Review: Sagebooks Treasure Box Game Cards

This post was sponsored by Sagebooks. All opinions are mine and mine alone. I was also provided a few review copies of the game cards.

Before we continue, let’s make it clear that these are NOT flashcards. If you’re hoping to use them as flashcards, you’ll be disappointed. Though the cards have the characters on one side, it also has the pinyin and a sample sentence on the same side. So unless you’re willing to cover up the pinyin (or your kid can’t read that yet), it won’t work well as a flashcard.

With that said, here’s my latest review of the Treasure Box Game Cards. I’ve had them for several months and though I may have done a Facebook Live for the unboxing (I can’t remember, sorry!!), I didn’t get a chance to check out the cards in depth until recently. Yes, because I’m LAZY.

But because I’m lazy, I buy a lot of things to make my life easier and this set would be included in the things that make my life easier section. So, without further ado, here’s more info about this set of game cards.

Product: Sagebooks Basic Chinese 500 Treasure Box Game Cards Sets 1-5 遊戲認讀卡(繁體)/Traditional or Simplified

Price: $31.08USD + shipping

How to Purchase:  Sagebooks

Company: Sagebooks

Ages: 3+

Level: Beginner

Description: Laminated study cards for the 150 new vocabulary introduced in the Sagebooks Basic Chinese 500 Treasure Boxes (Traditional/Simplified); Color coded same as each color coded series; each set comes in individual packet; Character with stroke order and sample sentence on one side, Picture or written clues on the other side; 3″x 2″;

Sample Pictures:

5 Minute Review: As expected from Sagebooks, the cards are of a high quality. They’re laminated and should withstand regular play well enough. (Will it withstand the crunchy fists of a toddler? NO. Ask me how I know.) The card boxes are handy although I’m not sure they will survive my children because packaging rarely emerges the victor in those encounters.

I’m not sure if the cards come with written instructions (they did not when I received them) and even though the online version of instructions is needed and helpful, I prefer to have instructions on paper and physically in front of me. This could be solved easily if I would just print them out myself, but um, effort.

But you WILL need instructions for some of the sets (especially Set 2 and Set 5) because they are not always immediately apparent from just looking at the sets.

The front side with the stroke order is easy to figure out. You can have your child trace the characters in proper order with their fingers and it’s a nice way to add a kinesthetic element to the learning process (similar to the tracing characters at the beginning of each Sagebooks lesson in the Sagebooks Basic Chinese 500 sets).

As for the games, they are mostly related to matching and sorting into categories – pretty standard fare. The graphics are high quality and pretty. What I found most impressive, however, were the game concepts for Sets 4 and 5.

In Set 4, the idea is to match cards with their opposite/mirror-image to either make a symmetrical picture or pattern. In Set 5, the goal is to read a set of clues and then find the picture that fits all the clues the best.

Glow Worm (5) still loves to match cards and he had a fun time doing so. You can see him playing the first game set in the following video:

While the matching games are fun for younger kids, at some point, that becomes boring for my older children and that’s why I love the harder ideas in Sets 4 and 5. My older two (~9 and 7) really liked to read the clues and figure out the matching card and that was far more engaging for them than just matching pictures.

It makes sense that more difficult activities are saved for the latter sets and the simpler activities are for the beginning sets. After all, if we are following the set development schedule for the sets, your children will be older and ready for more challenging games when they’re at the end of the series.

Overall, are these game cards vital to your children’s experience of Sagebooks and the Treasure Boxes? No. But are they a fun activity that will reinforce the 150 new characters in the Treasure Box sets as well as challenge your children as they grow and change developmentally? Yes.