Oooooh what a lovely pair! Today we’re sharing our thoughts on the pear-fectly punny Snatching Pears – a fruity twist on the well known, well loved matching memory game.

Game overview:

👥 2 to 6 players
⌛ 15-30 minutes
🧠 7 years+

As with the usual matching game, tiles are shuffled and spread face down across the table. Then players take it in turn to flip two tiles upright. If the pears are a pair, great! You keep the matching pair and have another go. If the pears don’t match, the tiles get flipped back down and your turn ends.

If the pears don’t match, BUT the tiles have the same coloured background, then it’s pear snatching time! The first players to grab a squishy pear from the centre of the table take a pear token (there’s always one less squishy pear than the number of players). Then play moves on as normal.

The game ends once all the pear pairs have been found. Each matching pair of tiles you’ve collected is worth 2 points, and each pear-grabbing token is worth 1 point. The player with the most points wins!

Our first impressions:

• Being absolutely honest, I went into this game with low expectations, thinking it wasn’t my type of game. But I was pleasantly surprised! We both had a great time. The artwork is simple but fun, and we really liked the puns – a few gave me a proper giggle.

• We played 2 player games and it worked well (although the single squishy pear looked a bit sad on the table!). We could imagine it being even more chaotic and fun at higher player counts.

• Although you can’t win on pear grabbing alone, I liked having the option to gain extra points outside of matching pairs because it helped compensate for my terrible memory (Matt still won best 2 out of 3 though!)

• The rules are simple and the game is quick to set up and teach. With the matching background rule, we thought there could be a potential for people to continuously pick the same tiles to stack up tokens (as there’s no rule to say you can’t keep picking the same tiles). In reality, we doubt that would happen, as other players would clock on quick and be ready to grab the pear before you do.

• The squishy pears squeak when squeezed, and the sound is very akin to a dog’s squeaky toy. Our lab was very interested in it – dog owners be warned!

Final thoughts:

We were pleasantly surprised with Snatching Pears – we had a lot of fun with the cheeky puns and the snatching twist. While it’s fun for all ages and groups, gamers and non-gamers alike, families are likely to get the most out of it over time. If our baby was a few years older we could see ourselves playing this a lot together. And dare we say, it’s a great option to play with the family over the festive period!

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This game was kindly loaned by Happy Yeti Games via the UK Board Game Review Circle. All opinions are ours and our reviews are always honest.