This Christmas, don’t expect to see Sir David Attenborough balancing an octopus on top of a warthog while trying to mate a toucan with a shark. Although if the BBC needs a festive ratings boost, it’s a thought.

You might see it happen on your kitchen table, though, if you own Beasts of Balance. The new augmented board game sits somewhere in between Jenga and Skylanders, with your efforts to build a tower of animals reflected in the digital world of its companion app.

The £69 game started life as a project called Fabulous Beasts, co-created by a group of eight to 12 year olds with a British startup called Sensible Objects. One £168k crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter later – plus a name change after a trademark run-in with the Hollywood Studio behind the Fantastic Beasts film – and Beasts of Balance was born.

The aim of the game is to build your tower of animals as high as possible. In the box, you get a battery-powered plinth on top of which you build your stack, an NFC reader to “scan” the Beasts of Balance pieces, and Bluetooth to connect to the companion app for Android or iOS.

You also get a set of durable plastic “artefacts” including six beasts: a bear, an eagle, a shark, a warthog, a toucan and an octopus. They’re colourful and deliberately minimalist representations of the animals, similar to the characters in Crossy Road, but less blocky.

Beasts of Balance blends physical and digital gameplay.

Other pieces include crosses and “migration” arrows; elemental artefacts representing combinations of fire, earth, water and air; and “miracle” artefacts that are this game’s equivalent of power-ups.

Single or multiplayer games

Whether you’re playing alone or with others, Beasts of Balance involves stacking the artefacts one at a time to form a tower on top of the plinth, with the twist that as you place them, they appear and have an effect on-screen in the app.

For example, in a two-player game: if the first player scans then places the bear; the second scans then balances the octopus on top of it; and then the first player scans and balances a cross artefact, the two beasts spawn a Pawpoise, which is a combination of the two.

Play progresses from there: the on-screen beasts have a semi-random number of points attached to them, which decrease if a beast is subsequently played that scores a higher number of points. Lower beast scores can be increased by using matching elemental artefacts, such as earth for the land dwelling bear, to try and boost their scores past the highest ranked animal.

The fun comes from finding out what different combinations of beasts and other artefacts do, with new animals stored in the app’s built-in bestiary to track your progress.

When the stack topples, you have a few seconds to reconstruct it before an on-screen volcano erupts, but if you fail it’s game over – and a check to see if your points total beat your previous best effort.

Dragging screen-glued kids into the augmented world

Beasts of Balance is designed as a family game that appeals to the current generation of kids who’ve grown up with tablets, but which also draws them out into tabletop cooperative gameplay with physical objects.

Is the core gameplay mechanic enough to keep those children interested beyond the first few games? It has been for my seven- and nine year-old sons, although not for the reason I expected.

They’re quite interested in filling empty slots in Beasts of Balance’s bestiary, but much keener on uncovering new and better ways to stack its beasts and artefacts, trying new orientations and combinations to build ever-bigger and more-stable stacks.

The cooperative gameplay is one of Beasts of Balance’s selling points, certainly for parents looking for a game to get their family round a table working together, rather than sparking arguments from over-competitive instincts.

The flipside here is that when my two children were playing together, they still managed to argue – usually about whose “fault” it was when the stack toppled.

To put it another way, in a two-player game of Jenga, when one player topples the tower, the other player is the winner, and happy. In a two-player game of Beasts of Balance, the risk is that when the stack falls, both players are furious.

Whether that says more about the inability of my sons to lose graciously rather than a failing in Beasts of Balance I’m not sure.

Sensible Objects has a few ideas to keep the game interesting in the longer term. It’s already selling two new beasts as £15 add-ons: the “Omnibeast” and the “Lalnalion” – the latter designed by YouTube gaming crew Yogscast.

New artefacts like the Lalnalion will bring new gameplay to Beasts of Balance.

There’s also a £20 “DIY Artefacts” pack of RFID tags, which children can stick to their own toys to make them part of the game. Future updates to the app could also add new gameplay modes, including a more competitive option.

Beasts of Balance isn’t cheap at £69, so that ability for digital updates to breathe more life into its physical components will be important if it’s to provide value for money in the longer term.

The price may put some parents off what is an unknown brand, but early adopters will find lots to enjoy in Beasts of Balance – not to mention getting a sense of how digital and physical play can interweave in a way that gets families laughing together, rather than staring into separate screens.