Designed and illustrated by Chih-Fan Chen, and published by Homosapiens Lab, Monster Hide and Seek offers a simple but fascinating twist on the traditional picking-up-doubles memory game that we probably all played as children.
The game comprises a deck of 25 monster cards and three candy cards. You lay them out in a 7 x 4 grid and flip the monster cards to find and collect doubles. So far so familiar. The twist, however, with Monster Hide and Seek is that all the monster cards are double-sided, in that they have monsters on both sides of the card. In some cases it's the same monster on both sides but mostly it's a different monster. In this game you only collect the monsters as a pair by matching the side you flipped (you don't score a pair matching a flipped card with any of the other face-up cards).
It surprised us just how much the double-sided cards alters this otherwise basic Pelmanism game. If your flipped cards don't make a pair, you don't return the cards to their previous state, and the visual 'noise' of having face-up monster cards makes it much harder to keep track of the all-important flip sides.
Another small tweak in the game is the inclusion of 'candy cards'. Instead of flipping a pair of monster cards on your turn, you can instead take a candy card. That'll be worth two points at the end of the game (the same as a pair) but taking the candy card requires you to flip all the cards orthogonally adjacent: so up to four cards, depending on the position of the candy in the grid. This can give an advantage to other players if they are attentive.
If you've children who enjoy playing picking-up-double/pair-matching memory games then Monster Hide and Seek is an obvious next step game. And the cute 'monsters' are unlikely to be giving even younger children any nightmares.