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Take the Cake is a great turn taking, shape matching and simple counting game from Gamewright for kids ages 4 and up. There are 16 colored cupcake cards with different shapes imprinted on them as “sprinkles.” Four different cupcake cards are placed in the center of the game space. The players take turns shaking a numbered dice (1-3). All sorts of different colored wooden shaped “sprinkles” (stars, circles, squares, triangles) are placed in a plastic sprinkle shaker. After the child rolls the numbered dice, this corresponds to the amount of times they get to shake the sprinkles out of the shaker. The wooden shapes will fall out onto the game space and the person whose turn it is matches up all the pieces they can onto the four available cupcake cards. The remaining pieces get returned to the sprinkler.  When you put the last piece on the card, you get to “Take the Cake.” The person who gets the most cards at the end of the game wins.

Here are some suggestions when playing this game with young children:

– In the beginning I acted as a facilitator, to take control of the dice, help the kids keep track of whose turn it was, help them recognize the numbers and complete the corresponding shapes, as well as to monitor the four cards in the playing space and to make sure all of the shapes were matched
– There are three different colored cupcakes on the cards: yellow, pink and blue. The yellow cards have one shape to match, the blue cards have 2 shapes to match and the pink cards have 3 shapes to match – so if you are playing with younger children you may want to just play with the yellow cupcake cards until they understand the concept of the game, then progress to adding some blue and pink cards the more they are able to multi-task
– I played the game with two almost 4 year olds, using all 16 cards, and due to their age, it was challenging for them to organize all the steps, especially if a lot of shapes emerged from the sprinkler. It was also hard for them to understand that they could use all four cards because they thought the card directly in front of them was theirs. So it may also be helpful to have children sit next to each other with the cards in rows in front of them and in this case, the role of being a facilitator allowed even younger children experience the fun of this simple game
– This game is great for fine motor skills just using your fingers to place the sprinkles back into the container, want to add even more fun? Use a pair of tweezers or tongs to place the unused shapes back in the sprinkle container, and this is greatfor preschoolers learning how to use three fingers to hold a marker or crayon

Gamewright provided Take the Cake free to facilitate a review, the opinions in this blog post are purely the bloggers own.