Animal Mix and Match

What you need

10-20 images of different animals printed on A4, then cut down the middle longways and pasted onto card - download resource

Intro

Wouldn’t it be great if we could mix and match animals to create new species? Something David Attenborough and Dr Frankenstein might contemplate if they ever had tea together. How shocked would the hare be if the tortoise suddenly had a cheetah’s legs?

This is a fun game and can be played in a few different ways. You can either find matching tops and bottoms or create bizarre new animals.

This activity is great for 1-on-1 or with a group of up to 4 people

The Activity

Invite the players around a table
Lay the animal images face down and mix them up. Have the top halves of the animals on 1 side of the table and the bottom halves on the other.

Activity 1

Ask the first person to choose 2 cards, turn them over and see if they match
If the cards match, that person wins the pair and play moves to the next person
The game continues until all animals are matched and the person with the most pairs wins

Activity 2

Ask each person in turn to choose 1 top half and 1 bottom half
Invite the group to decide what animal they have created and give it an exciting new name
Share and encourage ideas about where the new animal might live, what it would eat and whether it would make a good pet

Activity 3 (with 3+ players)

Shuffle the images and deal the cards out to each player
The first player selects another player at random and asks if they have a matching part. For example, if they have a cat’s head, they would ask “Do you have a cat’s body?”
If the player has the matching card, they give the card to the first player to complete the match. If not, play moves on to the next person.
This is repeated until all the cards are matched. The player with the most matches wins