The minute you open the box, you know that you are about to play a game that has been made for fun. The rules are beautifully illustrated. The game board is made of heavy pressboard, and is at least as colorful as the illustrations. Preparing the game for the first time, you punch out sections of the die-cut board, and each punch is pleasantly perfect.

There are two boards, actually: the Garden Level Game Board, and the Labyrinth Board. The first thing you do is punch out 24 coin-like “Magic Symbol Chips” from the Labyrinth Board, and place them in the cloth bag. Next, punch out everything that looks punch-outable, until you end up with a grid. Then you take the 24 wooden wall pieces and place them in the grid so as to make a solvable maze. There are many different maze patterns you can make, some of which can be extremely difficult to solve. After the maze has been built, you cover it with the Garden Level Game Board, and, for, for fun’s sake, turn the whole thing around so that no one actually remembers what the maze looked like.

There are four large “Magnetic Magician Pawns.” Each pawn is placed in one of the four corners of the Garden Level Game Board. There are also four metal balls, each of which is placed beneath a pawn.

Without actually looking into the bag, one player picks a Magic Symbol Chip and places it on the corresponding symbol on the Garden Leven Game Board. The first player who can move his piece on to that chip – without dropping the steel ball – wins that round.

The starting player rolls the die, which allows him to move from one to four spaces, horizontally and/or vertically. At first, it’s sheer luck. There’s no way to tell when you’ll run against a wall, and lose the ball – and when you do, you have to return to start. But once you do lose the ball, you’ll know exactly what to avoid the next turn.

And on and on, turn by turn, players begin to learn the maze, each from their own perspective, each hoping to be the first to win a Magic Symbol Chip. When that happens, the next player draws the next chip, and the new round begins.

It takes about 15 minutes to set the game up the first time. Playing the whole game (collecting all 24 Magic Symbol Chips), can take a while, but each round takes a little less time as more of the maze is explored and mastered. And, of course, you can stop whenever you are tired or are told you have to.

The mystery of the hidden maze, the excitement of losing the ball and having to start over, the surprise of having suddenly lost the ball, the delight of having mastered a portion of the maze, the elegance of the rules, the opportunity to build yet another, more or less challenging maze – all combine wonderfully to create a game that remains fascinating each time it is played.

The Magic Labyrinth was designed by Dirk Baumann, and is made available through Playroom Entertainment. It is for two-four players, and can be enjoyed by kids as young as 6, and by adults who have a good memory. As in most memory games, the kids have the advantage, which makes The Magic Labyrinth such a perfect family game. It is not really a strategic game, which, for many of us, makes the game especially appealing. But it does require deductive reasoning as well as a good memory, and, hence, challenges and exercises both. It’s an elegant game – not quite like any other. And, most importantly, turns out to be significantly, dare I say, majorly fun.

I’ve generally found that if you are going to do silly, you might as well go all out. What’s the point of dressing up as a pirate if you’re only going to go through the day saying your same old innocuous pleasantries in your predictable Midwestern mumble? Sometimes you just have to go for the gusto.

Gamewright goes for the gusto with their hamster sumo wrestling game Sumo Ham Slam. That’s right, sumo hamsters. And if the thought of crashing your hamster into your opponent’s hamster until one of you falls over or out of the ring doesn’t bring a smile to your face then remember this: at the start of the match, all players must chant SUMO HAM SLAM!! And there are magnets. And your feed your hamsters to make them heavier.

Still no smile? Check the flesh around your mouth for facial paralysis. Go watch some Monty Python.

The game comes with a plastic wrestling ring, four hollow plastic hamsters, 40 “food pellet” chips, a die, and two magnetic wands. The wands slide under the surface of the wrestling ring and control the movement of your hamster. The die tells you what to do on your turn: Eat, Train, or Slam! You earn plastic pellets by eating and training (thus making your hamster heavier) and you earn victory points by wrestling when you roll a Slam! The first player to earn five victory points is the winner. To augment the verisimilitude of the sumo-like encounter, the manufacturer recommends substituting pennies or nickels for the lighter weight plastic pellets, thereby further adding to the gravity and humorously hefty hamsterness of it all.

Once all the food pellets (or coins) are consumed, the game becomes a constant series of sumo matches. Which is just as well because the real joy of the game comes from the silly, but absolutely necessary ritual of chanting SUMO HAM SLAM!! before each bout. And sumo wrestling hamsters are nothing without their rituals.

Well, maybe they are Major Fun.

Sumo Ham Slam was designed by Mary Jo Reutter with art by Dean MacAdam. © 2010 by Gamewright.

William Bain, Games Taster

Further exploration of the Parsons Effect demonstrates what happens when you spin a hexagon-shaped magnet-cluster near similar hexagon-shaped magnet-clusters.

Parsons comments: “It’s like, when the one that is spinning is in full spin, the other, more stayed hexagon-shaped magnet clusters choose to ignore all that frenzied enthusiasm. But as it slows down, the others start noticing, and, with a wiggle and perhaps even a spin of their own, acknowledge the whirl.”

Discovered by Charles Parsons, behold – a whole new world of hexagon spinning.

The center ball is pushed just a teeny bit lower than the rest so that the hexagon rests on one point.

The four following reviews are almost identical, each featuring a different rendition of the same magnetic puzzle/toy concept. There are minor differences, and, depending the player’s preferences, one might prove definitely more, shall we say, “attractive,” than the rest. But comparing them to each in any effort to determine which was truly best only led us to the kinds of thinking that this website is not designed to support.

We’ve been taking a very close look at a puzzling phenomenon, known as The Neo Cube. The website alone is sufficiently filled with invitations and incentives for purchasing these extremely attractive technical marvels to explain why we’ve been looking so closely.

The spectacular variety of sculptural puzzles that these magnetic balls lend themselves to can be found everywhere on the web. On flickr you can find image after image of Neocubes. On Youtube you can watch a minor myriad of people making mini-metal-marble magnetic magic with Neocubes. As you watch, it is clear that making these extremely attractive configurations is as much a performance art as it is an act of conceptual mastery.

Until this review, the story of these amazing magnet balls has been uniformly focused on the many marvelous puzzle-like activities available to the magnet-ball-empowered few. Our explorations have revealed equally marvelous toy-potential. Here is a very simple example – showing what happens when you roll one ball at another, with appropriate speed and something like aim, on a plate. Turn up your sound to appreciate the fullness of the inherent glee.

With this very preliminary foray into the “toyetic” qualities of it all, we hereby invite your contributions of similarly jolly, playworthy discoveries. This first is but a taste. (Actually, more of a hint than a taste as the frame speed of the video doesn’t show the full spinning glories we experienced. But a tasty hint, nonetheless.)

image by Frans (3Djavu.nl)

We’ve been taking a very close look at a puzzling phenomenon, known, in this particular instantiation, as Buckyballs – a puzzle made of 216 (count ‘em) extremely attractive (read “magnetic”) balls.

The spectacular variety of sculptural puzzles that these magnetic balls lend themselves to can be found everywhere on the web. On flickr you can find image after image of Buckyballs. On Youtube you can watch a minor myriad of people making mini-metal-marble magnetic magic with Buckyballs. As you watch, it is clear that making these extremely attractive configurations is as much a performance art as it is an act of conceptual mastery.

Until this review, the story of these amazing magnet balls has been uniformly focused on the many marvelous puzzle-like activities available to the magnet-ball-empowered few. Our explorations have revealed equally marvelous toy-potential. Here is a very simple example – showing what happens when you roll one ball at another, with appropriate speed and something like aim, on a plate. Turn up your sound to appreciate the fullness of the inherent glee.

With this very preliminary foray into the “toyetic” qualities of it all, we hereby invite your contributions of similarly jolly, playworthy discoveries. This first is but a taste. (Actually, more of a hint than a taste as the frame speed of the video doesn’t show the full spinning glories we experienced. But a tasty hint, nonetheless.)

We’ve been taking a very close look at a puzzling phenomenon, known as CyberCube. We tried to look no further than their amazing, lovely to look at website, filled with invitations and incentives for purchasing these extremely attractive magnetic marvels, but couldn’t stop there. We had to have one, at least. The very shiny silver one. Though the gold one looked at least as attractive, and the nickel and black at least as playworthy as the others.

The spectacular variety of sculptural puzzles that these magnetic balls lend themselves to can be found everywhere on the web. On flickr you can find image after image of CyberCube. On Youtube you can watch a minor myriad of people making mini-metal-marble magnetic magic with CyberCube. As you watch, it is clear that making these extremely attractive configurations is as much a performance art as it is an act of conceptual mastery.

CyberCube come in a variety of packages and colors. You can get them in tins – which are fun to build on and, when the balls are stored inside the tin, helps eliminate the magnetic field. You can get them in boxes. You can get them in boxes (the magnets are a little smaller and cost a little less). You can get enough to make a 6x6x6 cube (with a few extras) or a 7x7x7 cube.

Until this review, the story of these amazing magnet balls has been uniformly focused on the many marvelous puzzle-like activities available to the magnet-ball-empowered few. Our explorations have revealed equally marvelous toy-potential. Here is a very simple example – showing what happens when you roll one ball at another, with appropriate speed and something like aim, on a plate. Turn up your sound to appreciate the fullness of the inherent glee.

With this very preliminary foray into the “toyetic” qualities of it all, we hereby invite your contributions of similarly jolly, playworthy discoveries. This first is but a taste. (Actually, more of a hint than a taste as the frame speed of the video doesn’t show the full spinning glories we experienced. But a tasty hint, nonetheless.)

We’ve been taking a very close look at a puzzling phenomenon, known as Zen Magnets. Actually, you need look no further than their website to be delighted and enticed by a myriad invitations and incentives for purchasing these extremely attractive technical marvels.

They also come with ample warnings about the dangers of swallowing, heating, or handling these magnets should their coatings be compromised, advising, in no uncertain terms, that these magnets should not be played with by children younger than 12.

The spectacular variety of sculptural puzzles that these magnetic balls lend themselves to can be found everywhere on the web. On flickr you can find image after image of Zen Magnets. On Youtube you can watch a minor myriad of people making mini-metal-marble magnetic magic with Zen Magnets. As you watch, it is clear that making these extremely attractive configurations is as much a performance art as it is an act of conceptual mastery.

Zen Magnets also comes with a drawstring velvet bag (which is especially useful when you don’t have the time or wish to make the effort to get them into any particular formation) and six extra magnet balls.

Until this review, the story of these amazing magnet balls has been uniformly focused on the many marvelous puzzle-like activities available to the magnet-ball-empowered few. Our explorations have revealed equally marvelous toy-potential. Here is a very simple example – showing what happens when you roll one ball at another, with appropriate speed and something like aim, on a plate. Turn up your sound to appreciate the fullness of the inherent glee.

With this very preliminary foray into the “toyetic” qualities of it all, we hereby invite your contributions of similarly jolly, playworthy discoveries. This first is but a taste. (Actually, more of a hint than a taste as the frame speed of the video doesn’t show the full spinning glories we experienced. But a tasty hint, nonetheless.)