Playing Pexesso With a 2 Year Old

For all intents and purposes, pexesso is a simple game to test your memory. You have a lot of square cards that look the same from one side and have some sort of pretty picture on the face of the card.

There are always two cards with the same picture. You put all the cards face down, and then take turns revealing two cards for all to see, and collecting them if they form a pair. If they differ, you put them back where you found them, face down again. Who finds more pairs wins. Usually, if you find a pair, you get to take another turn right away, which can lead to really satisfying collection streak, and speeds up the game quite a bit.

Maybe you don’t call it pexesso, but you probably played it when younger, and you might still play it if you enjoy to challenge your memory.

Why would you try to play it with a two year old? Two year-olds are not well known for their fondess of concentration and sitting still in one place. But it happened we were at a wedding with our two year old daughter, and she and bunch of other kids grew bored, and we needed to entertain them for ~10 or so minutes, and simple pexesso actually stood up to the task.

The set we had, was made for ~3 year olds, and instead of paper cards had small wooden tiles. Only 10 pairs of them, with simple animal drawings. This gave us a good starting point. Second, all of the 5 kids played collaboratively, with me filling the role of a referee of a sort. Kids still took turns, but sometimes out-of order, everybody discussing where could one or the other animal be hiding, cheering on every successful find. And sometimes even unsuccessful, if a previously unseen animal was revealed. My referee job was mostly to cheer them on, and to make sure none of them feels left behind in the chaotic turn order they created among themselves.

All in all, solid 10 minutes of good fun, and a nice distraction for the few kids whose parents needed to take care of something or other.

We actually tried to play a real, by-the-book game shortly after. It took few tries for her to understand the concept of taking turns. To keep things simple, we didn’t use the winning-streak rule. The 20 tile game was at the time testing the limits of her concentration, but she still seemed to have fun, and I didn’t mind that we actually didn’t finish most of the games.