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I’ve played Outfoxed! a healthy number of times. I have played with kids as young as four, and as old as seven. I suspect maybe it would get a little dry for kids who are 9 or 10 as it’s meant for ages 5+, but let’s see. Anyway, here’s why this game has been so successful and hit the table so frequently when I’m around little ones.

What’s It All About?

You can head over to BoardGameGeek and read countless reviews and even get the manual, so I’ll keep this short. In Outfoxed! you’ll team up with other players to roll cute dice to reveal suspects and move around the board to find clues that will help you to figure out which tricky fox is the thief. The game has a fun decoder tool that will let you know how the clue you found relates to the thief. The game is for 5+ and works great at that age in my experience. It plays 1-4 players, and it still plays well at two players.

Cooperative Team Game

My kids love cooperative board games. I can get them to play head to head in Hive Pocket, Sleeping Queens, and Kingdomino, but if given a choice they’ll pick the cooperative game very time. In fact, when I introduce a new game one of the first things they ask is, “is it a team game?” This is understandable as I don’t purposely lose games to let kids win, so it’s only natural that they would prefer playing something that we can win together without direct conflict.

Entertaining for Adults

Finding a game that is simple enough for a kid to play with a parent, yet not so simple that it bores the parent to death is always a struggle. Outfoxed! does a good job of being interesting enough to keep an adult entertained. It’s also fun for the adult to watch their kids work through the logic puzzle that’s required to identify the remaining viable suspects as more clues are discovered. It goes something like this…

Dad: “The decoder said that our thief doesn’t have a hat, but he does have a scarf. So could this fox with the scarf and the cane be the thief??”

Kid: “No!”

Dad: “Why?”

Kid: “Cause she has a hat!”

As more and more clues and suspects are revealed the deduction gets slightly more complicated. It’s good fun for a kid! It feels sort of like reverse Guess Who?

The kid will need to puzzle through to learn which suspects can be eliminated because they don’t match the information that has been revealed. Eventually, you’ll be able to narrow it down to a single suspect.

Colorful

Outfoxed! has great components. The dice are fun, the colors are bright, and the illustrations are all kid appropriate and obvious. The entire package is very pleasant. Even the box and insert are great!

Not too Long, Not too Short

Outfoxed! only takes 30-45 minutes to play through. A great length for kids and adults!

Adjustable Difficulty

When a dice roll fails, the fox moves closer to the edge of the board where he will make his escape and cause the players to lose the game. You can adjust how many spaces the fox will move on each failed dice roll to adjust the difficulty. We normally play by moving the fox 4 spaces when we miss the dice rolls. We found that moving 3 spaces was way too easy, and moving 5 spaces is pretty dicey (dad joke) but still doable.

Strongly Recommended

If you’re looking for a game to play cooperative with young kids, you can’t go wrong with Outfoxed!

Highly recommended. I like this so much I have purchased it multiple times to gift to others.

Try it out, might be fun!