Before there was Elmo and his world and his goldfish Dorothy and his ticklish dolls, there was Grover. Grover was always my favorite, and now he’s been brought to the iPhone with Grover’s Number Special.
This $2.99 iPhone app is a simple game aimed at preschool age kids. In Grover’s Number Special, players get to help Grover as a waiter serve up specials to a cranky customer (whose complaints are greeted by Grover’s sunny, air-headed silliness). The customer orders a special, Grover tells the player what the ingredients are, and then the player tilts the iPhone to catch the correct number of ingredients.
The game features, thankfully, the actual puppets in video, rather than some cartoonish version of them. The specials and ingredients are not drawings either, but rather photographs of the items.
This isn’t a complicated game. Your $2.99 is buying a sweet, simple counting game that will keep a preschooler busy and occupied, and learning, while waiting in line at the grocery store or hanging out in the backseat while you run some errands.
Grover’s Number Special was created by a partnership between Sesame Workshop and IDEO, a pretty cool design firm. And though some may think $2.99 is a big price to pay for such a simple game, I’m happy pay it to help support the work of Sesame Workshop.
