Have you exhausted playing Hapy Families and Go Fish now and want to move on with your family to something with a little more about it in terms of strategy. But it is also educational by encouraging simple maths during gameplay. Then seriously look no further than Sleeping Queens. This is a small card game by Gamewright is a brightly coloured box of fun with great artwork and simple rules but a tonne of fun.

In Sleeping Queens you will be trying to wake up queens by playing king cards from your hand to awaken the sleeping queens. As all the queen cards are placed in the middle face down, you will have the fun of turning over the queen of your choice. These range in points from 5 to 20, some have special abilities like allowing you to wake another queen, but most importantly they are worth points and are the way that you win.

The kings are key, but these are mixed up with a bunch of other cards, mostly number cards. Herein lies the simple maths. You are going to want to get the number cards out of your hand so you can snag some kings or dragons and get yourself some queens. Ordinarily you can only discard one card from your hand to draw another. However, if you can make a sum out of your cards then you can discard them all to draw new cards. So in that way you could discard a 2, 3 and 5 card (2+3=5) to draw three new cards, giving you a better chance of getting a king.

For a little bit extra bite there are a few “meaner” cards, the sleeping potion will put someone else’s queen back to sleep. Never fear though, if you have a magic wand card you can prevent the sleeping potion from taking effect. There is also the dragon card which will let you steal a queen from another player, this also can be stopped by using a knight card. It really all comes down to whether you have the right card in your hand to protect yourself, sometimes you will, sometimes you won’t. These cards will help you to manage the end point of the game, the winner is the person to get 50 points in queens or to wake up 5 queens.

If you want a family game with great artwork and a fun theme that plays pretty quickly, then I thoroughly recommend giving this one a go.

This blog was written by Hannah Blacknell