TabletopWars.com | Board Games, Card Games, Dice Games, Miniature Games, RPG, and More in the Philippines - Giro Galoppo -- Reviewing My Daughter's Favorite Games (No. 1)

Giro Galoppo is a family/children's game from Rio Grande Games and Selecta Spiel. It is for two to five players (though I've found it can be played solitaire fairly well) and each game runs about fifteen to thirty minutes.

Giro Galoppo is about horse racing. The players each take control of a horse and a jockey and tries to lead them to victory using the best of their abilities. It is a game that can be enjoyed by kids and adults alike.

COMPONENTS:
To anyone who's familiar with games produced by Selecta Speil, it'll come as no surprise that the game comes with stupendous wooden components. The game includes five wonderfully crafted wooden horses in various colors. Five wooden jockeys in various colors as well. It comes with a handful of great wooden "obstacles" to be used on the pace track, ranging from walls to fences. It comes with an excellent multilingual rulebook. A sturdy and colorful game board that represents the starting gate and the race track. And a deck of cards in five colors, one for each player/jockey. There are also some cardboard adornments you can use on the horses. All of these components amount to a wonderfully produced game.

Fact of the matter is, I could almost call these components "toys" because they are so well made.

GAMEPLAY:
The gameplay is devilishly simple, even my daughter played the game well enough when she was only three years of age. Now, at four, she's far better than she was before.

You start the game by picking a horse, a jockey and a deck of cards corresponding to the color of your jockey. These cards are numbered from one to six. You then randomly lay out the obstacles around the track. Obviously, this was one of the methods chosen by the designer to add some randomness to the game, and also add replayability.

During your turn, you choose one of your cards and lay it face down. Once every player has done so, the cards are simultaneously revealed and the lowest valued card goes first and so on. If you should ever land on a space that another player is on, that player is bumped backward one space, which could cause a chain reaction if another player was there and so on. If you land on an obstacle, you go back to where you started.

After all the players have moved, the cards are set to one side, and the players choose from the remaining five cards from their hand. Play resumes, cards are revealed, horses move, cards are set aside, cards are played (from the four remaining in your hand) and so on until you run out of cards, upon which you can reclaim ALL your cards from the discard pile and play resumes.

Whoever reaches the finish line first (or reaches farther down the finish line should two or more players finish at the same time) is the winner.

WHY CHILDREN WOULD LIKE IT:
As I said, the components come close to being "toys", added to the simplicity of the gameplay make this a game that most children would enjoy. My daughter first played it when she was three, and we still occasionally play it now that she's four. She sometimes even plays it solitaire, wherein she draws random cards for every other horse/jockey in the game (well, not exactly solitaire as she might play it with her dolls). She vastly enjoys playing with the "horsies" in and out of the game as well.

FINAL THOUGHTS:
As a family/children's game, I'd have to give Giro Galoppo two thumbs up... and I'm sure my daughter (and her dolls) would give their thumbs up as well. It is a fun and easy game that she enjoys with her friends and her family, and I enjoy playing it with her as well (as compared to being forced to sit thru a mind numbing game of Snakes & Ladders). If you want to get your kids interested in board games, Giro Galoppo is a good place to start.