Do you need every aspect of your sandwich to be perfect before you take a bite? Do you make sure all the Cheerios are evenly distributed before you plunge in your spoon? Do you fill every hole of your waffle before cutting along each of the ridges?
If so, Cheese Louise is the game for you.
The game comes with 24 double sided cards, each in the shape of a bread slice. Each side of the slice depicts some condiments (sometimes a few flies too). To accompany the bread there are 22 slices of foam “cheese” (for those who are dairy intolerant, no actual cheese was used in the manufacture of this game). The cheese has holes like Swiss cheese. Your challenge is to find the slice of cheese that will perfectly cover all the other items on your slice of “bread” (for those of you on a gluten free diet, or simply watching your carb intake, no actual bread was used in the manufacture of the game).
Each player gets a slice of bread. Once the cheese is spread out in the middle of the table, the race is on. First one to match the correct cheese to their bread slice wins and keeps the bread slice. Everyone draws another slice and then starts madly shuffling through the cheese.
Major Fun loves a good sandwich, and making these sandwiches is Major Fun.
The entirety of the rules (with illustrations) fits on one small piece of paper. The foam cheese and plastic bread slices are clever and so incredibly frustrating!!
Cheese Louise is a pattern recognition game much like Set or Swish but maybe even a bit more deceptive. It looks so easy, but there are small variations in the bread slices and the cheese slices. These differences generate far more choices than are obvious at first. Consider too that each cheese slice have eight ways they can fit on to any one piece of bread (four ways on each side of the cheese). If every piece of cheese is different then the game creates 176 different options—only one of which will work.
The pace is fast and a winner usually emerges pretty quickly (first person to finish 5 slices). Even with the small number of bread slices, the challenge on replay is still there. You can recognize a slice of bread and still not be able to find the right cheese because they’ve all been scrambled.
Who moved your cheese? EVERYONE moved your cheese.
For 1-4 players, ages 6+
Cheese Louise was designed by Kim Vandenbrouke of Brainy Chick, Inc. Distributed by Fat Brain Toy Co.