Little Sapling Toys: Wooden Matching Tile Game Review

One of my fondest recollections of my childhood were the endless amounts of time that I spent playing various memory games. I loved challenging myself to see if I knew where everything was and to see how quickly I could finish a game. I was thrilled when Little Sapling Toys reached out to me to offer a set of their Wooden Matching Tiles for review. 

Wooden Matching Tile Game

Transportation Tile Game

Kids Matching Tile Game

Little Sapling Toys offers three different varieties of wooden matching games. All three are pictured above and we received the first one. All three games are designed for ages 2 and up and can be played with 1-4 players. Each game comes with 24 wooden tiles (12 pairs), an instruction and suggestion booklet for five different games and a drawstring cloth bag. Each purchase is a sustainable one too as Little Sapling Toys plants a tree for each purchase, uses recycled content packaging, participates in a local green power program, and all of the tiles are made of FSC certified solid maple wood. 

In line with the rest of their products, Little Sapling Toys has once again made a top quality product that is beautifully crafted. All of the tiles are smooth edged and a great size for all ages to grip. This is a great point for younger users, ages 15 months and older, who are developing their small motor skills and grasping muscles. 


In the instruction and suggestion booklet, 5 games are detailed for 1-4 players. They include games such as cover (players match tiles to ones that have been assigned to them), guess (one player chooses an “it” tile and players guess which one it is when all tiles are face side up), match (the traditional turn over and match game), find (a hunt and match game that can spread out across the whole room), and pretend (a charades game to get other players to guess which tile you are portraying). These games are developmentally geared towards players ages 2 and up. 


If you are playing with the tiles with children ages 15 months and older, there are a variety of other games that you can play. 


Counting – Keep it simple and start with counting up to three tiles and then push on as your child is ready to learn the numbers that follow. It’s great to have 24 tiles for this and as they get older, you can accompany the counting with the writing of the number in standard digit form and eventually to talking about the tens and ones places.


Face up Matching – With younger ones, you can use the tiles as flash cards for learning the names of the different illustrations. Once they learn what each picture is, you can move on to asking them to “find the other monster” and then stack them together.


Building – These tiles make great thinner building materials that can be used to build within the set itself or as detail pieces within a thicker set of building blocks.


Categories – Separate the tiles out into animals, people, and objects. This can go to a whole new level as a great noun exploration game for kids once they hit first and second grade. 


Stacking – As your young child is developing small motor skills and hand eye coordination, stacking is a very important activity. Combine it with the counting game above and you have a multi-layered activity. 


Put ‘Em in the Bag – Watching a 12-24 month old play the game of putting things away and taking them out again certainly can fill hours each week. Take advantage of this curiosity and the wonderful cloth bag that accompanies the tiles and have the kids go to town! Put them all in, take them all out and repeat!


For older children, these tiles can be a great stepping off point for understanding grammar and writing skills. The Categories nouns game described above is a great starter. Take it to another level by talking about the verbs that each tile can do. Use the tiles as Story Starters and have kids invent plays or write poems or whole stories based on the inspiration of one tile. Alphabet games can be played too as kids enter school and learn how to spell the names of the tiles and then you can sort them by alphabetical order. Finally, Prepositions is another option as you can hide the tiles around the room and talk about which ones are under, on top, inside, outside, above, below, etc. in order to help children understand these words in a visual way. 


Overall, I think this is a great investment at $26 as the tiles can be used in a variety of ways for a variety of ages. Hop on over to Little Sapling Toys’ Etsy shop in order to snag a set and enjoy!




Disclosure: Little Sapling Toys has provided me with a set of Wooden Matching Tiles for purposes of providing a review. I received the Wooden Matching Tiles at no charge to me and I am under no obligation to return the product but can keep it for my own personal use.