Game Review – Sorts for Kids – Australian Game of the Year, 2009.

Sorts for Kids has recently been named “Australian Game of the Year” by Board Games Australia.

Published by Crown and Andrews and the inspiration of well known Game developer, Craig Browne, Sorts for Kids is a trivia game where near enough is good enough! Sorts for Kids is the younger sibling of Sorts!

The new game is not only simplified for younger players but also even more fun with great questions, easy to use paddles to lock in your answer, and a new category of questions – the line up! It is ideal for ages 7 and up and is also fast becoming a popular family game.

The Play
Sorts is the game of putting things in order. Everyone plays at once and must sort the four topic items into order, be it: number of superheros in a gang (The Incredibles, Power Puff Girls etc), the age of movie stars (Miley Cyrus, Dakota Fanning etc.), or top land speed of different animals.

There are also questions where you must pick the two correct answers of four options, and the “line-ups” where players rank themselves on an attribute such as length of hair, or number of buttons!

Score is kept on a board and the first to reach the middle is the winner. The questions are a great mix of fun and serious and will enable adults and children to compete on a roughly equal footing. Do you remember on which days of the week The Very Hungry Caterpillar ate his different foods?!

Educational Uses
The nature of Sorts for Kids makes it an ideal educational game as it involves plenty of interaction, listening, questioning and conferring with other players. It requires an environment where noise is not a problem since, being an interactive game, it can create some commotion, particularly the “line up” component. The game generates conversation and family and friends in constructive critique, logical thinking and categorisation.

Sorts also ends up teaching you a large array of facts.

Try this:

Sort these things by their height – from shortest to tallest: school desk, golf buggy, adult lion, shopping trolley.

A really fun part of Sorts for kids is called Line-up. When players pick a line-up card they must line themselves up according to all manner of unusual criteria.

There are three types of topic cards:

Blue topic cards – Four colour coded list items which need to be sorted into the appropriate order (e.g. Sort these things by their length – a stick of blackboard chalk, a dessert spoon, a one metre rule, a computer keyboard)

Yellow topic cards – A statement is made and four possibilities are given, but only two of them are correct. You need to choose which ones (e.g. which two of these animals can run faster than a rabbit?)

Red topic cards – Line up ( Sort yourselves by the number of buttons you have on the clothes you are wearing right now)

The reverse side of the card shows the correct answer, or in the case of the red topic card the reward.

The game lasts for about 30 minutes. A good length of time for serious engagement. Boredom is not a problem either with Sorts, since the subject keeps changing throughout the game. It allows for 2-6 players and the components include:

* 250 topic cards
* 24 plastic smile dots
* 6 plastic dot holders
* Game board
* 6 player tokens
* Rules of play

Sorts for kids plays on everyones fascination with listing and comparing things and is worthy of the prize it has received. There are hundreds of topics specifically for kids covering just about any area of the natural and man-made world.

It is one of the more truly “social” family games we have seen and the simple format ensures high participation and easy adaptability.

Though published in Australia, the game is available world-wide through several Australian online Stores.