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.

Think Colorforms – thick, bright, hefty, magnetic, geometrically-shaped colorforms. Imagine these thick, bright, hefty, geometrically-shaped colorform-like pieces that you carry around in a wood-framed suitcase. Now, while you’re at it, think Tangrams. That would explain the deck of large, two-sided cards, printed with colorful designs of varying complexity – each of which can be made with some or all of the thick, bright, hefty, colorful, geometrically-shaped pieces.

Now, add a dry-erase marker or two. Note how you can draw, and of course, erase on the inside of both panels of the suitcase. Which means, if you want, you could make any shape out of any combination of pieces, outline the shape with a marker, and make your own puzzle. Can you take all the pieces off and put them back on?

If I could travel back in time and give my early adolescent self a gift of potentiation and portends of power, it would be a copy of John Austin’s Mini Weapons of Mass Destruction. If I were my father, on the other hand, I’d take that book away from me in a most timely and uncompromising manner, hide it in a place where only I could find it, and read it from cover to cover.

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.)

The HABA Ball Track Building Set is, by all measures, a toy to treasure. Made of European Beechwood, the pieces are beautifully finished, and a pleasure to touch, lift, position, reposition. The basic set includes just enough ready-made sections of track and tunnels to make the purpose of the toy immediately accessible, and more than enough building elements to invite curiosity, imagination and endless elaboration. The HABA Ball Track Building set will engage children in hours of play, exploration, design, construction and, above all, experimentation.

The fact is, that any construction toy that involves building marble runways, even one made of plastic, provides children with a near perfect environment for gaining the basic understanding of and appreciation for the processes that are central to all scientific pursuits. Given a set with a variety of both construction and track elements, creating a marble runway that really works invites observation and testing, experimentation and patience, refinement and repetition, elaboration and further testing.

Children are sensitive creatures, and though they may not express a specific preference for wood over plastic, the warmth, heft and precision of this thoughtfully made wooden toy will deepen and enrich the play experience for as long as they continue to play.

Though the HABA Ball Track Building set provides everything needed for many, many hours of absorbing fun, there are supplemental sets available that extend the value of the set, renewing the invitation to play by introducing new properties and functions. We tried the Cascade (a zig-zag, waterfall-like box that makes a lovely sound as marbles drop through), the Speed Track (a long, high ramp, that, as advertised, makes the marble go very fast, prompting new explorations of what you can make the system do), and the Score Counter (adding a random, but fun way to compete). But were most excited by the HABA Games for HABA Balltrack an extension that significantly adds to the overall play value of the entire set. It, in fact, redefines the set by introducing the idea of games.

The ball run is not a game. It’s a construction toy, the object of which is to build something – not play something. By adding games to the set, the entire toy gets redefined. Suddenly, there are rules, social structures, so many more variables to play with, which, in turn, get extended and redefined by the nature of the toy.

For example, the set of miniature nine-pins (wooden, of course – 8 natural color, one red). So now the child has something to aim for. How many rolls will it take before she can knock down all the pins? Who can knock down the most? Can you knock all the pins down except for the red one? Should you use the large marbles? Roll them down the special large marble ramp? Both ramps? Should you both roll your marbles at the same time, from opposite sides? Should you use the large marbles to hit the small marbles so that they roll into the pins? Should you use the small marbles to hit the large? Should the small marbles have to be launched from the very beginning of the entire marble run? Can you re-aim a ramp while a marble is rolling? And then there are the three arches – targets to roll through. One is worth three points, another only two, and a third, the widest, only one point. Where do you put those arches? Where does the marble have to come from?

And then there’s the floor, the whole room – everything becomes a target or an additional obstacle or another ramp. With the game extension, the whole Ball Run takes its place in the child’s world, becomes one aspect of a small universe of things to roll at and under and through, becomes even more of a shared thing, an invitation to play that your child can extend to his family and siblings and community.

If you were a Jack-in-the-Box who wanted to be game, Litter Bugs is what you’d be.

You’d be just as surprising, suspenseful, and almost as frightening, as a good jack-in-the box, but unpredictably and instead of getting cranked, people would take turns pressing your buttons, never knowing which one of eight was going to make you pop, having one less choice with each passing of the trash can.

You might not be a toy trash can, per se. Or a trash can with such an evil, oddly smirking face, as illustrated. But if you were a toy trash can with a toy trash cad lid, attached, beneath which a large, very fly-looking plastic fly lies ready..
to…….
pop-up.

To play the surprisingly one-piece Travel Litter Bugs game, one of you presses down on the plastic fly – all the way down until the fly, well, clicks. Close the lid. Randomly select any randomly selected button. Push it down. Give the trash can to one of your partner/opponents. Let them push down any of the other still unpushed-down buttons. And so on and so on, button-by-button, until there are, for example, only two buttons left and it’s your turn and you still can never tell which is going to release the fly, which, just as you press the other button, suddenly pops straight up, forcefully flipping open the toy lid in satisfyingly complete surprise.

You can play with it by yourself, with you friends, you can play with it as a toy, you can play it to decide who goes first. (Rocky and I were play/working on a puzzle together, using the toy as a kind of victory timer. Every time one of us would get a piece in, we’d get/have to press a different button.)

Travel Litterbugs is an elegant, well-designed toy/game, for children of any persuasion. As decisive as a game of Rock/Scissors/Paper, fun as a jack-in-the-box, and about as long to play. Major FUN!