Put on your detective caps! You’re on the case to discover he sneaky scoundrel in this memory game for kids! Players as young as 5 can enjoy hunting for the culprit in Mia London and the Case of the 625 scoundrels, a game that is not only fun, but educational!

How Do You Play Mia London and the Case of the 625 Scoundrels?

In this memory game, you are going to be deducing the identity of the guilty scoundrel! The scoundrel is wearing four types of accessories, (hat, glasses, mustache, and bowtie) that identifies him. 

There are five types of each accessory represented on cards, each repeated twice. To begin the game, you’ll shuffle each of the four accessory decks and discard one card into the box. These four cards are the accessories that will identify the scoundrel at the end. 

Someone is nominated as the Chief Investigator (we usually always make this the adult, don’t worry, you get to play too!) and this person will now slowly flip the accessory cards onto the table for all of the investigators to observe. 

You begin with the hat, turning over the top four cards of the hat deck to form four piles, then you continue flipping through the deck, adding new cards on top of these four stacks from left to right. You flip slowly so that everyone has the chance to see what has been revealed, but covering the previous cards completely. Each accessory is represented twice, except for the one accessory that had it’s pair discarded at the beginning. This is the accessory is the one you are trying to discover.

Once all of the cards have been flipped, all players open their Investigation Booklets

The investigation booklets are flap books that have each of the five accessories on individual flaps. Flip through until you find the accessory that you think is the one that identifies the scoundrel.

Then the next glasses deck is selected. This time however, the Chief Investigator will only make three piles, revealing and covering in the same way. Players then save the glasses they think they only saw once in their booklet. Then it’s time for the Mustache deck, revealing only two piles now. Then finally, the bowtie deck is revealed in a single pile for players to focus on. 

Each player will then open their booklet and reveal the scoundrel they think is the culprit they are searching for. The Chief Investigator takes out the originally discarded cards to reveal the answer!

The player(s) who correctly guessed all, or the most, accessories wins. 

What do we think?

Our kids were very much so drawn to this game. 

The art is adorable and the components invite you to pick them up, examine them, and play around. 

I can’t say enough good things about the use of the flip book. This game could have been soooo fiddly with a bunch of tiles or items that kids had to select to create their creature. Instead, everything comes wonderfully organized and contained in these flip books for everyone to use to select their accessories. 

One of the biggest frustrations as a parent when playing games with kids can come from the problem of too many things to manage. Maybe it’s just me, but I get stressed out when I’m having to help all of my children keep their player space organized while following the rules and not trying to crush their excitement as they wiggle around and touch everything. 

There is no fear of this in Mia London. Simply pass each kid a flip book and you’re good to go! An adult manages and flips the cards while the kids stay focused on their task. 

These booklets also make it extremely easy to reset and play another game. Mia London takes only a few minutes to play, (10 minutes or less if you can believe it!) and you’ll undoubtably want to play it at least a few times in a row, which I recommend doing to help kids get the hang of how to remember these accessories. Resetting the game for another round is truly as simple as just flipping your book flaps back and your kids are set! 

Mia London as an Educational Game 

I absolutely love games where kids must practice their working memory skills. 

For those unfamiliar, your working memory is the type of memory that involves actively holding temporary data in your mind where you can then use and manipulate it. When you have a strong working memory, you are able to hold onto information long enough to use it. 

In Mia London, players have to focus on what images they are seeing on the cards so that they can then know what image they did not see twice. This requires you to hold the images in your mind long enough to eliminate them upon a second viewing. It seems easy, but it requires a lot of focus and is surprisingly difficult. 

A traditional memory game, where images are placed face down in a grid, you flip over things one at a time and try to remember where each image is located. What I love about Mia London is that it takes a new approach to this, rather than having the ability to create a map in your head of where each item is, you have to remember the one thing you didn’t see repeated without getting confused by all of the images you did see twice.

Then you can’t just spurt out the answer, you have to hold it in your mind long enough to flip through your detective’s pad to select the correct accessory. This can be where you lose it, mentally speaking that is. Because you have to flip through this book, you’re again looking at all of these accessories that you don’t need, searching for the one you do because you only saw it once. This brings in more information into your brain that you have to be able to filter through without losing hold of the answer. 

It takes a lot of practice! 

And this type of practice is something we all can benefit from.

So why is a game like Mia London great for kids? Why is it important for them to exercise and improve upon their working memory? 

Their education of course! 

Having a strong memory helps us in our ability to do math, reading, remembering instructions, and our attention spans in general. While playing Mia London, you may think you’re just watching cards being flipped, but when you start to think that holding each of these accessories in your mind while you focus on the one that’s missing is not that unlike listening to a string of numbers being said aloud, holding them organized in your mind, and then solving the problem, you can start to see how it helps build strong minds!

Will Your Kids Outgrow it Quickly?

Naturally games for kids, especially when targeted towards younger players like this one, will be out grown quicker than an older game. 

Mia London will be trickier to play at the beginning, but hopefully, your kids will get the hang of it, figure out the mental tricks they need to use to win, and the game will become easier. So outgrowing this might come sooner than not. Our 8 year old is already figuring it out and finding it a bit simpler while our boys (4 and 6) are still learning. 

I’d say you’ve got at least a couple years of play out of this game which, in my book, is pretty good for a kids game. 

If you feel like your kids are getting the hang of it quickly and need to be challenged, you can easily provide that for them. Try flipping the cards quicker. Perhaps you only show one stack of cards for each accessory rather than the 4,3,2,1 progression. There are definitely ways to up the difficulty on this if your players are showing off their strong memory skills.

Summary

Mia London and the Case of the 625 Scoundrels is a simple game with a smart design. 

Taking a new spin on memory games, kids are trying to remember not just what they’ve seen, but what they haven’t seen, holding it in their mind long enough to record it in their flip book. This is a great exercise to help improve working memory skills that will not only be fun and engaging while playing, but prove beneficial in their educational development.

Mia London is high on our list of memory games that we recommend parents play with their kids!

Mia London will be released soon, to preorder, click here.

For all of our game recommendations, make sure to check out our Amazon Storefront. 

A special thank you to our friends at Scorpion Masque for sending us a copy of Mia London and the Case of the 625 Scoundrels for review. As always, our thoughts and opinions are our own. 

Game Info:
Title: Mia London and the Case of the 625 Scoundrels
2-4 Players Ages 5+
Designer: Antoine Bauza, Corentin Lebrat
Artist: NIKAO
Publisher: Scorpion Masque

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