OUTFOXED, A CLASSIC WHO DUNNIT GAME FOR PRESCHOOLERS, 4 players

Product overview

Gamewright Outfoxed: What to Know

Cooperative is the feature, not a footnote. If your experience of board games with young children is that someone flips the board when they fall behind, a game where all the players win or lose together removes the entire failure mode. In Outfoxed the table moves around the board collecting evidence clues, feeds suspect cards through a clue decoder to eliminate them, and races the guilty fox, who is advancing toward the exit the whole time. The pressure is real but it is aimed at the fox, not at each other.

Gamewright publishes it at ages 5 and up for 2 to 4 players in 20 minutes. The box holds 16 suspect cards, 16 thief cards, 12 clue markers, 4 detective hat pawns, 3 custom dice, a fox figurine, the clue decoder and the board. The decoder is the component that sells it to children, you slide a card in and a window reveals whether the suspect has the trait you just found, which turns logical elimination into something physical. The actual skill being practised is deduction by elimination, which is a genuinely useful thing for a five-year-old to be doing for fun.

A note on the listing and one on expectations. The Amazon title calls it a game for preschoolers, while Gamewright's own published age is 5 and up, so a 3-year-old is below the publisher's own floor despite what the listing implies, worth knowing if you are buying for a preschooler literally. And at 20 minutes it is the longest of the shorter games here, which for a 5-year-old at the bottom of the age range usually means an adult is playing too, not supervising from the kitchen.

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