Hasbro Games Reviews

I purchased this game for my daughter who just turned 4. She loves polar bears and have been working on our abcs. When I first saw this game, I was excited. Finally an alphabet game that uses lower case letters. My daughter knows all the upper case, but is still working on lower case. It also claimed to be a spelling game. When I brought the game home my daughter was excited, that was until we began to play. Although it is a cute idea, the game is WAY to simple to keep a young child interested.

Here is how you play...
* You pick one word card, and you take turns fishing for letters.
* After you caught a letter, you determined if it was in the word you were trying to spell. If it is, you place it on the word card. If not, it goes into the cast out pond.
* Everyone playing takes turn fishing for letters for the same word.
* The winner is the person who places the last letter on the word.
* The winner then get to put the polar bear in the ice pond for a swim.

My problems with this game included...
* For an alphabet game, they should have had all the letters in the alphabet. There were only the 13 letters needed to make the words on the word cards. Even if the letters were never to be used, it would be nice to have them all in a pre-school alphabet game. Children could name the letter and put it in the cast out pond and learn all the lower case letters.
* The magnets on the letters were not strong. Often if you caught a letter, it would fall of the magnetic pole as the letter broke through the "ice". Frustrating for young children.
* The game is way to simple. Not strategy at all and the winner is left completely up to chance. After spelling one word, my daughter who LOVES board games was done and asking for a different game.
* For a spelling game, I would have expected the words to be high frequency words (words that are found most often in print). The words seemed to be randomly chosen, such as pie and snail.

If I had it to do all over again, I wouldn't have bought this game. I see it going into the closet and not getting much use. My daughter at the end of the game just wanted to take the polar bear out and play with him. :-)Get more detail about Cranium Polar Bear A-B-C.