Toy Review: Haba "Maunz Maunz" (Crazy Cats) Review

You may have seen my blog post yesterday, which was the first in a series of three product reviews for the German toy company Haba who are celebrating their 75th Anniversary.   Haba manufacture and distribute good quality, primarily wooden toys for babies and children. The products are sustainable and use toxin-free stains whilst be colourful, fun and educational - a good mix I think! 

The second of my products is "Maunz Maunz" (meow-meow) is also known as "Crazy Cats".

Maunz-Maunz is a strategy card game, suitable for young children. The pack includes 52 cards and some wooden cat tokens and is suitable for 2-5 players.  

It's a little like Uno if you're familiar with that game as the idea is you have to get rid of all your cards to the win game. You do this by taking it in turns to play a card showing a cat that matches the type or colour of the one that has been played prior to this.  As with Uno and similar games, you can force the other players to pick up extra cards or miss turns and once a player only has one card left they have to shout "meow" and then "meow meow" when they have none left - which then makes them the winner. They get to take a wooden cat token and the game starts again. The first player to collect two wooden cat tokens is the overall winner.

The cards are attractive to young children as the illustrations are bright and colourful pictures rather than being numbers.

The game comes in a small sturdy tin - it's smaller than you'd think, practically pocket sized really which I think makes it ideal for travel or for keeping in your car/bag for an emergency distraction! It only takes a couple of minutes to play a round which is ideal to stop smaller children get bored or distracted and long enough to play whilst you're waiting for food to arrive or need to kill time somewhere.

My children enjoyed playing the card game and it was one that all the family could join in.  The cat pictures were appealing to them and the gameplay was simple enough that they could understand and then relay the rules to us, the adults which made them feel a bit more in control of the game. I think "Maunz Maunz" will be a little game that will get used quite a bit over the summer months when we're on our various camping trips and holidays!