Top 12 for 2012

11/28/201211/29/2012 - Bernie DeKoven 2 Comments

We don’t recommend a game unless we think it’s a good investment that pays off in significant fun. Nevertheless, some games seem a little more Major than others. And, once again, as we do every year, here’s the 2012 selection of the Majorer:

Party Games

Jungle Speed Ravin Rabbids is essentially a fast-paced matching game. Cards are evenly dealt to all the players. Extras go into a pile (called “the pot”). Players turn over cards and if a match occurs, the two players with the match try to grab the “totem” (a soft plastic tube that stands on one end in the middle of the table). The loser takes the winner’s face-up discards and puts them at the bottom of his or her pile. In this manner, winners get rid of cards and losers get more cards. The game ends when one player is out of cards.

Like a lot of party games, Train of Thought puts one heroic player on a quest to squeeze the magic word from the lips of the other players. In most such games each player discovers, when it is his or her turn to accomplish this task, that all the other players were gifted with fewer brain cells than the universe bestowed upon zooplankton let alone higher mammals. Can’t they SEE what I’m doing? How hard can it be to guess this word?

FitzIt is something like Scrabble, only instead of letters you’re playing with ideas. On the other hand, it’s nothing like Scrabble at all, because the winner isn’t the one with the biggest vocabulary, but rather with: a) the most imagination, b) the best ability to convince everyone else of the unquestionable logic of oft-absurd assertions, and c) a modicum of sheer luck.

I’m going to warmly embrace the over-the-top, absurd twists supplied by Mayfair’s Lemming Mafia. Silly? Yeah. Major Fun? Are you kidding? Lemmings! In fedoras. Jumping off a pier. And there is no saving the lemmings. Only betting on their watery demise. So limber up your best wise guy voice and get yourself fitted for concrete galoshes.

Snake Oil is crazy fun. It’s fun to play the salesperson, enthusing your little heart out pitching a truly absurd product to a whimsical, and often genuinely silly customer. The intensely purposeless creativity, the sheer passion of the pitch, the remarkably consumer-like arbitrariness of the customer. Hilarious fun of major proportions. The manufacturer recommends Snake Oil for 4-9 players, age 13 and over. Snake Oil was created by Jeff Ochs, design by the design company.

Kids and Family Games

Rhino Hero is a kids’ game, unless they allow their parents to play. And then, when the kids are asleep, it’s party time. It’s a direct descendant of playing house of cards. But it’s a game instead of an exercise in masochism. And an innovatively fun game it is.

Pentago is like tic-tac-toe, don’t you know. Only you have to get five-in-a-row instead of three. Which is almost all you need to know about so, naturally, you assume you don’t really have to learn anything else in order to have yourself a good old time outsmarting opponents. Except for the turning-a-section-of-the-board part. I mean, even with the turning-a-section-of-the-board part, you still really know more than enough to play the game. You just might not know enough to keep from, well, losing.

Zombiepox is Major Fun for its simple rules, surprising strategy, and replayability. It also works as a good introduction into cooperative games. Those who have played cooperative games like Forbidden Island will recognize the basic elements of those games in Zombiepox. If you have been weaned on those games then you’ll seeZombiepox as a good vector for getting your friends into those other, more complicated games.

Electronic

At first, Sifteo seems like some kind of IQ test from the future: a set of three high-tech cubes, each a small computer with a color screen, each knowing when it is pressed, tilted, turned over, turned around, or near another cube. All together providing an apparently endless variety of surprisingly deep puzzles and investigations of the universe of sound and reason. And then you realize it’s a more of an IQ toy than an IQ test, inviting you and your children to hours of, as the manufacturers describe it, “intelligent play.”

Gluddle made me laugh. Several times. Out loud. I don’t know if it was because all these eyeball things say “oi” whenever they hit something. or each other. Gluddle is brought to your iPad,-pod and -phone courtesy of Creative Heroes. It was by created by Richard van Tol and Sander Huiberts. It is fun. Major Fun. It will make you laugh. It will keep you playing. It will make you laugh some more.

If you were looking for an electronic game to exemplify why the Major Fun seal was created, you’d need look no further than Hasbro’s Bop It! SMASH. It’s very easy to learn how to play. You don’t have to read the instructions, you don’t even have to take it out of the package it comes in. You, as the package so clearly indicates, simply smash both ends at once. That’s it. That’s all you need to know.

Zombiepox

11/25/201211/28/2012 - Will Bain Leave a comment

Like most great diseases, the game Zombiepox has had a period of incubation and mutation. The genetic material for the game germinated in Pox: Save the People. According to Tilfactor’s website, Pox was designed as an educational game in coordination with the Mascoma Valley Health Initiative in order to counter misinformation about vaccines. I had the opportunity to play Pox and was impressed by the mechanics, especially for a game that was designed for educational purposes.

What the game lacked were the design elements that would appeal to the wider commercial audience that would be looking for a game off the shelf. It wasn’t infectious enough.

Thank goodness for the current zombie culture war. Pox: Save the People gets a new protein sheathe and a fresh entry into the population. Zombiepox!!

For a cooperative game, the setup and play of Zombiepox is remarkably simple. The game consists of a game board (a grid of 81 people), chips to mark the people (vaccinated, infected, zombified), and a deck of cards that tells you how the infection spreads. The rules fit on a single, folded sheet of paper.

The game starts with 2 zombies in the middle of the board. Each player’s turn starts by drawing a card and following the instructions. Cards tell the player how to spread the zombie infection and how many may be vaccinated or cured. If a person on the board is ever surrounded on all sides by the infected, that person becomes a zombie. Six of the 81 people on the board are babies who are especially susceptible to the disease. They become zombies on contact with the disease.

Players set a goal at the beginning of the game and play until the disease can no longer spread (WIN!) or the players’ goal has been exceeded (LOSE!) The hardest challenge is to limit the epidemic to the two original zombies. Six zombies is the maximum.

Vaccinating and curing people is the strategic aspect that keeps the game rewarding and frustrating. The vulnerable babies cannot be immunized and it costs more to cure infected than it does to vaccinate the healthy citizens. These decisions and complications become more difficult to juggle as the infection spreads.

Zombiepox is Major Fun for its simple rules, surprising strategy, and replayability. It also works as a good introduction into cooperative games. Those who have played cooperative games like Forbidden Island will recognize the basic elements of those games in Zombiepox. If you have been weaned on those games then you’ll see Zombiepox as a good vector for getting your friends into those other, more complicated games.

Who knows, a few more iterations and a mutated strain of Zombiepox might just threaten the position of Pandemic as the alpha cooperative disease game. Maybe.

1-4 players, ages 12+

Gluddle

10/26/201211/28/2012 - Bernie DeKoven Leave a comment

Gluddle made me laugh. Several times. Out loud. I don’t know if it was because all these eyeball things say “oi” whenever they hit something. or each other. Or what a great sound they make in chorus. Not the qvetchy oi. But the somewhat Australian oi. Though I made the qvetchy oi, many times. Let me tell you.

So, there are these Gluddle (the plural of Gluddle is Gluddle). Yes, they most definitely look like eyeballs. And you kind of point them in the direction that you want them to go. And a curve of semi-balls shows you the direction they will most likely go. And then you tap, and off they go, bouncing and oi’ing around, bouncing off each other, bouncing off walls and things, until they bounce off the screen entirely. What you hope most is that they bounce into these large, target-looking things that also look like eyeballs, but are called the “Supervision,” which immediately makes you want to destroy them.

These Supervision (the plural of Supervision being Supervision) can get pretty mean. They can freeze your Gluddle, which is always a bad thing, even though you get a lot of Gluddle. I mean a lot, I mean you get an endless supply of Gluddle! So you can fill your screen with Gluddle after Gluddle after Gluddle and you can’t really lose. You just get a lower and lower score. But eventually you figure things out, and on to the next challenge (there are 102, count them. levels). Strategery-wise, you can also tap one of your Gluddle while they are in mid bounce, and, like the Supervisions, freeze a Gluddle. But, unlike the Supervision-frozen Gluddle, you can unfreeze any of your self-frozen Gluddle. Frozen Gluddle can be very good things, because your free Gluddle bounce off of them, and a well-timed freeze can cause an equally well-timed bounce into, well, see, it’s a puzzle, a physics game, and there’s a lot to figure out, and the thing is, you can’t lose, and it makes you laugh. Oi, the sheer Majorness of the fun!

Gluddle is brought to your iPad,-pod and -phone courtesy of Creative Heroes. It was by created by Richard van Tol and Sander Huiberts. It is fun. Major Fun. It will make you laugh. It will keep you playing. It will make you laugh some more.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yIZqaZGxPww[/youtube]

Multi-Player Pentago

10/14/201211/28/2012 - Bernie DeKoven Leave a comment

It’s like tic-tac-toe, don’t you know. Only you have to get five-in-a-row instead of three. Which is almost all you need to know about Pentago, so, naturally, you assume you don’t really have to learn anything else in order to have yourself a good old time outsmarting opponents. And if you happen to know the ancient Chinese game of Go-Moku (a.k.a. “Go Bang,” or your more descriptive “Five-in-a-Row”), well, then, you know even more about playing Pentago, because in Pentago (“pent” as in five) you have to get five-in-a-row in order to win. Except for the turning-a-section-of-the-board part. I mean, even with the turning-a-section-of-the-board part, you still really know more than enough to play the game. You just might not know enough to keep from, well, losing.

You might want to practice a bit, just to get the feel of it, so you might consider visiting the vividly illustrative on-line version of Pentago before reading any further. Of course, you won’t gain much of an insight into the strategic significance of playing multi-player Pentago, which, as you might surmise from the title of this review, is the very version about which we are currently enthusing.

In sum, it’s called “multi-player” because two, three, or even four players can play it together. Or, should you be so oriented, you can play in teams, hence significantly raising the number of potentially engaged players. Which means that even though you might have figured out how to play Pentago, achieved demonstratable mastery over the online version, and already have the original version or perhaps even the more original wooden version of two-player Pentago Classic; multi-player Pentago is something significantly other because more things of sometimes profoundly strategic impact happen between turns.

What you get with Multi-Player Pentago is nine turning board sections with which to play, and four different color pieces (each piece being two-sided, each side being of a different color). But more about this later.

You also get a very well-made, aesthetically pleasing game board, a couple of lovely little velvet-like draw-string bags within which to store your pieces, in a durable box with a velvitishly-lined filler, and exceptionally clear, well-illustrated instructions including just enough strategic insights to entice you and your friends to explore nuances of piece-placement and board-section-turning and two- vs three- vs four-player encounters for the rest of your natural lives.

Unless, of course, given such an easily learned game of such almost archetypal elegance, you decide to explore variations, such as: what would happen if you could, say, turn over one of your opponent’s pieces so that it became some other color (hopefully yours), or if you were allowed to move a piece that you’ve already placed, or if you place two pieces down at the same time as long as they were or were not adjacent. Then you might need to teach your children how to play so they can carry on after you.

Pentago – very well-made, very well-conceived; a game you can learn in minutes and spend months trying to master, that takes anywhere from three to thirty minutes to play, that is as fun for a six-year-old as it is for someone as old as you.

What else can we say? Major fun, in all its manifestations (though Multiplayer Pentago seems just a tad more Major! A conceptual gift from Mindwister.

The Big Fat Tomato Game

09/01/201211/28/2012 - Will Bain Leave a comment

Tomatoes: that most delicious and yet misunderstood of nature’s bounty. Is it a fruit? Is it a vegetable? How do you pronounce its name? How many can you stockpile before your neighbors become covetous of your horde? Gamewright’s succulent offering The Big Fat Tomato Game (hereafter to be known as TBFTG) attempts to answer one of these questions.

TBFTG comes with 5 plastic baskets, a pair of red dice, 60 cards, and 150 small, red, fluffy tomatoes. Yes, the Gamewright does take some liberties with verisimilitude in order to make the game work but you will forgive this inconsistency once you see how the fluffy tomatoes are employed. The artwork is top notch (and funny), the rules are clearly explained, and the props are cute. Some great design work here.

At its most basic the game consists of players rolling the dice and collecting that number of tomatoes into their baskets. Once a player collects 20 or more tomatoes in his or her basket, the player may dump out the basket to form a stockpile. Your stockpile scores you points at the end of the game. If the game stopped here it would be about as much fun as real-life industrial tomato picking, but I have as yet to introduce the cards.

As a player you start your turn by drawing cards until you have 5. These cards either help you or hurt your opponents. Once you have your cards you have five actions that you can take but only in this order:

Play a green helpful card on yourself (if you have one)
If you have any pests in your garden (placed there by another player) you take a penalty
Roll the dice and put tomatoes into your basket
Play a red attack card against an opponent )If you have one)
Discard any cards you don’t want to keep (you will draw back up to 5 next turn)

At any time during your turn, you may empty out your basket to form a stockpile. If you have 20 or more in your basket, you may keep them. Less than 20 and you lose them all. So sorry. Keep better inventory. Only stockpiled tomatoes score points at the end of the game. But tomatoes in your basket are usually safe from attack (unless someone kicks over your basket with a special card).

There are a lot of different cards and all of them have special times at which they can be played. This might seem daunting at first but each card comes with clear instructions on when and how it can be used. Your first game may be a little slow as you take some time to read what each card can do (and laugh at the clever illustrations), but they quickly become intuitive and play moves fast.

The TBFTG is probably the closest you can get to having a tomato fight that won’t stain your walls. Like so many games that we adore here at Major Fun, the attack cards are wonderfully mean spirited and it keeps everyone on their toes. Sometimes it’s fun to just run up and kick over someone’s tomato basket and unleashing the Tomato Zombie is major fun.

For 2-5 players, ages 10+

Bop It Smash

07/06/201211/28/2012 - Bernie DeKoven Leave a comment

The lights blink in sequence. You wait, everso patiently, for the ever-decreasing millisecond that the green light in the center is on, and, well, SMASH! Smash well enough, and you get a bonus round. Continue smashing well and you get to go to the next level, and the next bonus, and the slightly excruciatingly more difficult next level, and then the less threatening but even more excruciatingly difficult bonus round, and on, and excruciatingly on. And if you happen to be altruistic enough to want to share it with someone else, there’s the PASS IT variation (easily selected by moving the switch next to one of the smash-knobs). And, should you seek an even more competitive dialog, you can switch to a multi-player version which allows you to engage in super-fast reflex challenge with up to 5 more people (depending on how much patience and self-restraint you have).

The audio instructions and narrative are enticing, slightly cajoling, often humorous, and a tad, shall we say, sarcastic, but in an inviting, almost lovable way. The game select feature even includes a volume control (either loud or not-so-loud). Ah, so wise these designers. There are three AA batteries required, all of which, bless Hasbro, are included.

Yes, verily, this is not the only Bop It! to have bopped its way into our collective Bop-awareness. There’s the earlier, multi-control Bop It! and the more recent massively multi-controlled Bop It! XT and even the Bop It! iPod/iPad Touch Game. But Bop It! SMASH is the one version that most vividly exemplifies what the Major Fun seal is designed to lead you to – elegantly designed, accessible, intuitive, portable, sharable, engaging, intense fun.

FitzIt

04/30/201211/28/2012 - Bernie DeKoven Leave a comment

There are cards. Many, many cards. Two hundred sixty-five two-inch, round-cornered, nicely finished, fun-to-hold square cards, each describing an attribute that can be more or less reasonably attributed to something.

I select, at random:

“comes in an odd numbers”

“fits in a car trunk”

“usually holds other things”

The task is to think of something that all of these things would describe. One might say, for example, “a shopping bag.” And reasonable others would have to admit that a shopping bag does in truth come in odd numbers (e.g. one), fit in a car trunk, and usually holds other things. Of course, if you had more cards (and you, in fact, you have the prescribed five), you would be sorely tempted to use as many more of them as you could. “Hmm,” you opine, “could a shopping bag be, as this other card describes, ‘used to build something’?” Probably not. More than likely, should you make such a claim, you would be voted down, and you would lose your turn. Is there anything else, then, that comes in odd numbers, fits in a car trunk, usually holds other things and is used to build something?” How about a bag of nails? Perfect, no? Now, if only a bag of nails were “often considered romantic.”

Of course, unless you play first, you have to add your cards to cards already played, crossword-like. And your goal is to play all your cards. And, though you have five cards in your hand, you actually have a stock of 15 with which to dispense.

And then there are the strategically pleasing exigencies. For example, should you be able to play four of your cards, you may give away your remaining card to any of your opponents. And in the event that you are so lucky, and so linguistically well-endowed that you manage to employ all five cards, you may give two of the cards from your stock to the unlucky, but deserving player of your choice. And, potentially even more profoundly satisfying, if you add a number of your cards to an existing row or column of four or more cards, you get to give away an equal number of cards, much to your advantage, and equally as much to the disadvantage of your preferred victim. Keeping in mind, of course, that the more cards you hope to use, the more arduous the feat of reasoning required to make sense of them all.

And then there’s the aesthetic, but unscored delight that comes from proving yourself so extremely clever that one of the cards in the row you’ve created connects to a column of other cards in crossword-like manner, and you are able to produce an acceptable definition for both.

Cleverness, in sum, is what it’s all about – cleverness and convincingness – and luck, and playing with people who see reason in being reasonable, and have a well-established sense of humor.

FitzIt, they claim, is a game for two or more players. The “and more” part, I believe, is probably not more than, what, 28, figuring 7 players per team. All in all, a party game. And even if only two people are playing, a party game of major fun proportions.

FitzIt was designed by Jack Degnan and is published by Gamewright.

Train of Thought

04/22/201211/28/2012 - Will Bain 1 Comment

“Brevity is the soul of wit.” Shakespeare (through Polonius in Hamlet Act II, Scene 2)

“Eschew surplusage.” Mark Twain (“The Literary Offenses of Fennimore Cooper”)

“Just spit it out!!” Anyone who has ever played Tasty Minstrel’s brain wracking party game Train of Thought.

Train of Thought gleefully flips the script around so that it is the player who feels as if they are a couple of IQ points short of stupid as they try to give hints that may be only three words long. There are a lot of laughs to be had due to this limitation, but practice and patience rewires the brain and soon enough, everyone starts to feel almost telepathic.

There are three main components to Train of Thought. 200 Station Cards contain the word clues (6 per card). A 6 sided die. A 120 second timer. Each player has a turn as the Conductor in which they try to get the other players to guess specific words in 120 seconds. A correct guess scores a point for the guesser and the Conductor.

The Conductor draws a Station Card and rolls the die to determine which word will be the starting word. All players see the starting word. When the timer starts, the Conductor draws another Station Card and finds the word with the same die number as the starting word. This is the target word. The Conductor provides a THREE WORD clue that contains the starting word. All other players shout out one word—and ONLY one word—as an answer. If no one guesses correctly, the Conductor must make another THREE WORD CLUE that includes one of the words shouted out by the other players. This continues until the correct word is guessed. The Conductor draws another card and now has a new destination word.

Especially in early games, it is easy to get flustered by the three word limitation. How can you possible get someone to guess “chimpanzee” when one of your three words must be “pudding”? This is a source of great frustration and humor. When you say “This eats pudding” the other players will naturally say things like “children” and “grandpa” and “ants” which are all wrong. BUT it lets you now say “Children sized ape” which might get you a bit closer.

In my observation of the game I learned two helpful strategies. One: don’t worry about wrong answers. If anything, think about getting the others to guess words that will help you get closer to your goal. Two: don’t even worry about making sense. It is perfectly legal to say “Pudding Jane Goodall” with the hope that someone will blurt out “chimpanzee” even though there is no connection to “pudding.” You have three words, and if two of them will get your answer out of another player then you get a point and you also get to seem like the Amazing Kreskin.

Tasty Minstrel Games has a great party game here and it looks great. The instructions are clear with plenty of examples. Art is catchy and the game play is lively. They are a relatively new company but have an impressive stable of games that will appeal to a wide variety of gamers. Check ‘em out. In three words: Major Fun likey…

For 3 – 7 players, ages 10+

Jungle Speed Ravin Rabbids

04/22/201211/28/2012 - Will Bain Leave a comment

There is often a wide chasm that separates the digital world of video games and the analog world of the table-top game. Sometimes this is facilitated by a generational difference, sometimes by the clash of personalities between traditionalists and early-adopters. There are also some very real differences between the gaming experiences—fundamental differences that keep good games from crossing over. Even at their fastest, board games tend to be slower and more deliberative than their electronic counterparts. And when table-top games are built for speed, they generally require the players to physically manipulate objects—a mechanic that is often problematic for video games.

Asmodee’s takes something of a hybrid approach with their grabby, slappy, trippy card game Jungle Speed. It is not a remake of an existing video game, but it successfully captures the frantic action (and bug-eyed rabbit characters) of a series of games for the Xbox Kinect: Ubisoft’s Rabbids.

Special cards complicate things (naturally!!) If the “rabbid hunter” card appears then all players try to grab the totem. If the “BWWWWAAAAH” card appears then all players must put bunny ears behind the player to the left and laugh maniacally. There are others but the effect is the same: players never know if they are going to be in a duel with one of the other players or ALL of the other players.

The cards for matching have some small differences which make mistakes maddeningly common. And mistakes are costly. If you grab the totem at the wrong time you get ALL the face-up cards from ALL the players. The game also comes with t little Rabbid figurine that sits on top of the totem. Whenever someone grabs the totem, the figuring falls off. The first person to grab the figurine can get rid of one card.

Although the Rabbids are not the first to move from the video world to the wider world of popular culture (Pac Man Fever anyone?) they do bring with them a wild, hilarious, and Major Fun game that will have you swatting and cursing at your friends around a cozy table. Much like you would if you were playing in front of a Kinect.

For 2 – 10 players, ages 8+

Sifteo

04/08/201211/28/2012 - Bernie DeKoven Leave a comment

Sifteo is a computer peripheral that communicates via a “dongle” (a small device that plugs into the USB port). To begin play, you must first download an application called “Siftrunner.” Through this software, you connect to the Sifteo cubes, your own personal library of Sifteo games and activities, and an online collection of yet more games that are available for a most modest fee (the Sifteo itself is somewhat of a significant investment, and you’ll probably rationalize yourself into purchasing at least one more $50 Sifteo cube).

Sifteo is a frame-breaking toy. Even though you need your computer nearby, the players are interacting solely through the manipulation of the three (or more) Sifteo cubes. When a game is selected, it is downloaded to the cubes. The computer provides the sound effects – which results in a richly immersive soundscape for each game.

Currently, there are 19 different activities available from the Sifteo store. Some are free. Several are included with your initial purchase. Though the majority of Sifteo activities are best played as a solitaire, many can be played with more than one player.

Peano’s Vault is one of the included games. It is more of an exercise than a game, offering a collection of mathematical puzzles where players arrange cubes to equal a target number. Each cube displays a number. Surrounding that number are different arithmetic operators (plus, minus, multiply, divide). By connecting the cubes in the correct order to the correct operator, you arrive at the correct solution. The game demonstrates the unique benefit of the Sifteo device – rearranging cubes provides a new and inviting way for interacting with number puzzles. Even with three cubes, the puzzles can get deeply challenging. With four, even moreso. Five or six and you border on merry mathematical masochism.

Chroma Shuffle (available for 300 points) exemplifies the more recreational uses of Sifteo with a series of visual logic puzzles. Each cube displays a collection of dots of different shape and color. By positioning two cubes next to each other, dots that are adjacent and the same color/shape disappear. By tilting a cube that has lost some of its dots, you can rearrange them. There are a variety of puzzles, most of which have something to do with making all the dots disappear. Again, the opportunity for challenge (this time, visual and logical) can get quite profound as you progress through the games. (Chroma Lite comes free with your set. Playing with it for a half-hour or so should be ample evidence of why you should consider purchasing Chroma Shuffle.)

Planet of Tune (a 300 point investment) transforms the Sifteo cubes into a tool for exploring and composing music. Each cube becomes one of 14 different instruments. Standing the cubes on edge makes each instrument continuously play. In this way, by selecting which cube to stand up and which to lay down, you can actually play your cubes, creating your own musical performance. Shaking a cube makes the instrument play according to whatever tempo you create. You can “record” each instrument so that the sound you make keeps repeating.

And on and on, each activity demonstrating a sometimes significantly different way of interacting with the cubes, and each another invitation to use your mind, senses and fingers.

All the activities exercise the mind. The games center on logic, and the activities, like Peano’s Vault, focus on exercising knowledge. Though the games are engaging and entertaining (like good puzzles), currently the most significant contribution of Sifteo is educational – encouraging thinking and learning. The arithmetic and linguistic exercises demonstrate how the simple act of shifting cubes around adds a new and playful dimension to what in other manifestations is dull and routine. Sifteo even includes two activities that the user/player can edit to focus on particular learning objectives.

For players who may not appreciate the fast and near-chaotic pace of the majority of arcade-like computer games, Sifteo is a welcome alternative. It provides a rich and comparatively gentle invitation to electronic gaming that is removed (by up to 20 feet) from the computer. For parents and teachers who want to encourage children to use their minds and exercise their creative and intellectual skills, Sifteo offers ample and entertaining opportunities.

In sum, Sifteo proves to be an innovative interface to computer technology, inviting mind and fingers to many hours of deep, intelligent, and often major fun.

Sifteo was originally developed at the MIT Media Lab by Dave Merrill and Jeevan Kalanithi and introduced to the world in Dave’s 2009 TED talk.