Road Scholar: Play and Learn Spanish is not only out of print, but the entire company is no more, so I’m really glad we found it at a thrift store! It’s a bit like Candyland, but with Spanish words and phrases rather than candy.

This game for learning Spanish has a board, a die, pawns, and lots and lots of cards! Our game came without instructions, and since it’s out of print, it took me a long time to track down instructions. In the hope of helping everyone else who may be looking for these instructions, I’m including them here for you.

However, it’s pretty simple. Before beginning the game, choose whether you’re translating from English to Spanish or Spanish to English. Place all the cards you’ll be using in one stack beside the board. Place one card face up on each of the four colored spots in the center. If you decide to translate from English to Spanish, make sure every card is always English side up.

Roll the die. Whatever color comes up, that’s the card you need to translate. So if you roll a blue, look at the card on the blue spot, and then translate it. If you’re correct, you get to move to the next blue spot on the path. There are only four colors but six sides on the die, so one side has you skipping a turn, and one side has you turning around (switching from clockwise to counter-clockwise around the table, or vice versa).

My family is not bilingual. In fact, we know hardly any Spanish, even after living right next to Mexico for four months. So we started working through Spanish on Duolingo before trying this game. Then, when we started playing, I chose just some of the cards to use. There are 300 cards in the game, so if you’re new to Spanish, do yourself a favor and start with just some!

As our Spanish started to improve, I started to add cards to the ones we knew. The cards are all numbered, too; numbers 1-150 are supposed to be easier and 151-300 harder. They can also be sorted into categories, which is helpful for my brain (colors, food, time, clothing, animals, etc).