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.