Teaching kids to appreciate where food comes from and how it comes to be will play an important role in raising a generation able to live more sustainably than ours does. Haba's In the Country links farmyard activities, simple recipe building for kids, and the company's time-tested use of high quality yet simple wooden game pieces to create a captivating game that helps kids think about how their food gets to the table while helping them to develop some complex "habits of thought" at the same time.

Like many Haba games, In the Country can function along a continuum of cooperative or competitive play. Players collect recipe cards which show a series of ingredients needed to produce a meal or dish, ranging from the simple (a snack of carrots, an egg, and a glass of milk) to the complex (a piece of carrot cake). Here's where things get interesting: Each recipe card shows not only the cookbook-level "ingredients" for the dish, but the chain or process that brings that ingredient into being, and that's where the farm comes in.

The farm features a cow pasture and a chicken pen, each supplied with wooden animals; a vegetable garden, wheat and grass fields each supplied with thick cardstock supplies (rows of carrots, bushels of wheat, and bales of hay); plus a dairy area to make cheese and a mill to grind wheat into flour, all surrounding a farmhouse that serves as the players' home base and harvest drop-off area.


Rolls of the die allow players to move around the board in pursuit of raw ingredients, their steps measured in lengths of a cardstock tractor (rolling a "3", for example - the highest roll available - allows the player to move three tractor lengths, and three tractors are provided so the player can string them together to define their path). That's an interesting feature of the game in itself, as it allows players to roam freely over an open 2-D space in measured steps rather than moving along designated "spaces." (It's this kind of small, unassuming innovation, one or two of which can be found in almost any Haba game, that makes games produced by the company so interesting to us as reviewers, and make it clear these games are designed on an individual basis, rather than applying a predefined formula.)

Some die rolls result in animals moving around on predefined spaces of their own, rotating around in their pens and moving closer and further from the reach of the approaching players. Wheat and carrots can be collected from their positions on the board, and the wheat taken to the mill to be turned into flour. To get a small wooden bottle of milk (which can be used in its original form or taken to the dairy to be turned into cheese), a player must go to the hay field, collect a bale of hay, and then bring it to the cows, who are moving around in their pen based on a die roll; to get a wooden egg, a player collects wheat from the fields, carries it to the mill to grind it into grain (an end ingredient in many of the recipes in itself) and then takes it to the chickens, who are similarly mobile, to exchange for an egg.

It's funny to write out because it sounds complex. But unlike some kids' (or adult) games with overly complex actions that keep players returning to the rules to figure out what comes next, gameplay in In the Country is very simple; its complexity lies in planning one's activities, guided by the simple diagrams on every recipe card that show all the steps necessary to produce the final dish. And this is a very good and interesting kind of complexity for young children; independent of the fact that they are being invited to think in a far more comprehensive way about where their food comes from, they are also asked to think of approaching a goal in stages and putting multiple parts together to achieve it.

Z has enjoyed this game very much since sometime in her third year. Interestingly, it taps into the natural thrill children have in cooking food, despite the fact that the collection of ingredients is never physically transformed into a representation of the final dish; none of that seems to matter, and Z seems almost as proud to be "baking bread" in the game as in real life. We played In the Country for several months in our own home and then donated it to a local cafe, where we occasionally spend a long, relaxed lunch eating hearty, simple organic meals in the perfect setting for this game!

In the Country sells for about $36 on Amazon.com.