Disclosure: I received this complimentary product through the Homeschool Review Crew
We always look forward to reviews from Byron’s Games and seeing what new fun game they have created to help us learn through play! This game was especially exciting for me because I was able to combine my children’s love of games and my daughter’s love of music by playing Maestro Mastery – Explore the Composers.
About the Game
Maestro Mastery – Explore the Composers includes information about 52 different musicians that span in time from medieval to contemporary. The game comes with matching color coded cards, a timeline board, and a poster of the musicians.
This game is set up as a memory matching game, which makes it easy to play with no prior knowledge of the musicians. As you play the game you learn information about each of the musicians, get a better understanding of musical eras, and even have the opportunity to listen to some of their great music.
Our Experience
I had my 13-year-old daughter and six-year-old son playing the game together. When they first tried to play they found it a bit overwhelming. There are 2 decks of cards with 52 cards in each deck. They had followed the suggestion of only starting with one deck, but there were still a lot of cards for a memory game.
However, they then went into that one deck and chose a smaller number of musicians. Once they were dealing with fewer cards they felt like they could master the game. We started with just playing the memory matching portion of the game and reading about the musicians.
After playing the game a few times they added in the listening component. Byron’s Games includes instructions for going to a page on their website where you can listen to selections from each musician. As they found a match they could click on the link for that musician and hear music. We thought this was a great way to help them start to get a better understanding of the different types of music and become more familiar with famous pieces without any pressure to memorize them.
While they continued to play with only part of a deck, they were getting exposure to different musicians because they would play with different parts of the deck each time they played. I also feel like if you had more people playing using the whole deck would not feel as overwhelming.
We didn’t feel that we were ready for the extra challenge option; however, if you have only older students or after you have been playing long enough to want more of a challenge they have some extra challenges that combine the memory match cards with the musical selections. This would be a great way to include the game as part of a high school level music appreciation course or keep teenagers actively learning.
Conclusions
Overall, this game was a great fit for our family. We condensed the number of cards used at any one time to make it a little easier, but otherwise they enjoyed playing based on the instructions. We loved that it could be played by multiple ages and have different options for learning about the musicians and their music.
To find out more about how other Review Crew families used Maestro Mastery – Explore the Composers be sure to click on the graphic below.
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