SweetLand – Family Board Game App Review
App Info
Price: $1.99
Overview
Gather the family together and enter the sweets-filled world of SweetLand — Family Board Game. This digital board game has been designed to appeal to multiple ages. It’s simple enough for toddlers and preschoolers to enjoy it, but offers enough twists and turns that older kids will still have fun with it too. Don’t have four players? No problem. The game allows kids to play against the computer and with different combinations of human and computer players. However you choose to play, you’ll have fun seeing who can be the first to get to the castle at the end of the super sweet world full of candy, donuts, and every other sweet food kids love.
Features include:
- Four different players
- Play against the computer
- Candy and sweets-themed game board
- Easy to use spinner
Quality
Sweets greet kids as they start the game. The game board, which can be viewed from multiple angles and different zoom points is full of chocolate, lollipops, candy canes, donuts, cakes, and cookies. The colorful monsters that serve as characters fit right in too. Once started, game play moves smoothly and is fairly intuitive, but it may take kids a bit of time to figure out how to move from space to space (tap on the circle not the character) and how to spin the spinner well. Before game play even starts they’ll also want to customize the monsters with their own names or silly names to help make the game more their own.
Education
This app has not been rated for education.
Entertainment
Like a typical board game, to play you spin the spinner to see what space to move to, and then you move there. Each square on the board has a color, making it easy for young kids to track where they’re going. They’ll also love zooming out to see where their characters are in relation to the end of the game. Special sections of the spinner allow for double moves or to move to special spaces on the board. For some kids, these special spaces will become more annoying than entertaining. Not only do they allow players to move forward huge distances, but they can also set players back huge distances when they’ve almost won the game. This can be very frustrating for young kids who are just learning how to play games.
Value
While simple, the game encourages families to connect over one device and adds a twist to a traditional family game night. It’s also much cheaper than a board game, making it a good choice when you want to add something new to the game night rotation.
Child Friendliness
Once kids enter the game, they stay within the game and other than a privacy policy, there’s nothing to take kids out of the game. They may struggle a bit initially with figuring out to play and may have a hard time if they don’t spin the color they want or if they’re not winning, but overall they’ll find the game easy and fun to play.
