tide forever. The game ends when
there are only two inhabitants left in Hamelin. The player with the least anger wins the game.
Because of the small number of four hand cards The Pied Piper is strongly luck-dependent, but the children still do not feel played, quite the opposite. It is so much fun to be able to send the rats to the neighbor’s houses, passing through your own. Largeaud has complemented the fairytale series with a clever concept, once again nicely designed by the publishers.
The Pied Piper (Purple Brain Cre- ations) by Agnès Largeaud; for 2–5 children, about 5+ (better: 7+) years; duration: about 20 minutes; price: about 20 €.
Fabulantica
If you want to meet the Puss in Boots, the Frog King, or a genie in a bottle, you need to travel to the fairytale
land of Fabulantica. Right in the middle of the place, two to five children start the game at a fairytale castle, helping inhab- itants in their search for fellow citizens.
Unfortunately, Fabulantica is plagued by “hideritis”; all twelve fairytale charac- ters are hidden in different spots under small yellow towers. Mission cards let them know that, for example, Little Muck or the Frog King are looking for Puss in Boots. First, they need to find the search- ing party under a tower to make the common mission their own. The first player to fulfill three of these missions wins.
Movement is required to lift the secret of a yellow tower. There are no dice, but movement cards customized for each landscape: horse and camel for grassland and desert, mountain travel requires at least a donkey, and rivers a boat. For the very large jumps the flying carpet is very handy. The little adventurers start with five travel cards and their hand limit is ten. When a player travels to a tower, its secret is revealed for all to see. This seems helpful, but does not make Fab- ulantica an easy game, for the tower is then pushed along to one of the five empty tower spaces. One minute the
dragon can be at the old mill, the next in the stone circle. This constant confusion is quite challenging for elementary school children.
But they all join in eagerly, even with full player numbers and even if a game lasts more than half an hour. The travel rule is a challenge, but a flight on the magic carpet often gets players out of a mess. The target group does not care at all if adults say this all seems very old. It is obvious that Teubner leans heavily on both Elfen- and Sagaland, but his new mix creates a challenge and arouses
the children’s curiosity again and again. A reviewer might wish for a more fairy- tale-like graphic design and towers that do not resemble buckets, but again that does not bother the children. Fabulantica proves how old ideas can still manage to spark. Wieland Herold/cs
Fabulantica (Logis) by Marco Teubner; for 2–5 children, about 7+ years; duration: about 30 minutes; price: about 25 €.
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