Floral Loto game (Jacques and Son).jpg

"Floral Loto: A New Round Game", box lid with sticker [image info]

game contents [image info]

A Floral Loto game in a wooden box with sliding stickered lid, produced by Jacques and Son of London, apparently some time between 1870 and 1900.

Contents

The game is essentially a Victorian "educational" version of "Bingo" – each player takes a card showing images of ten flowering plants, after which smaller oval "coins" are drawn which each give the details of a flower, as pure text. The object is to call out when a drawn coin matches one of the ten images on your player card, be given the coin to cover the corresponding image on the card, and continue until one player has filled all ten places on their card (at which point they win).

The background idea of Floral Loto was that players would learn to associate plant images with their names ... and to force them to memorise the names of the plants, the pictures had no associated text, and the text coins had no associated pictures. The instructions sheet did include listings of the plant names for each picture card (which would be necessary for adjudicating in the game), but the list (deliberately?) used small text and was quite fiddly to use, so that players would need to learn the names so that they could avoid continuously referring to the instructions, in order to to keep the game running smoothly.

Dating

Online sources date versions of the game that seem identical to this one to 1870, or to the date range 1870-1900.

External links

• Example of the game Floral Lotto - new round game, ~1870 (gamesboard.org.uk)
• Floral Lotohttp://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O26613/floral-lotto-a-new-round-card-game-john-jaques-son/ Floral Lotto, a New Round Game (1872), (collections.vam.ac.uk)
• Floral Loto (John Jacques edition), 1900 (boardgamegeek.com)
• Floral Loto (National Trust Collections (nationaltrustcollections.org.uk)