Orchard Toys – Slug in a Jug Review

I am very happy to tell you that from now on my family and I will be reviewing games and toys from Orchard Toys. We have always been fans of Orchard Toys and now that we have been made Orchard Toys Official Testers, we are all very excited about it!! You might notice that my sidebar is now showing a special badge that shows this. Yaay!! Hurrah!! 🙂

For those of you that don’t know or haven’t heard of Orchard Toys before, they are a British company that started from a kitchen table over 40 years ago! Although they are recognised now as a leading manufacturer of educational games and puzzles around the world, they still design, produce and pack all of their products.

What I like most about Orchard Toys is that they are designed with the ethos ‘Learning Made Fun’, and they combine bright, innovative design, durability and quality. Also important to them is value for money. When our children play with their products, they are learning about language and literacy, numbers and counting, matching and sorting, sharing and fair play; they are learning to tell the time, recognise colours and spell new words. Importantly though, they will also definitely have FUN!

The lovely people at Orchard Toys sent us a game called Slug in a Jug for us to review. This is a game targeted at children aged 5 to 9 years old. Bella is 5 so she was just in the lower age range to play this game. Obviously because she is still learning to read and write properly there were some parts of the game that we didn’t do exactly as instructed but the whole point was to have fun with the game.

This game can be played in 3 different ways (Slug in a Jug, Rhyming Pairs and Find the Rhyme). I think its good that I can see that Bella can develop her reading, language and grammar with it as she starts to spell out words and make up silly sentences with the cards. We will show how to play the main game as the other ones, we thought, were still a little bit too difficult for Bella. We will keep playing this game with her and I’m sure that in time, she will be able to play the 3 different versions very well.

The object of this game is to collect as many rhyming cards as possible. What you have to do first is spread all the cards face down on the table. Each player chooses a card and places it face upwards in front of them. 

You start by turning over one of the cards in the middle and reading it out aloud. If the word rhymes with the card in front of them, the player puts the new card down next to their card and makes a rhyming sentence using the two words. If the words do not rhyme, the player returns the card to the table, face downwards.  On their turn, players can exchange the unmatched card they are holding for a card from the table, which counts as a turn. Once players hold a rhyming pair, they can take another card from the middle. 

Bella did very well as she understood the game pretty quickly, although she didn’t do the silly/funny sentences when seeing if the cards rhymed. Her reading has developed really well over the last 6 months since turning 5 and she has made the leap from being able to phonetically sound out written words to blending them. We just let her match the cards by reading each of the words to see if they rhymed. She was really good at it and was soon matching pairs and beating Nick. It was pleasing to see her enjoying it so much every time she was lucky to get rhyming cards. Finally, Nick got a match, so it was happy times for him LOL!

The game continues until there are no more cards left on the table. The winner is the player with the most matching pairs at the end. Bella won as she matched the most pairs of cards – well done Bella!! Bless her!

If you like the look of this game, you can buy it from the Orchard Toys website. The price is £7.50. You can also find Orchard Toys on Twitter, and you can also browse around their boards on Pinterest.

We also made a video of playing the game. You can see this below:

Have you heard of Orchard Toys before? Do you have any of their toys or games? Would you consider buying a game like this as a Christmas present?

Disclaimer: I was sent the Slug in a Jug game from Orchard Toys in exchange for an honest review. All the opinions are my own. 

Thanks for stopping by,

Love you all ❤️

Franca  💋