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| A game of seek and find. |
Find Your Friends is a game of matching funny, smiling faces. This is not the Gizmo from the Wedgie and Gizmo book series, but he still look familiar. Can't put my finger on it.
The game board has 120 images (head shots) on it and there are 120 mystery cards, one to match each picture on the board. I'm not sure why they call them memory cards, since they are just the same head shots that you find on the board. Just as a side note, the cards are too big to place directly on the board for a matching type game.
The cards measure 2" x 2". There are 28 different characters, and some of the characters are on the board a couple of times and other characters appear a lot more frequently. For instance, Gizmo, the dog in the image above, appears 20 times. Each time an image with the same character appears, the image is different in some way. For instance, one particular boy appears with a birthday cake, with a tennis racket, with glasses, with a balloon and with a ball and glove. So even though there are multiple cards with the same face, you will be able to tell them apart because of different accessories.
The round tokens come in six different colors (blue, yellow, red, green, purple, orange) and there are eight of each color.
This is not the right game if you are thinking about working on recognizing facial expressions since they are all smiling.
Object:
Be the first person to place all eight of your tokens on the board.
Set up:
Open the board and place it in the middle of all the players. Each player takes eight tokens of a single color. Shuffle the mystery face cards and place them in a face-down pile near the board.
Play:
The first player will turn the top card face-up and place it where all players can see it. All players search the board at the same time to see who can be the first to find the exact face on the card and place one of their tokens on that square on the board. After it is found, the next player flips the top card and players race to find it. Play in this manner until someone has placed all of their tokens on the board and wins the game.
For me it was a whole lot easier to scan the board for squares with the matching background color and only stop on those squares that match my color and then look at the face, but you don't have to mention that short cut if you don't want to. Looking over 120 faces can be tedious, over and over, but the number will be fewer and fewer as squares are covered with tokens.
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| A quarter of the game board. |
Try this:
- Skip the game. Sort through the cards and pick out all of the dog. Then look over the board and find all the matching dogs.
- Skip the game. Play I Spy. Choose an accessory that you see a lot of on the board and say I SPY a tennis racket. Have the individual scan the board in an orderly manner, either horizontally or vertically. Count all the pictures you see with a tennis racket.
- Sort the cards into three piles - girl, boy, animal.
- Rehearse things about the picture that stand out before you start searching. I found that I had to keep looking back at the picture because they all start to look the same at some point. But if I said something like "pink background, girl, book" I was more apt to remember what I was looking for.
- Don't cover the images with a token, let the person who found the image have the card instead. This will be a harder game as the number of images on the board that will be scanned each turn will remain the same.
- Work on visual discrimination, figure ground, visual scanning, manual dexterity, executive functioning skills, process skills, socialization skills, play and leisure exploration and participation
In the box: 48 tokens, game board, 120 mystery cards
