Board Game Review:

Wooly Wars

Wooly Wars board game box cover

Table of Contents

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Game Overview

Type: Competitive

Players: 2-4

Overview: This surprisingly engaging French tile-laying game (also known as “Wooly Bully”) is great for hooking children, clients, or students who are motivated by visual input. These individuals love video games, movies, and other things that challenge them to pay close attention. This game helps build skills that support handwriting, dressing, and other daily & school-based activities. I’ve also had great success using it with adults with dementia, stroke, or brain injury.

Recommended Age:  8+

Length: ~30 minutes

Skill Targets:

  • Executive functioning skills
  • Visual-spatial skills
  • Fine motor skills
  • Social-emotional skills
  • Sensory processing

Learning Targets:

  • Math & science
  • Natural world

Description: The country of La Guerre des Moutons (the war of sheep) is full of fields and forests. Each player tries to make the largest pens with their own color sheep inside by placing their tiles. You can easily close small pens, or you can be ambitious and try to build large farms – but if you cannot enclose the fields, your sheep are likely to be eaten by the big bad wolves roaming in the nearby forests. Each player’s sheep color is secret at the beginning of the game and is strategically revealed to gain maximum points.

Game tiles are laid in the style of dominos, matching color or pattern. Unlike dominos, tiles can be matched on up to four different sides. Tiles are double-sided and have nearly every possible combination of sheep color, number, and landscape (forest or village).

How to Play
Therapeutic & Educational Applications

Here are some suggestions for how to use Wooly Wars for specific learning and therapeutic goals.

Make it easier:

  • Lay all the tiles on the table (open-hand) to allow therapist or teacher assistance
  • Only use one side of the tiles (decrease choices)
  • Play in teams of 2-3 learners and pair those of different abilities

Make it harder:

  • Add a timer for turns
  • Don’t allow players to look at their hands between turns

Target executive functioning:

  • (adaptive thinking) Ask each player what they want to do on their next turn and what their back-up plan is if they cannot
  • (working memory) each player gets 20 seconds to look at their tiles before they are hidden. They must then choose and play without looking!

Target visual-spatial skills:

  • Free-play with the tiles and try to build various configurations or shapes
  • Play “I Spy” or a variant of “Where’s Waldo” in-between turns to challenge visual scanning and eye saccades

Target motor skills:

  • Play the game on a swing, therapy ball, or scooter – play a turn, take a ride, play a turn. This can also be helpful for children with sensory seeking needs
  • Play the game on an easel and stack the tiles sequentially
  • Build an obstacle course and incorporate it into game play
  • For bilateral coordination and pinch or grip strength development, incorporate tools such as tongs and have the tiles be carried from one area to another before placing on the board

Target social-emotional skills:

  • For each turn, players share or answer a social question
  • Have players look at each others’ tiles instead of their own and then verbally communicate what is on each tile (bonus: this also challenges visual-spatial skills!)

Target sensory processing:

  • (tactile) Instead of using the drawstring bag to hide the tiles, bury the tiles in different types of dry goods (rice, beans, etc.)
  • (tactile) Put novel objects in the drawstring bag
  • (taste) Try eating foods of different colors which correspond with the colors of the sheep (black beans, bananas, blueberries, etc.)

Target math skills:

  • There are many sheep to be counted – have players add / subtract sheep as they are placed on the board (use a scrap sheet of paper to make this easier)
  • Create story problems using the board / tiles.
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