Staccabees is a surprisingly fun stacking game (as you might guess from the name).

There are three different sizes of hardwood cubes: the natural-wood-colored are the largest, the orange are next, and the white, the smallest. There’s a 4-sided top-like thing. You spin it. If, when it finally falls over, an S is on top, you take half of any of the three kinds (rounding up if the number is uneven) in your collection, and add them to the STAC. If a T is on top, you take the top cube off the STAC and add it to your stock. If an A is showing, you add all of any one kind of your blocks to the STAC. And if a C is revealed, you don’t do anything. Which, depending on how high the stack, can be a great relief.

There’s a total of 54 blocks. Each player gets 3 of each kind of block, which leaves enough for as many as 6 players. Players take turns spinning the top-like thing (which some scholars refer to as a teetotum, while others of a more ethnic bent think of as a driedel), following the directions, and hoping that they: a) don’t make the stack fall, and b) be the first to use up all their blocks.

Though the rules are simple (it may take a while to remember what each letter on the teetotum stands for, but after a few games, it’s not an issue), they are very cleverly designed. If you are unfortunate enough to have toppled the tower, when it’s your turn again, and you get something like A for all or S for half, you could very likely get rid of a lot of blocks, and, at the same time, radically increase the height of the tower (and it’s instability) for the next player.

This makes Staccabees remain fun until the very last spin. Even someone with only one block left can easily find herself still playing round after round after round. And if you seem to have gathered a great many blocks, there’s still the possibility that you can turn your fate completely around with a single spin.

There’s a delightfully growing tension to the game, which is even more delightfully balanced by at least an equal amount of laughter.

Everything is well made (all hardwood), and comes with a cloth, drawstring bag for easy transportation – which is something you’ll want to do a lot, take the game with you, just about everywhere.

Staccabees, designed by Daniel Singer and Bruce Kothmann, is as fun for kids as it is for the entire family. Major fun.

The SpinFlyer is what you, and the artist who made it, might call a “desktop toy.” Or a “tabletop toy.” Or a “meditation toy.” Or an “art toy.” Or even an “adult toy” (though you have to be a little more careful of your audience when you call it that).  It’s most definitely a toy. It’s hand made. It’s designed for that quiet kind of play you sometimes get into when you’re waiting for something, or thinking, or daydreaming.

You give it a gentle spin, or tap, or you blow on it, or you put it near a fan, and it goes round and round and round. Silently. Never quite predictably.

You can experiment. You can try to make it do things like fly over the cup and come to rest without ever hitting the cup. You can count how many times it goes around and try to make it do exactly that many next time, or one more, or one fewer. You can see how gently you can push it. You can let it take you away. If some curious soul happens to visit your desktop airport, what was an invitation to personal meditation becomes an equally attractive conversation piece. So much to share. So many variables to investigate together. So many different ways to play.

It’s a delicate joy. Finely, lovingly made. It’s a work of play art. (Each is numbered, each comes with a signed certificate, each beautifully packaged). So carefully balanced so that a gentle tap will send it into flight. Beckoning you and anyone near to touch it, watch it, play with it.

Sharing is good – as long as it remains in your personal space under your personal protection. Loaning it to someone, as eager as that someone might be to have it under her personal auspices could very well prove to be, shall we say, ill-advised. It is made of plastic and a carbon fiber rod. The rod, as I mentioned before, is delicate, and it can snap in half if you are not careful. A greater risk is the model detaching from the end of the carbon fiber rod where it’s glued.  If someone holds the rotating arm by the model it’s likely to snap off the rod, or if they drop the arm and the model hits the floor first, it might detach from the rod, which could easily transcend the parameters of your kindness.

We tried two versions: the Classic Wing and the Desktop Dart. Only some assembly was required, and that proved to be intuitive enough to require only a corroborating glance at the instructions. The Desktop Dart, which looks like a paper airplane made of plastic, seemed to fly longer. The Classic Wing seemed somehow more, well, classic. You can nudge them both in either direction (clockwise, counterclockwise). Because the Classic Wing looks the same going backwards or forwards, it lends itself more to bi-directional nudging.  We decided it really didn’t matter which one you had. They were equally playworthy. Equally inviting. Equally Major, fun-wise.

Tic Attack Toe is, as you might have guessed, based on Tic Tac Toe. That tells you that it’s a two-player strategy game and very easy to learn.

It doesn’t tell you that, unlike everything you know about Tic Tac Toe, there’s no one winning strategy, the game never ends with a tie, there’s just enough luck in the game to keep it interesting for adults and kids alike, it’s significantly more fun, and brilliantly designed – from package to play.

You get a plastic box. Each corner of the box is extended just a bit – as if it were the center square in a game of tic tac toe, with the adjacent squares partially erased. Which is exactly what it is. And once you lay it on the table you realize the design is just enough to make box function, rather perfectly, like a whole tic tac toe board.

You open the lid to find 60 cards. 25 cards are X-shaped (strategically notched, rounded-corner rectangles), 25 O-shaped (corners also rounded, the rest strategically un-notched). Of these, both players get two sets of cards numbered 1-12, and one wild card. There are 9 cards used to keep score (you get to take one every time you complete a tic tac toe). And one rule card.

You take all the cards of your chosen symbol (as in X or O), shuffle them, and deal yourself six. From then on, you take turns placing cards on the board (the center square and 8 adjacent indicated squares). You can place any of your cards anywhere as long as they are higher than any card already played – yours or your opponent’s. That part, the having to play a higher card part, is where the game takes on much of its uniqueness, strategic interest, and fun. You can get very strategic about it all – strategic enough to merit serious contemplation. Since you only have two cards of each value, playing your highest is something you can only do twice in each game. The wild card, interestingly enough, beats any card. And even more interestingly, any card beats a wild.

Every time you win you get to pick up a score card (from the pile of 9, which you have perhaps chosen to stack in the conveniently provided box lid). The game doesn’t stop there, naturally. You go on playing until someone has collected 5 score cards.

Everything about this game reflects what some people might call “intelligent design.” Very intelligent: The minimalist board which doubles as a carrying case. The well-written, concise, comprehensive, and admirably brief rules – simple enough to invite the development of house rules for those who wish to take the game more or less seriously (try playing with partners – like bridge, reduce the number of score cards needed to win, increase the number of cards in your hand). The design of the cards, making it very easy on the eyes, very clear what each card is worth and to whom it belongs. The elegance and depth of game play. It’s only a little game – like one of those games you’d expect to see hanging on a supermarket endcap. But it’s a paradigm for what a Major Fun game should be.

The PB&J Toy company produces toys and games, most of which are just being introduced this year.  The concept of playing Tic Attack Toe came to them by way of By George! Inc, but the packaging, the final rules, the refined game play all came from PB&J. If Tic Attack Toe is representative of their games, this is a company we will be wanting to play very close attention to.

Lava Dragon can be a very scary game – especially if you follow the recommendations and change a rule or two.

As you can see, there’s a castle-mountain-looking thing which is actually (gasp) a volcano! And there, perched on the top, a comparatively giant (double gasp) dragon! And should you, teeny tiny micro-fig that you are (to get a sense of scale, you can almost make out the red guy on the second level), brave the menacingly volcanic temperament and be the first to reach the top, you will have won not only the game, but also a fanciful flight on the back of the even more fanciful dragon (which is in its LEGOish way, a most awe-inspiring creature).

The key to the game, as in most LEGO games, is in the die (or, as LEGO would have you call it “dice”). After you’ve built everything and placed your brave avatar on the lowest level of the conceptual volcano, your dice is empty save for two orange “lava tiles” on opposite sides. These orange “lava tiles” allow you to move one of the 12 orange lava cones anywhere you want (generally, between one of your opponent’s and where said opponent would most passionately wish to go). From then on, every time you roll the dice to a side with sufficient space, you can add one of your own movement squares (you get four of the tiny things) to that face of the dice. As the game progresses, every time you roll the dice, you and everyone else who has a movement square on the top face of the dice gets to move his or her avatar one space for every one of her or his movement squares showing. There are rumors that where you decide to place your movement square is of significant strategic impact.

Once again you experience the unique play element introduced by the LEGO dice – a die whose faces you each can actually change as the game progresses.

And so it goes, each player taking a turn adding one of their movement squares (if possible), blocking someone else with a lava tube (often, even more fun than moving your own piece), moving their knights one or several spaces vertically or horizontally, peg-by-peg towards the top. And everyone is amused. Until someone makes it to the top first, and is more amused than everyone else.

Later, perhaps much later, when you’ve discovered all that you wish to discover about the game, and you all feel brave enough to explore even more gasp-inducing variations, you find yourself ready, for example, to face the dread power of the, pant, lava, gasp, stick.

See, there’s this stick. And there are these holes on the sides of two of the levels of the volcano (one near the bottom, one near the top). And these holes go all the way through. And should your personal piece be near one of those aforementioned hole, and should your opponent happen to roll the dice so as to cause the volcano-exploding orange tile to be revealed, that opponent can now take said lava stick, poke it through the hole on the opposite side of the volcano, and cause your beloved micro-fig to leap, rather spectacularly, off the volcano, to be returned to the very bottom and start the climb all over.

But fear not. There’s another, and perhaps happier wrinkle you can also employ to in some small way ameliorate the potential horror of the lava stick. There’s a brown tile that you can add to the dice. And this tile, known as the “climbing rope,” will allow you to scale a completely flat surface of the volcano, lifting you two levels closer to the top. So if you do get knocked down, there’s now the chance for a swifter climb.

We recommend this game only for kids, from the ages of 7-15, because adults tend to have weaker hearts.

Lava Dragon was designed by Cephas Howard, and is available in most toy-carrying stores, and, of course, Amazon,

There’s an animated demo of the game on the LEGO site.

Monster 4 is exceptionally easy to learn – that’s probably because it’s based on a game that just about anybody who is past kindergarten age already knows – Tic Tac Toe.

Of course, being a LEGO game, it’s a lot more than you’d expect, a lot more fun, a lot more interesting, even if you’re already a world-class Tic Tac Toe champion, or not.

First, it’s not 3-in-a-row, but 4-in-a-row – which, strategically, is somewhat more interesting, especially since most of us already know how to win the 3-in-a-row game.

Next, you can play it with up to 4 players.

And then there’s the LEGO dice (even though there’s only one die, and we were all trained to call one die a “die” – LEGO likes to call it a “dice” – and we like LEGO, so it’s a, well, dice it is), which introduces luck into the whole thing, which makes it even more different than you thought.

And then there are the “ghost” pieces – which are “wild” (as inherent to the ghost-character according to most ghostly lore) and can be, according to which variation you’re playing, be considered is belonging to anybody, or as belonging to nobody. So, whenever you see a Ghost, you know you need only 3 more of your pieces to win – or not.

And then there’s the Spider, which, when landing on a particular quadrant of the board, again according to which variation you’re playing, either makes all the pieces on that quadrant leap off the board and return to their opponents’ piece-holding piece, or makes everybody else’s pieces leap off the board, your pieces being granted temporary spider- immunity.

The game has a scary graveyard Halloweeny theme. The pieces look like little monsters (one of my favorite things about LEGO figures is how, regardless of how scary they’re made to look, they always seem, well, cuddly). The spaces like graveyards. And the spider, despite its six-legged, googly-eyed, somewhat surprised appearance, most definitely monstrously spiderish.

For someone who has played with LEGOs alot, Monster 4 takes maybe 10 minutes to build. As with all LEGO products, the building instructions require no reading and are carefully, nay, painstakingly illustrated, step-by-step. Also, as with all things LEGO, when you finish building the game you discover that not only were you able to find every piece, but there are even extra pieces for you to use in your further LEGO explorations.

The playing instructions are also easy to follow, though reading (or being read to) is most definitely required. But, as they say somewhere, the game’s the thing, and Monster 4 turns out to be as fun as it looks, at least. So much fun, and so easy to learn (because it’s based on such a familiar game) that it makes you want to play it again and again, trying out all the recommended variations, mixing them up, and adding your own. And this, of course, is where the game gets even more fun than you thought possible – when you change it and it becomes truly your own.

Designed by Cephas Howard, available wherever people are smart enough to make it available, and Amazon even.

See the LEGO site for a demo.

With all due respect (and no small amount of admiration) to Charles Darwin and the entire field of biology, I must submit my own theory of human evolution. Humans evolved not from a line of apes, but rather from magpies.

My evidence? Reiner Knizia’s sparkling card game called Gem Dealer.

Even before you open the box, the shiny gems beckon to you from a little window cut out of the lid. They clatter invitingly, these rough-cut plastic jewels of red and green and blue and purple and white. The 25 gems (five of each color) actually make starting a game difficult because everyone wants to just mess with them instead of listening to the directions.

If you can get your friends to take their grubby little hands off the bright plastic baubles, you will have a chance to explain that the goal of the game is to gather four of the five gem-colors. In order to do this, players must use the cards to bid on a gem.

The bidding process is my second piece of evidence that humans have a strong avian connection. If you’ve ever seen two or three crows squabbling over the same bit of food, you will recognize the behavior patterns you see in the bidding process. One dances in, another knocks the prize away, one backs off, another pecks again, and finally one of the birds swoops away with the crumb.

But instead of crumbs there are colored gems.

And players dance with their cards.

The cards correspond to the gem colors: five colored suits numbered 2-7 with some wild cards thrown in to shake things up. A player starts the bidding on one colored gem by revealing one or more cards of that color. In clockwise fashion, the other players either raise the bid by revealing a higher combination of cards, or pass and sit out the rest of the round. Once everyone passes, the player with the highest bid wins the gem. All bid cards are discarded and the winner starts the next round of bidding.

There are a few complications with wild cards and playing cards face down, but the game revolves around outbidding your opponents (always satisfying) and recognizing when to cut your losses and bow out. Players are constantly drawing new cards from the deck so it is impossible to run out of cards, BUT it is possible to use all of your cards on one gem color and then be stuck with only one or two crappy cards for the next few rounds. It is also satisfying to know that someone will win a gem at the end of the round. This is not a game that drags. Each round has a winner and, pretty soon, someone is going to get the four gems they need.

Getting a gem is fun. Collecting that fourth gem despite the desperate bidding of your opponents—major fun.

Gem Dealer was designed by Reiner Knizia with art provided by Paul Niemeyer. Gem Dealer is published by Gryphon Games, © 2008.

William Bain, Games Taster

It is always a challenge to review a jigsaw puzzle – primarily because so much depends on personal taste. So, if you don’t like challenging jigsaw puzzles (1000 pieces) that exercise your sensitivity to color, pattern, and design as well as shape, then maybe this particular puzzle isn’t what you would call Major Fun. Not to worry, the manufacturer, Ceaco, has a significantly vast and varied selection of puzzles of all levels of difficulty, and we can, with confidence, guarantee that if you like jigsaw puzzles at all, you’ll find something very much worth the time you are willing to while away in the name of puzzling fun.

Our Chief Puzzle Taster, (my wife, Rocky) is an artist. Like most of our Tasters, she has a relatively light-hearted approach to puzzles, tending to appreciate the art as much as the puzzling. Which perhaps explains why she really liked The Fiddler. It’s part of Ceaco’s Mosaic line – images that are created by assembling selections from the works of other artists. (Take a look at this hi-res image of the Fiddler puzzle for a better understanding of what you’d be playing with.)

Though, when viewed close-up, the effect of the mosaic is to present a more complex image, she discovered that it helped her find pieces by searching for a particular style of artwork, while, at the same time, sharpening her appreciation for how different artists work.

Her strategy for solving this puzzle underwent several changes as she progressed. First, she would just pick up any arbitrary piece and try to figure out where it goes. Later, she separated the red and blue color pieces. Later still, she separated pieces into four kinds of shapes to help her fill in the gaps. It wasn’t until she finished the whole puzzle that she could decipher many of the images used in creating the mosaic. And, even after the whole puzzle was solved, she was still able to spend considerable time exploring (and indeed marveling at) how the person who created the mosaic from such disparate parts was able to create a picture which, when seen from across the room, looked as realistic as a photo.

There’s a lot more to like about this puzzle, and, in deed, all of the Ceaco puzzles we’ve so far tried. The pieces lock together well enough for you to feel that you’ve actually found a fit (even when the visual cues are not as powerful as you’d like). The colors (always an important factor when doing jigsaws) remain vivid throughout. Both of these factors add greatly to the fun and aesthetic of the jigsaw experience.

Surprisingly, the Fiddler is similar, in challenge, that is, to the Wedding , one of Ceaco’s “Dream Day” series. This series, rather than presenting mosaics composed of the work of different artists, shows the work of one artist who has included 18 different “surprise” images within the context of the painting. These 18 discrete objects, like the different art styles in the Fiddler, provide useful visual clues while she was solving the puzzle.

These differences within a puzzle go a long way towards making the puzzle more fun, and alleviating much of the severity of the challenge – even though it has 1000 pieces. A puzzle like Motor Cycle Race, which also has 1000 pieces, turns out to be much more challenging – simply because the image is stylistically so similar throughout.

Ceaco’s puzzle boxes are designed for easy recycling. They open by tearing a pull tab. Though they close well enough, it does make you have to be a little more careful when you get ready to disassemble and store the puzzle. It might be a good idea to keep the plastic bag the puzzle comes in, and to tape it closed before you put it all back into the box.

Any game that has a bell that you want to be the first to ring is almost a fatal attraction for your average 6-12 year-old. Especially if it’s one of those neat metal kinds that hotels used to use. Any game that has pictures of desserts and drinks and diner-like meals – especially hamburgers with french fries – well, you can almost taste the fun.

Order’s Up! is is a Lotto-like game. There are 16 heavy, cardstock “Guest Checks,” each showing combinations of 6 different delicious-looking foods. There are 64 food tiles. Four kinds of these tiles are “wild” and can be used for a variety of main courses, drinks, or desserts. There’s a die that you roll to find out if you get a food tile, or you add two more tiles to the “serving area” or you get to swap Guest Checks with another player, or you get a free tile, or you get to ring the bell, or you don’t. And there’s the bell.

The bell is placed in the middle of the playing area. Four food tiles are placed face-up around the bell. The rest are divided into 4 different stacks and placed just outside the serving area. When it’s your turn, you roll the die. If it comes up on the bell symbol, the first player (not necessarily you) to ring the bell gets to take one tile from the serving area and put it on his Guest Check. If the die shows a cracked bell, you can’t ring the bell until it’s your turn again. If you do, you lose one item from your Guest Check.

So there’s recognition and reaction time (and restraint), there’s the drama of swapping one of your empty Guest Check’s for someone’s almost full Guest Check, and then having your almost full Guest Check getting swapped away by someone else. There’s the finding of the right match. There’s the racing to be the first to ring the bell. And then there’s ringing the bell when you shouldn’t.

For kids 6-10, Order’s Up! is absurdly fun. It takes maybe 10 minutes to learn, and each round can be played in 15 minutes. You can, of course, play as many rounds as you feel like. There are enough Guest Checks so that you can make the game more challenging by giving each player two cards to fill. You can easily the challenge (perceptually and physically) by giving the winning player an extra card to fill for the next round.

The game is, like almost all Gamewright games, well and thoughtfully made. The bell is not really very loud. The cards are durable and well-illustrated. The die large and legible. The rules easy to read and describe. The box sturdy, providing easy storage.

Designed by Myles Christensen and illustrated by Lee Calderon, Order’s Up has just the right balance of luck, skill, and social interaction to engage and challenge 2-6 kids.

See the elephant on the cover of the game box? You’ll see 100 of them when you open the box and look at the cards. What do elephants make you think of? Forgot already? Yup, it’s a memory game. See the mouse? Small-hand-size 3-d funny-looking mouse? What do elephants say when they see a mouse? Eeek!, of course. So, it’s an observation game. See the dice? There are two of them. One has arrows and numbers on it. The other says things like “higher,” “lower,” “even” and, oddly enough, “odd.” So it’s a game of luck, too.

Re. those 100 elephant-illustrated cards. They’re numbered, from, as you might surmise, 1, to 100. Now, imagine that you’ve made a neat, 6×6 array of elephant-down elephant cards. You can think of that as your playing board, because that’s pretty much what it is.

Now, give each player (from 2 players to 6) an elephant card. That card gets placed on the table, elephant-up, so everyone can see it. OK. Put the mouse somewhere near the middle of the array, on one of the face-down elephants. OK. So it’s your turn. You throw the dice. One die, the die with the numbers (1-6) and arrows (up or down) tells you two things. First of all, it tells you how many places (turned-over elephant cards) you can move (horizontally and/or vertically). We’ll get to the arrows a little later. Once you complete your move, you turn over any adjacent turned-over elephant. Now the other die is important. It tells you what kind of elephant you’re looking for – an even- or odd-numbered elephant, or one that is higher or lower than your turned-over elephant card. You turn over the chosen card. Wait, is that a little mouse hanging from the elephant’s trunk? Quick, grab the plastic mouse and say “eeek!” Cool! Now you get to keep that card, and continue your turn. Unless someone else said “eeek!” first. And then they get the turn, and the card, and you don’t.

OK. Say the adjacent card you just happened to pick doesn’t have a mouse on it, and does have the kind of number you were looking for. Now you have this choice: a) you can take that card, or b) you can leave it, move the mouse the required number of spaces, and hope you’ll just happen to find yet another card of the collectible kind. And, if you do find such a card, you can prolong your turn yet another move. And if you don’t, you have to return all the cards you collected that round. This, in game parlance, is known as “pressing your luck.”

And then there’s the arrows. The arrows tell you whether, when you turn a card over and it doesn’t meet the criteria shown on the category die, you leave that card face-up or face-down. Having to leave it face-down is what makes Hide and Eeek a memory game.

You get a lot to think about. A lot. Not so much that the game is by any means difficult. You can be as young as 8, and still have significant fun. But just enough so you have to pay close attention, all the time. Just when you think you’ve found a card you were looking for, you miss noticing that there is a mouse on it. Just when you think you know exactly where you can find the kind of card you need, you discover you’ve forgotten where you saw it before. Every card that is left face-up lures you forward. And every player who moves after you gets lured somewhere else.

So there’s memory, there’s observation, there are numerical properties, there’s luck, there’s strategy, and, most importantly, there’s fun. Major fun. For all the complexity, the game is easy to learn. It takes maybe 15 minutes to play. It keeps everyone involved. It’s well-made. It’s cleverly designed by Peggy Brown, attractively illustrated by Kevin Whitlark. Sometimes, it’s so much fun being the one who grabs the mouse and gets to say Eeek that it really doesn’t matter who actually wins the game!

Bendaroos might very well remind you of another terrific art toy – one that also consists of lengths of wax-dipped yarn in a variety of colors. If you know of that particularly terrific art toy, you are already, no doubt, deeply enamored of all the many creative uses to which this construction toy can be so creatively put – the animals and vehicles and flowers and devices of many colors that one can make, without getting dirty or requiring much more than an inspiring illustration or two and a sufficient number and variety of color choices.

So why should you consider getting Bendaroos and not the other? Actually, there’s no reason at all. Except it’s good to know that there’s a choice, and that there are niggling comparisons to be made, and that no matter which one you buy, you will no doubt want to try the other, and you won’t be disappointed at all.

This review, therefore, will confine itself to the explication of a particular game we played with Bendaroos – the Megapack, of course, in which we found 42 red, yellow, green, blue, hot pink, neon yellow, neon blue, and neon green pieces, along with 41 each of white, black, orange, and neon red. That’s 12 different colors, which means that if you had as many as 12 people playing, there’d be a different color for each player, which would add significantly to the jolliness of it all.

We drew, so to speak, our inspiration from a famous Dada-type game called Exquisite Corpse, one version of which being most illustratively illustrated in the following video:

Exquisite Corpse Drawing from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo

We gave each player a different color. Simultaneously, we each made something (anything) out of our Bendaroo. After that, we each passed our creation to the player on our left (though we could have easily passed to the player on the right, but some arbitrary direction needed to be established for the duration of the game). We then added another piece to the figure we just received. And then passed the two joined pieces to the next player, again to the left. And on, and on, until we finally received the construction that included our original piece. We then each decided what to name the collectively created work of art, and took turns presenting the finished work to the group, in our best art-presentation-like manner. And we nearly Bendarooed over in laughter. In deed we nearly did.

All of which is to say that, given a bit of playful creativity, Bendaroos can provide many hours of Major Fun to pretty much everybody.