Egyptians is a part-roll-and-move, part-trivia board game that is designed to teach you and your family about Ancient Egypt in a fun and engaging manner. The aim of the game is to collect a complete set of Pharaoh cards and place them safely inside your pyramid.
To play Egyptians, each player or team places a camel token on the start space; they then take a cardboard pyramid and place it in their play area. If this is the first time the game has been played, the pyramids will need assembling first—I used a small amount of double-sided sticky tape to build ours.
The Question/Action and Pharaoh card decks are shuffled and placed in their respective places on the board, and each player/team takes three Pharaoh cards and put them in their play area.
Players travel around the Egyptians board attempting to collect all six Pharaoh cards and entomb one on each inside their pyramid. They take it in turns to roll the die and move their camel the indicated number of spaces around the board. There are eight different actions to perform depending on which space you land on.
Once a player has collected one of each of the six Pharaoh cards and entombed them safely inside their pyramid, they must race around the board to return to the start square. When they have arrived there (this does not need to be by exact count) they must roll an even number to move to the Ra symbol in the middle of the board where they will receive Ra’s blessing and win the game.
Egyptians is a very simple to learn game aimed at kids age seven and up, making it perfect to play during elementary school when most kids will do topic work on the subject of Ancient Egypt. The game does a great job of teaching kids history without them realizing that they’re learning—my son is currently studying Ancient Egypt at school and has asked to play this game multiple times despite protesting any and all “official” homework sent by his teacher.
The multiple choice questions mean that everyone can play regardless of their knowledge of Ancient Egypt—if you were playing with an Egyptologist, you could even leave the answers out entirely to level the playing field a little! The center of the rulebook also includes guides to both hieroglyphic symbols and some Egyptian deities, so if you were playing with younger children this could be left open on the table as a reference. The rear of the rulebook contains a “did you know” section filled with interesting facts, many of which will provide clues to the questions in the game.
Egyptians is not a complex, strategic game that will keep die-hard gamers engaged for hours, but it is not intended to be so. Instead, this is a game that can be played quickly and easily to help boost at-home learning. I would highly recommend it for homeschoolers and teachers as well as parents who want to help engage their children with their current school topic at home. It is far from the greatest board game I have ever played, but it excels at what it is designed to do, and even my husband and I have found ourselves learning more about Ancient Egypt than we did before, thanks to Egyptians.
GeekMom received this item for review purposes.
This post was last modified on March 19, 2018 3:49 pm
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