When my kids were young, a big priority for me was teaching about different countries worldwide. We haven’t focused much on US geography, but world geography was really important to me. So, I started collecting different world geography games to help us find our favorites!
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There are actually two versions of The World Geography game. We have the card game, which came out first, but there’s also a board game. They’re similar, and watch the blog for the post about the board game!
The World Geography Card Game is small space friendly
One of my favorite things about this game is the box size – it’s tiny! And it uses every bit of space; there was no desire or need to unbox and bag the game because there was no wasted space at all. There is a large world map included, but it folds up so small it fits neatly on top of the cards.
Another thing I love about this game is that it includes every officially recognized country, and when I purchased the game in 2019 it had just been updated. I know country lines change somewhat frequently, so try to stay up to date with our resources. There are also a couple of extra, blank cards included, so if you need to make a major update, you can.
Multiple ways to play The World Geography Card Game
There are instructions for several different ways you can play, but the game itself is composed of just the country cards and the map. They suggest using the facts (ordering them like in Cardline), or four different challenges: continent, flag, location, and capital city. In addition to the flag, the cards also include the area, population, highest point, and the number of neighboring countries.
So far, The World Geography Card Game is the most comprehensive game I’ve found for world geography. However, my kids are still a bit young for it, so we play with some modifications:
Modifications make gameplay easier
We often have the globe right on the table with us. This is our most common modification; I want my kids to know that the world is a sphere, and to be familiar with an accurate portrayal of different countries’ sizes.
Sometimes we hand-pick out specific country cards to play with. We’ve studied a few over the years in our unit studies, so these my kids are more familiar with.
Pick one continent to focus on. This limits where they’re looking on the globe, helps them get familiar with the different continents, and reduces the possible countries dramatically.
This brings me to my last favorite part of The World Geography Card Game: the way they divide up the countries into continents. I’ve always been uncomfortable with the division between Europe and Asia. It is, after all, not actually a physical distinction, but a political one. Ever since I first read the term Eurasia to signify both of them together, I’ve loved it.
How countries are divided up into continents
The World Geography Game does divide up Europe and Asia. I suspect to make the game more manageable and balanced. However, I love the way they divide up the countries into the two continents; they focus on cultural distinctions. There are, after all, very different cultures in Asia versus Europe. This means, though, that several countries have been split between the continents. A big example is Russia. The western portion of Russia is much more culturally similar to the rest of Europe. Eastern Russia, which has most of the land, but not much of the population, is more like Asia culturally. There are several other countries they’ve divided in this way, and it’s indicated on the individual country cards by having both colors in the continent spot.
At the end of the day, if you want just one world geography game, I definitely recommend The World as the most comprehensive and up-to-date, yet in a small box.