Have you ever heard the word ‘edutainment’?

Back in the early 90s, games were being lambasted left, right and centre – for being nothing but violence filled wastes of time, rotting the minds of kids the world over.

So game publishers began bringing educational games to consoles and computers; not that this was a new idea – check out Donkey Kong Jr. Math for an early example, or even the Atari 2600’s Basic Math (later renamed Fun With Numbers) if you want to go back even earlier.

However, with games like the Carmen Sandiago titles – featuring historical and geography-based themes – or even educational titles such as Mario Is Missing (notably licensed but not published or developed by Nintendo), the learning element was almost a stealth aspect of the game.

It was the video game equivalent of hidden vegetables on a toddler’s plate.

Gaiaton almost feels like that, though the game element – called Lifeforce Battle – feels very tacked on.

These are educational cards first and foremost, beautifully produced with wonderful photography and great facts, but just a single stat – Lifespan – used in the ‘game’.

Basically, whoever has the highest maximum Lifespan wins an encounter – except the animal’s colour type can also have an effect to either double the Lifespan of cards or create a stalemate.

Which feels fairly arbitrary.

Winning an encounter sees your card placed face down near you as a ‘Bullpen’ and losing means placing a card face down in an ‘Expired’ pile.

If you run out of cards in your deck, shuffle your Bullpen and use that to draw from – your hand will always have five cards.

If all of your cards end up in your Expired pile, you lose.

It feels like an even less involved version of Top Trumps, with the potential for games to drag out unnecessarily too.

There’s also the issue that the rules state you must always have a hand of five cards – but of course, in order for all cards to end up in the Expired pile, this isn’t possible.

The game element of Gaiaton just feels lazily slapped together so the creators can claim that their admittedly gorgeously produced cards can be played with as well as collected – however thin the game may be.

It’s a bit cheeky of the creators to claim that there’s a deckbuilding element too, as it just seems that you gather 50 cards in a deck which is shared between players – each player takes 25 cards at the beginning of the game from the ‘built’ deck of 50 – so it’s not as if you can stack the deck with cards to give yourself an advantage, as these may just end up in your opponent’s half of the deck anyway.

It’s a shame that a few more stats and a more thoughtful card game element hasn’t been applied to these cards; as it is, they’re nicely designed and substantial as an educational tool – but they’re almost the reverse of those ‘edutainment’ games we began discussing at the outset: well produced, primarily educational, yet with little entertainment value.

Gaiaton is soon to launch on Kickstarter; if the set – which features stunning holographic cards, different starter decks and booster packs – still piques your interest, you can check it out here.