Rhino Hero Junior: A Dexterity Game for the Littlest Hands
Our game of the month for May is one of those special cases where a company takes a well-known and beloved game and juniorizes it for the youngest members of family game night. HABA is adding to their My Very First Games series aimed at 2-year-olds with Rhino Hero Junior, and I’m very impressed with this addition.
First of all, I love junior games. When game designers take a really good, established concept and make it accessible to younger children, families are always the big winners. We like the concept of junior games so much, I was even inspired to start compiling our favorite junior games of all time - and Rhino Hero Junior is definitely going to be added to the list. It’s actually impressive how many of our favorite family games are well-known titles that were simplified or redesigned in some way with young children in mind.
And Rhino Hero Junior was really a brilliant choice to get this special treatment. Like the original, it’s a dexterity game that works on fine motor skills and balancing, and, for some reason, we don’t own a single other balancing game like this aimed at such a young audience. A toddler game with an emphasis on motor skills like this one seemingly fills a gaping hole in a fantastic niche.
It’s also important to point out that Rhino Hero Junior works on several more skills on top of the obvious motor skills training. There are also ways to play that practice your numbers, your colors, your ability to compare sizes, and even your memory. And if your little one isn’t able to stack a tower yet, some of the ways to play don’t even require the balancing at all. Suffice it to say that this junior version was tailor-made to be a very enjoyable and beneficial game for little ones - perfect for gameschooling.
But, of course, building up a tower still remains what I would consider the really big appeal of this game, and certainly what people think of when they think of Rhino Hero. And the designers made that key mechanic much easier than the original by replacing the light cards with thick, heavy cardboard - which is much easier to handle and control. Your tower is also limited to just 6 floors by design, and the floors go from largest on the bottom to smallest on the top. So there’s a good chance even the littlest players will be able to find success stacking this tower.
But, like I mentioned, there are actually several ways to described in the rule book. The first one is easy - it’s called free play. Little ones will definitely love just playing with the colorful and beautifully illustrated components, and the wooden Rhino Hero Junior and Baby Spider Monkey pieces are fantastic - as I’m sure you’ve come to expect from HABA.
The second way to play is a fantastic gameschooling setup for practicing either colors or numbers. Instead of stacking the floors high, you spread them out on the ground and build a path - matching colors together or trying to proceed in numerical order. It’s a great choice for toddlers, and even my 5-year-old is willing to play this way still, but she’d probably much rather move on to the last way to play and start stacking.
The final recommended way to play is the classic game of stacking the floors up, and you start with the floor tiles spread out face down. You take turns drawing a tile to see if it’s the next number you need for your stack, since you’re trying to stack them up numerically, and this adds a bit of memory into the mix. If you draw a Baby Spider Monkey, you have to move the Baby Spider Monkey figurine to the top of the tower as well, and it’s always adorable to see careful little fingers grab the figures and move them around the tower.
The memory component of the game is not demanding or punishing, with no real way to lose other than the tower falling down. And, like I mentioned before, the tower is also designed to be pretty sturdy anyways. It’s truly a fantastic game for the My Very First Games series. And even though it’s designed for toddlers to get the most enjoyment out of it, I personally think it works great all the way up to about my daughter’s age of 5.
But we also have an 8-year-old in the house, and he likes playing with his little sister, so we’ve also experimented with different house rules to spice things up. So just in case you want to take the difficulty of the game another step further, we have a couple of ideas for you!
The first new idea is to stack whatever number you draw, even if it’s not in numerical order. Trying to stack the tower without going from the largest to the smallest piece definitely throws a wrench in your plans, and makes things very interesting. If you really want, you could even make it competitive instead of the default cooperative mode - but of course we are huge cooperative fans in this house.
The second idea is to change things up about how Baby Spider Monkey works. You can say that drawing 3 Baby Spider Monkeys is a way to lose the game. Plus, each time you draw a Baby Spider Monkey, you have to shuffle around all of the cards to randomize things. For some reason as kids get older, they like there to be a way to lose the game, and I suppose I can’t blame them. So something like a three-strikes-and-your-out rule might make them happy. And, if you mix both of these new rules together, you’re in for a much trickier game for sure!
HABA really never ceases to amaze us, and I’m always particularly impressed with their games in the My Very First Games series. I love the way they approach games for 2-year-olds, with a focus on learning opportunities and beautiful, high-quality components. And I really think toddlers everywhere are going to fall in love with Rhino Hero Junior.
Note from Dad Suggests: Due to high demand Rhino Hero Junior is currently out of stock or seeing elevated prices on Amazon. Make sure to check out buying straight from HABAusa.com or look for the retail price of $29.99.
Disclosure: HABA shared an advanced copy of Rhino Hero Junior with us. We only write about the things we love and all thoughts and opinions are our own.
Have you tried the original Rhino Hero? What about Rhino Hero Junior? What do you and the kids think about balance games? Let us know in the comments!
