Munching Monsters Card Game

Whenever I have a new book coming out, I try to come up with a related game, puzzle or activity to go in the games section of my website. For Here Be Monsters I decided to make a card game that readers could print out and make for themselves. It’s a “pirate memory game” – a phrase that I’ll always associate with the very funny Little Britain sketch that you can watch here.

Click here to go to my site and download the game

It’s one of those games where you collect cards by find matching pairs, but to make it a little different and hopefully a little more fun I’ve added some extra monster cards that change the way the game is played. When he first started working on the book, illustrator Poly Bernatene produced a set of individual character sketches of each of the pirates and he sent me these to use on the cards. The book is also being published in Spain and Argentina and Poly is producing a Spanish version of the game which will be available through his own web site.

I thought it might be fun to shoot a video showing how to play the game, so I asked next-door-neigbours Finn and Seth to me to help me make one. The book is dedicated to Seth and I gave him a set of the playing cards so that he and Finn could practice playing it before we shot the video. We filmed ourselves playing the game a couple of times and Seth won both times!

If you're wondering how we did it, the front shot of the video was taken with a camera mounted atop a kitchen cupboard and the overhead shot was taken simultaneously with my iPhone which was cantilevered out from another cupboard using a timber joist and G-clamp as shown below. Then the two shots were cut together using Final Cut on an iMac.

Click here to find out about HERE BE MONSTERS,

the picture book the game is based on