While games for preschoolers are getting more common, there aren’t as many of them as for older kids. The Richard Scarry’s Busytown version of Eye Found It! is great for young kids, while other versions of Eye Found It! can be good for older kids.
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We have Richard Scarry’s Busytown version of Eye Found It! There are several different ones, including Disney and a World History one. (We have the card game version of the World History one). This is a great cooperative game for preschoolers, to maybe early elementary. At 6 and 8, my kids have outgrown it.
Eye Found It! is mostly luck
Eye Found It! requires very little skill and less strategy; it’s mostly luck. Personally, I’m not a fan of games like this, but they do tend to be good for little kids. The skill that is required is spotting things; kind of like a variable Where’s Waldo. The strategy is deciding which path to take, as there are a few T’s in the road. But otherwise, it’s all luck, depending on what you spin.
In Eye Found It!, all players are racing together to get from one side of the board to the other. The board itself is a huge behemoth, over 6’ long. We had to put 3 leaves in our table in order to record playing it! Usually, we just played it on the floor, but with three pets, that wasn’t terribly doable in our house. There are small pieces, so if you have crawling babies who are still trying to put everything in their mouths, this might not be the best game for your preschoolers.
Anyway, in the Busytown version, the whole board is like one of Richard Scarry’s books, with endless activity and tons of details. Players start at one end, and at the other is a picnic they’re trying to get to. But if you spin “Pigs Eat!”, one item of food is removed from the picnic. Come to think of it, I don’t think we’ve won this game very often. There are two spots on the spinner that allow the pigs to eat, so it can be pretty difficult to win (although, like I said, it’s largely luck-based, so not something that you can really get much better at).
Reading not required in Eye Found It!
The best part of the game is when the spinner lands on the magnifying glass. In this case, you turn over one of the cards and the hourglass, and everyone looks for whatever is on the card. There’s both a picture and the word on each card, so reading is not required. When you find it on the board, you place a magnifying glass on it. When the hourglass runs out, count up all the magnifying glass pieces that were placed on the board, and everyone gets to move that many spaces.
Finding the items is good for little ones that are still trying to learn how to pay attention to things, but as the board is so long, it often ends up with kids climbing over each other and the board. When I remind each kid to choose a section of the board before we start searching, things go a bit better, but it can still be tricky.
When a player gets to the ferry, their turn is skipped until everyone is on the ferry. Once everyone makes it on, then the whole ferry moves together.
A winner with kids
My kids were always excited to play this game, even today when we played through it for our recording session. Me? Not so much. If you have the right age of kids, but none of yours are still trying to eat everything (thus the 3+ age range listed on the box), and no pets, or you otherwise have a really long but rather narrow table you can have the game on, this can be a good game.
If you’re like me and have to play it on the ground, and you have either pets that are going to get in the way, or smaller babies/toddlers that will try to eat the magnifying glasses, I’d pass on the game. There are other options for finding pictures, from Waldo books to the game Spot It, or the card game version of Eye Found It. If you’re still on the fence, head on over to our YouTube channel and watch the play-through. (We had to pretend none of the pigs had gotten any food items to show how the game ends, though!)