Animal Upon Animal

Overview

In Animal Upon Animal, you’re given a coterie of creatures who want to show off their balancing skills to form a giant pyramid. All atop a crocodile! The path to glory requires using your finely-tuned dexterity to create this critter construct. After all, you’re going to need to get snakes, sheep, penguins, monkeys, toucans, hedgehogs, and iguanas to hop on board and stay there without tipping over.

Each turn a player rolls the die. Based on the results, that player will add one or two animals to the stack of animals or pass that stacking duty on to someone else. Of course, if any pieces fall off whilst you are building this towering pyramid, you have to stack up to two of those pieces in a future turn.

Core Mechanics: Stacking, Dice-rolling

Victory Condition: The first player to have stacked all of the animals in their possession wins.

Ease of learning: Animal Upon Animal is yet another game that’s great for kids, and this one can be played by even younger children. 4-year olds shouldn’t have any difficulty learning the mechanics of this game since it’s all about building a tall structure out of oddly-shaped animals. If there’s any guidance they might need, it would be for the adult to guide them when they roll the die to help them understand what the results mean.

As I mentioned above, playing Animal Upon Animal is easy. You roll a die and based on the results, you perform the action shown on the die face. Some will require that you place one to two animals onto the pyramid. Others will require that you interact with other players to have them place animals on your behalf or have them decide which animal you’ll be placing. When you place an animal and accidentally cause the pyramid to partially collapse, you’ll be penalized by having to take 1-2 of the collapsed pieces, adding them into your supply. That’ll set you a bit behind because the person who places all of their animal pieces from the supply first is the winner!

Purchase from: Amazon