Great family board games – Richard Scarry’s Busytown: Eye Found It!

Richard Scarry’s Busytown: Eye Found It! is a cooperative family board game from I Can Do That! Games, which has won a few family gaming awards.

The goal of the game is for all the players to travel together across Busytown and cross the water on the ferry to reach Picnic Island, before pigs can eat all of the picnic food.

Busytown has very quickly become one of our favorite family games. It is cooperative – everyone wins or loses as a team – so no loosers, no cries… It encourages teamwork, enhances observations skills, promotes attention to details and reinforces object identification and matching skills.

The game itself comes in a sturdy card board box that depicts the major characters from the Busytown Mysteries TV show. The 6-foot-long game board represents Busytown, covered with illustrations of buildings and scenarios adapted from Richard Scarry’s Busytown books.

You have a spinner, a large ferry counter, a set of 10 magnifying glass tokens, 6 food tiles, a small deck of Goldbug cards, a small sand timer as well as an instruction sheet.

 Counters are moved by rotating a spinner which has several possible outcomes:

• move: you make a movement of 1,2, 3 or 4 squares
• pigs eat: if you spin pigs eat then you need to remove 1 of the 6 food tokens from the picnic area
• Goldbug: if you spin a Goldbug, then you take a card from the Goldbug deck. This card depicts something that all of the players must try to find and mark with their orange plastic magnifying glass. Before starting to look for different objects (kites, barrels, shovels, etc.), you set the sand timer. You stop when the sand timer runs out and you count all the objects (that everyone has found). This will give you the amount of squares that all the players should move ahead.

The board itself has different paths, so you have some options to choose from on your way to the picnic. At the end, everyone must have boarded the ferry before it can travel to Picnic Island. This is really cool, as everyone is encouraging the others to join on board. If the players reach the picnic before the food is devoured, they all win!

Honestly, I think this is the first family board game that we played few times in a raw with my daughter loving it and us not getting bored. You can really enjoy playing it as a family, with kids starting from 3 years old. We bought it when my daughter was 3,5years old and she loved it from the start. She is 6 now and she still loves to play it, so enjoy it with your kids too! :)