Find Otto With Kids: How to Play Together at Home and in Class

A painted world full of animals in hats and scarves, one of whom is hiding: Find Otto could have been designed for sharing with children. It is free, it runs in the browser with nothing to install and no sign-up, and the search is the same for everyone each day.

This guide is for parents, grandparents and teachers who want to play it with a child or a whole class. It covers how to share one search between several people, how to read the clue together, and how to make the most of the picture once Otto is found.

Very little of the game is words. The clue is one short sentence, and every part of it also appears as a chip with a swatch of its colour, so a child who cannot read yet can still hunt for "the pink one" and "the stripy green and orange one". The start screen shows the day's Otto standing on a little planet with his name over his head, so everyone knows exactly what they are looking for before the search begins.

There is no time limit and nothing to lose. Misses only add seconds, a tap on the grass or the sky costs nothing at all, and if the search runs long, a child can stop and come back later to the same picture.

The game gives each device one try a day, or each account if you are signed in. That makes it naturally a shared activity: one picture, one search, several pairs of eyes. At home that might be a phone passed round the breakfast table or a tablet on a lap; in a classroom, the interactive whiteboard or a projector. The picture is large and pans and zooms with a finger, a mouse or the keyboard's arrow and + and - keys.

Giving everyone a job keeps a group search from turning into everyone shouting at once:

• The clue reader reads the clue aloud and checks each candidate against it.
• The driver pans and zooms. Swap drivers from day to day.
• The map keeper watches the small map at the bottom left, which shows the part of the picture on screen, and keeps track of where the group has already looked.
• The tapper taps an animal only when the group agrees it matches every line.

With younger children, simpler is better: one child drives, everyone else points.

Before pressing Start, look at the day's Otto on the start screen and describe him together. What animal is he? What colour is his hat? What colours are the stripes on his scarf? What is he carrying? Then read the clue sentence aloud, slowly, one item at a time.

Make sure everyone hears the card's one rule: Only one animal in the picture matches every line. The crowd is full of decoys that match some of the clue, animals of the right kind in the wrong scarf, or the wrong animal in the right outfit, so a good search is a careful one. During the search, a tap on the clue at the top left opens the whole clue again.

The decoys turn every "There he is!" into a small exercise in checking. Is it the right animal? Is that the right hat? Are those the right two colours on the scarf? Children quickly learn that the animal in Otto's whole outfit is not him if it is a mouse and he is a cat.

The game backs this up gently. A wrong tap on an animal flashes Not Otto · +10s and adds 10 seconds, shown beside the clock, which gives a child a reason to check every line before tapping without any real penalty. Taps on anything that is not an animal are ignored completely, so small children exploring the picture with their fingers do not rack up misses. How to play Find Otto has every rule if you want to explain them in full.

For a group, split the picture up. Zoom in until the animals are big enough to tell apart, then give each child a strip of the picture, left to right, top to bottom. The small map shows where each strip is. When someone thinks they have found him, the whole group checks the clue before anyone taps.

For two children at home, one can search while the other holds the clue card and asks the questions, then they swap halfway.

The best part of Find Otto with children is often what you find on the way. Every world tells a few little stories in its crowd, the way a busy picture book does: a queue for ice cream, a brass band, balloons getting away, a sausage dog on the loose, a goose chasing someone, a hat blowing off. Things move, too: smoke curls from chimneys, flags flap, boats bob and a few animals stroll up and down. Every clock in the picture even shows the real time.

Some prompts that work well:

• What is happening here? Pick a story in the crowd and tell it together.
• Where are we? A harbour, a fair, a snowy village, a crystal cave. What would you hear, or smell?
• What time of day is it? Some days are set at dusk or night, in fog, rain or a snowstorm.
• Who is behind whom? Otto usually stands partly hidden behind another animal, a stall or a tree, which is good practice for words like behind, beside and in front of.
• What is that called? The clothes include dungarees, waistcoats, ponchos, berets, deerstalkers and three-cornered hats, and there are 62 animals who can play Otto, from a hedgehog to a walrus.

After the find, Look around closes the result card so you can explore the whole picture at your leisure.

If the search drags, the Hint key drains the colour out of the whole picture except the part Otto is in. It costs a full minute on your time, and each of the three hints a day closes in further. A child-sized way to use it is to make it a vote: has everyone checked their strip? Is it worth a minute? The drain itself is fun to watch. How Find Otto's hints work explains what each one leaves.

And giving up is fine. Give up shows where Otto was, circled on the picture, which is its own small reward: everyone gets to see where he was hiding and who was standing in front of him.

A new Otto hides at midnight UTC: in the small hours in Europe, so a new picture is ready by breakfast, in the morning in India, Japan and Australia, and in the evening of the day before in the Americas. Because there is only one try a day, it makes a short, fixed ritual rather than an endless screen: a few minutes over breakfast, a starter at the beginning of a lesson, or a reward at the end of the week's last one.

The result card keeps a family's or a class's record on that device: days played, days found and the best time. The Share key copies a short result that never gives away where he was, handy for sending to a grandparent who is playing the same picture somewhere else.

• Logic: the clue is a set of conditions that must all be true at once. Ask the class which single line rules out the most animals.
• Describing: one child describes an animal in the crowd in clue form, the others find it.
• Time zones: why does the new Otto arrive at midnight UTC, and what time is that where a pen pal lives?
• Data: once enough people have found the day's Otto, the result card shows a curve of the day's times with a pin at yours. What does the curve's shape say about how hard the day was?

Whatever you do with it, keep it light. Misses are only seconds, a hint is only a minute, and tomorrow there is a whole new world. Today's is waiting at Find Otto.