Don’t Crack the Egg – An Easter Matching Game

Collect eggs, try to find the Easter bunny, but above all, don’t crack the egg! Free printables mean you can play this festive and simple matching game.

This is just an Easter take on the game Don’t Wake the Shark. Michelle over at MollyMoo is has created a fish matching game with a twist that makes it work really well for even the smallest kiddos. Here’s the big twist: instead of each set of cards being different, most of the cards match each other, which means that your little one will get a match with almost every card flip. Along the way, you try to avoid the sharks, which make you lose a turn, and track down the clownfish. Switch sharks with broken eggs, and clownfish with an Easter bunny, and you have Don’t Crack the Egg!

This is also something you can throw together quickly for your Easter party. If you print these on heavy enough cardstock, all you have to do is cut them out. If you’re like me and don’t have enough of the heavy stuff, you can print them on normal paper and glue them to construction paper tiles to make them opaque. I even laminated mine with clear contact paper to make them more durable.

Don’t Crack the Egg Matching Game Rules

Start by shuffling cards, then laying them out face-down.
Starting with the youngest, each player takes turns flipping over two cards.
If the cards match, the player can keep both. If one of the cards is a broken egg, the player loses a turn (For very young kids, I just make them flip the cards back over. Losing a turn can be a little hard to understand, and it’s penalty enough not to get to put more cards in their pile).
The objective is to find the Easter bunny card match. Whoever finds both Easter bunnies is the winner and the game ends. With very young kids, I help them count their matched cards for the practice and celebrate how many cards they got. You can make this as competitive as you’d like.

Easy, right? So without further ado, here’s your printables. You’ll need 1 copy of each: