We tend to visit our local car boot sale a couple of times and month and picked up the game jitterbugs for £1 as we wanted something my 4 year old and 18 month old could play together. It's aimed at children between the ages of 3 and 6 but my youngest is very capable of playing it and thus it makes a very nice family game.

When you open the box you're faced with a big plastic base, 12 jitterbugs (little bugs with a magnet on the top) and 4 spider wands that are basically a handle with a leaf halfway down and a spider on the bottom that has a magnet underneath. There is a button on the top of the base that will make the base vibrate and the game can begin as soon as you've placed the jitterbugs onto the base. I should note that the game requires one C battery.

There are two different ways to play the game which are described on the box but it's possible to play it in a variety of different ways too. One of these ways described on the box are to catch all 3 of your coloured bugs before your opponent catches theirs but this version is a little hard for my 18month old so we tend to keep this to just my 4 year old and I. The other way described on the box can be played with my youngest and it's as simple as trying to catch as many bugs as you can! This is a bit of a dud if you only have 2 players as it's likely that you'll both catch 6 bugs each and there will be no winner but it's a bit easier to win with 3+ players as the wands can get tangled or you can block them from getting any bugs.

We also play another way that my 4 year old likes and that's to get your opponents bugs before they do and award points at the end for each bug caught. For example, an opponents bug would get 3 points, one of your own bugs would get 2 points and a bug that has no owner would get 1 point. This is a fantastic way of helping your little ones tell their colours, count higher than the possible 12 and show them to use their imagination to come up with new games to try. We've also played it with awarding points to a colour (blue 4, red, 3 etc) and adding them at the end to see who has won. She loves doing this and is trying to think of new ways to play as we speak.

I find children get bored with games very quickly and it's for this reason that we make up our own games to play with what we have so we're not constantly buying new games that take up storage space we don't have! This game of jitterbugs is perfect for it and it can be as simple or as complicated as you want to make it. It's supposed to cost £10 in ELC but ours was a bargain price of £1 and in perfect condition too. The battery isn't included in the price but it can be purchased from ELC or if games and toys are constantly running out of batteries then you'll have a stash just waiting at home for a time like this!