First Orchard

Today we’re looking at First Orchard, a cooperative children’s game in HABA’s My Very First Games line. In First Orchard, players work together to harvest all of their precious fruit before the villainous (or possibly just hungry) crow eats it all. Let’s take a look.

First Orchard is a game marketed towards very young kiddos. Especially when dealing with little clumsy fingers, it is important that game parts are not only easy to hold, but durable enough to survive the encounter. Luckily, HABA does well on both fronts here. The wooden game pieces are fantastic quality – easy for little two year old fingers to grab, and have survived being thrown across rooms in toddler disputes. My boys (2 and 4 as of this review) love playing with them even outside the confines of the game rules.

The cardboard parts are pretty durable as well, though I have my concerns about the basket – we haven’t had any issues, and it is pretty sturdy, but it is still a cardboard container and may get destroyed if your little ones are left with it unsupervised. Granted, I’m a little paranoid about these things. Come on Dad, it’s a kids game. It’s bound to get banged up a bit.

Setup is easy enough that I can involve the boys in it. Set out the four cardboard trees, and set the fruit on them in groups matching their color. Set the path tiles out in a row, and place the crow piece near the start of the path. The basket and die go where players can reach them, and it’s game time.

The gameplay in First Orchard is necessarily simple – roll a die, do the action on the die face. The die has four colored faces and two icons. The four colors represent the fruit of the same color – rolling any of these results in the player “picking” one of the matching fruit and placing it in the basket. The basket icon lets a player pick any of the colors, and the dreaded crow icon makes the crow move one space down the path toward the Orchard.

If players collectively succeed in getting all of the fruit off of the trees and into the basket before the crow reaches the Orchard, everyone wins together! If however the crow reaches the Orchard first, everyone loses.

We all love First Orchard. While it doesn’t have particularly strategic play for us big people, it helps the little ones stay focused on color recognition and working towards a common goal – starving the mean ole crow – I mean harvesting all of the fruit.

We’ve played several times, and even had success bringing it to the park and introducing gaming to other young kiddos. Because the game plays itself in truth, it is totally possible to rotate players in and out without disturbing the flow of the game. This is great when someone decides they want to participate part way through a game.

The true test for a kid’s game is whether the kids enjoy it. I usually measure this in how often it is requested. Since we got “the fruit game”, it has been one of the more requested games in our kid’s game library, and has even made my four year old’s “frayvrite game” list. If you’re looking for a way to introduce your little ones to tabletop gaming while teaching them to work together and recognize colors, check out First Orchard! It’s great!

Review copy provided by HABA Games.

Publisher: HABA
Number of Players: 2-4
Age: 2+
Price at time of Review: $30

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(Repost of original review from March 2019)