Monster Mash

Find sets of monsters and be the first to get rid of all your cards.

How do you play Monster Mash?

Place the squishable monster in the midddle of the table and put three monster cards around it.  These are the start of the monster stacks.  Deal the remainder of the cards equally between the players.

You're ready to play.

Take it in turns flipping a monster from your deck of cards and placing it onto one of the three stacks.  You can mash the squishy monster by putting your hand on it if you see either three monsters of the same colour, three cards with the same background colour or three of the same monster type but with different colours.  
If you get the set right you can give some or all of the monster stacks to the other players.  Get it wrong and you have to take all of the monster stacks - eeek.

You'll discover there are multi-coloured monsters too that can match with any colour increasing the need to think flexibly.

The winner of the game is the first person to get rid of all of their cards.

What can you learn?

- to increase your perception speed and reaction speed
- to link images to words and their starting letters
- to focus and refocus attention
- recognition of patterns
- improve working memory
- to manage in changing situations.

THINKercise twist

- Instead of playing until one player has no cards you could set a timer to play for 5 or 10 minutes.  The winner is the person with the least cards at the end of that time.

- Instead of giving monster stacks to a chosen player the cards could be split between the remaining players.  This reduces the amount that players can pick on each other if this is desired.