The Sevi Daisy Memory Game is basically shaped like a giant flower press. It comes with six printed sheets that have memory picture pairs at varying levels of difficulty ranging from sheets with a variety of different objects to sheets with the same object but of different colors and backgrounds. When you make a match, rather than keeping the cards, you get to keep your daisy pegs. It can be played with other players or alone.


Sevi has elevated the standard memory game to a higher level. Children can work their way from the simplest of the picture sheets (those with a variety of objects) to the more complex (finding two houses that are the same color and one the same color background), making this memory game challenging for many years of play, and of course the sheets can be rotated to any of four orientations, so there's really no memorizing where items are in relation to one another except for savants. I particularly like the fact that the printed sheets gradually increase in difficulty level - the first level of objects that are all the same is mice in a colored background and just the background is different. The most difficult level has the child matching both object and background colors - pink houses with blue backgrounds, for example, on a sheet with varying house/background color combinations.


I've always found card memory games to be somewhat clumsy in the amount of space they command when set up - it's hard for kids to manuever around them or to reach all the cards. The Sevi Daisy Memory Game has changed all that with it's neat 10" game board. It's easy for Z, at age four, to reach across all sides of the board and she loves to play it with us or by herself. Putting the board together and getting it set up for game play provides some valuable manipulative skills practice (putting the top board and the selected sheet on the pegs and putting the daisies in the holes) and of course, the congnitive skills that come with any game of memory. It's compelling enough that kids will be excited to play by themselves or play with a partner. (While the daisies may seem "girly" the printed sheets that provide the main part of the game are gender-neutral.)

The quality of this game is beautiful - it's handcrafted of wood in Italy and paints and varnishes are non-toxic. At $50, it's a pricey choice but one that can become an heirloom to be saved and passed down to grandkids.