There are games you play, and games you get lost in. Fishy Fish from French brand Djeco belongs to the latter category. The game boards teem with fish, divers, seaweed, and sea creatures, and the fabric bag contains two hundred tokens, each with a detail you need to find among all the activity. As soon as the first token comes out of the bag, everyone leans over the board and silence falls over the table.
Clever about this search game: the four boards are interchangeable. You arrange them in any combination next to each other, so the image looks different every game, and no one can rely on what they found last time. With 200 search tasks, it also takes a long time before you've seen everything. Meanwhile, children practice their eye for detail, their concentration, and their patience, and with these kinds of search games, it never feels like practice; everything happens naturally: that is learning through play.
Fishy Fish is a classic game idea in a new guise: the illustrations are entirely by Djeco, and the boards, tokens, and box are made from FSC-certified paper and cardboard. You can play it alone or with four, from about five years old, and it's one of those games where adults at the table naturally keep looking along. The fabric bag keeps all the tokens neatly together, even if the box starts to wear out after a few years.