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The Green Game Giraffe Mac-Game, Pounds sterling 26.99 Eric Brown and
Paula Vaccarey

IT WAS a brilliant idea to design a game about ecology, which makes
people more aware of the issues while they enjoy themselves. But, unfortunately,
there are several drawbacks to the Green Game. It’s similar to Trivial Pursuit:
you answer questions to move round the board, collecting pieces of a jigsaw
of a dodo. When your dodo is complete, you have won. Questions are divided
into categories, such as land, animal, sea or air depending on the symbol
on the square you are on. The game is intended for 15-year-olds and above
but, even if you have a degree in science, you’ll run into problems.

Most questions are ridiculously hard, many are phrased in such a muddled
way that several answers could be right and, even worse, the answers are
sometimes wrong, missing or don’t apply to the question. For example, ‘What
family do crows belong to?’ is answered ‘Corridae’, rather than ‘Corvidae’.
You might forgive one misprint but many occur. And ‘Where do fruit bats
face extinction?’ might be answered by a list of countries bordering the
Indian Ocean. A bald answer ‘Indian Ocean’ is wrong – no fruit bats live
there. Other questions veer between metric and imperial measures in their
answers which confused some.

When we played this game it took about three hours and we didn’t even
finish it. But there are positive sides to the Green Game. The board is
really well set out with sturdy pieces, and there is an excellent idea struggling
to get out. The game is good if you enjoy having a laugh at the awful English
– the questions read as though they’ve been badly translated from German
– or like to spend time arguing if the question was too hard, the answer
wrong or if it’s your fault. It would also probably work better as a team
game. We found sides formed, anyway, just to decide what the questions meant.
If you want a game that you can take seriously and doesn’t take so long,
then this is not for you. We would not spend Pounds sterling 26.99 on it.

Eric Brown is at Islington Green School, London.

Paula Vaccarey is at Stoke Newington School, London.