‘Can we play the monsters game?’ is a phrase I’ve been hearing a lot recently from Athena. Smelly Wellies from Orchard Toys is what she’s referring to and it’s a matching/memory game designed for kids of two and up. You can play in pairs, three or four people and there are various ways to make the game harder or easier dependent on the skill levels of the players.
The game comes with four game boards, but if you’ve only got two players you could have two each. Each board has three monsters on it with space for six pairs of wellies. The aim of the game is to give each monster a matching pair of wellies before your opponents. You can play by picking three red wellies to place on your game card and then taking it in turns to pick up green backed ones to see if they match your monsters wellies, or for a more tricky game set all the wellies out face down and take it in turns to attempt to pick up pairs. Athena doesn’t quite ‘get’ this part, hating to only pick up one at a time but we’ll continue to try it each time we play so she gets used to the more tricky aspect!
We’ve also played a more relaxed version of the game with Arlo, with the wellies face up and we’ll ask him to find the wellies with the strawberries on, or find all the yellow wellies; then we ask him to put them on the monster wearing a jumper or the blue monster. Because of all the fun patterns there is more scope to the game than you might first thing!
Athena isn’t a very good loser just yet, but we’re definitely not the sort of parents who let their kids win just to avoid them being upset! I think as we play it a bit more and Arlo gets the hang of matching pairs it will be a great game to keep these two occupied on their own, although it’s quite a fun game to play at any age to be fair!
Available from Amazon & all good toy retailers. You can view the full range of Matching & Memory games from Orchard Games here.
We were sent this game for the purpose of this review, all words and opinions are my own. Post contains affiliate links.
I do love Orchard Toys, great fun for all the family (although being a good lover is something that is learnt over time).