Get Kids Moving With The Yoga Garden Game

The Yoga Garden Game is a recent favorite in our household. Combining metaphors of gardening and animal mimicry with yoga poses in a cooperative setting, this game is perfect for families wishing to explore yoga further with young children, to create a fun formula for a daily or other regular yoga practice, or simply to supplement your existing yoga or other movement activities. Depending on how busy we are, we might be looking for any of these, so the game is fast on its way to becoming a mainstay in our family gaming life, which is quite intensive as it is.

Players work together to help flowers bloom in a garden before night falls. Play proceeds by rolling a single die and helping a bee travel around the board's circular path, with three event types moving the game forward: flowers, which allow players to place an open bloom on a bud space; stars, which result in a 1/8th circle wedge being placed in the center over the plants' roots; and suns, which trigger the drawing of a card displaying a yoga pose which everyone then performs.

The cards' poses are simple and well-defined, the game board and pieces are made of thick, durable cardboard, and the design and illustration are both truly excellent. At about $20 this game is a great investment.

The Yoga Garden is also a great game for children who may be unaccustomed to cooperative games. Unlike many games which are cooperative by design but could just as easily be used competitively (one of our favorites, Orchard, is just such a game), this game is cooperative to its core thanks to its single shared playing piece and the largely metaphorical goal, which lacks a concrete consequence (if the flowers do not bloom, after all, they can always bloom tomorrow!). The true goal of this game is the expression of life through creative movement; as with other movement games (we reviewed two here), it's a surefire way to actively engage very young children in games. Combined with the game's simple, fast-paced progress, this is a very easy game for kids to get into. We think it's perfect for kids from age three on up, and that younger children could easily be engaged along with older players in performing poses. This is a game the whole family can enjoy.

Yoga instructor Jennifer Durand, who developed the Yoga Garden Game, teaches children yoga at several San Francisco locations. She has also produced a full curriculum of children's yoga instruction for classroom use. Durand sells the Yoga Garden Game through YogaKids, where it is currently available for $19.

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