Although I occasionally indulge my kids in a toy that has no educational value whatsoever, I definitely prefer to spend our money on toys that are both educational and fun to play with. I’ve sent way too many “must have” toys to Goodwill or thrown broken bits of plastic into the trash. It’s not always easy to match a child’s age to toys for their age and level of development, which is why sites like eBeanstalk have experts to do the work for us! It’s easy to find the right learning toys for younger children and toys that older kids won’t even realize are educational!. BUT they need help from moms like me to help pick the toys.

eBeanstalk put together a team of child experts who looked at over 10,000 toys, selected the best learning toys and matched each to a stage of development. From babies through age seven, eBeanstalk has developmentally appropriate toys that are also fun! For each item on the site, the Product Features explain which skills a child of that age will typically be developing, and ways parents can use that item to help their child strengthen those skills.

I applied for and was chosen by eBeanstalk to be one of their toy tester Moms, and over the summer we received our first package. Inside was a green box containing cards for a game called “Ligretto”, a product of Playroom Entertainment. I had never heard of the game before we received it to review. If you’ve ever played Solitaire, you’ll understand the rules of Ligretto. Now, eBeanstalk doesn’t sell that game themselves, but because I have boys older than seven, they found a game meant for kids ages 8 and up. I played it with my boys who are 12 and 10 and a 10 year old friend, and we had a BLAST!

Ligretto is a card game that up to 12 players can play, AT THE SAME TIME. Each player has 10 cards in a stack with the top card up, plus three cards in a row next to that, also up. They also have cards in their hand. How many cards each player gets depends on how many sets of cards you have. Since we only had one set of cards, we had to do a lot of reshuffling. The gameplay works like this: each player looks in their stack or row for a “1″. Anyone who has one puts it face up in the center, then anyone with a “2″ puts the card on top of that, and so on. If a player doesn’t have any playable card showing, they put down cards from their hand face down and when they get to the third card, they turn that one over. When they’ve gone through their whole hand, they shuffle the hand and start again. If a player uses one of the three cards in their row, they take a card off their stack and put that in the row. The first person to get rid of all of their stack cards wins.

In this photo, you can see our cards in the middle, some are ones waiting to have a card played on them, some have been played on. On my right you can see my three “row” cards, I’m in the process of dealing everyone their ten “stack” cards.

Ligretto is made by Playroom Entertainment, I can’t link to their site because their database is down according to the error message I keep getting. If you type “Ligretto card game” into a search engine, you’ll find links for other sites selling the game.  I want to thank eBeanstalk for sending us such a fun game to play as a family!  I encourage you to visit eBeanstalk to check out other developmentally-appropriate toys for your kids.