Keva Brain Builders

06/18/201406/13/2014 - Will Bain Leave a comment

If you missed my earlier post about Keva planks and the fun of destruction, you can check it out here.

Keva planks are precision cut wooden building blocks. They measure about a quarter of an inch thick and the proportion of their dimensions is 1:3:15 (1 unit thick, 3 units wide, and 15 units long). The uniformity and quality of the Keva plank construction makes them ideal for building very complex and very stable structures.

Turns out, they also make for an interesting brain-teaser.

In essence, Keva Brain Builders is an exercise in architectural design and perspective drawing. The game comes with 20 planks and 30 puzzle cards. The cards are double sided. On the puzzle side is shown a diagram of something the player needs to build. The diagram shows the figure in top view, side view, and front view. The planks are color coded to indicate which side you are looking at in each view.

Your challenge is to build the structure so that it matches the picture on the solution side of the card.

The cards come in three difficulty levels. The easy ones are very simple both in the structure’s complexity and in the amount of balance it takes to create the structure. As the puzzles get harder, the diagrams become somewhat more difficult to suss out, but the manual dexterity to build the solutions becomes much more challenging.

Keva Brain Builders lends itself to free play. Although many of us at Major Fun liked playing with the challenge cards, just as many liked building our own structures. I imagine that there will be many kids who will be perfectly happy to take the planks and make their own designs. I had fun trying to come up with complicated designs that I would then draw in all three perspectives.

Ultimately, this is a great introduction into Keva planks, it’s a nice small building set, and the puzzle challenges are a clever way to improve spatial awareness. It comes in a compact, zippered pouch; although if your household is anything like mine, that will get stuffed with dolls and the Keva planks will be incorporated into some other Frankenstein structure of train tracks, Lego, and toilet paper rolls.

Solo play. Ages 7+

Pivit

06/14/201406/13/2014 - Will Bain Leave a comment

As you might imagine, we play a lot of games here at Major Fun, and after a while those games start to fall into rather predictable categories. In turn this can lead to a certain predisposition toward the ones we see most frequently. Tiling games are common and although I enjoy many of the ones that we get (see recent Major Fun Award winners here here and here…) when I open up the box I’m already settling in to a comfortable, laid back mental slouch.

So when we dumped Pivit out on the table and started flipping the tiles over, I had slipped into leisurely chat mode. It’ll be like Qwirkle, I thought. Lots of down time as each person takes a turn. Good for catching up on gossip with my friends.

To be fair, Pivit is a lot like Qwirkle in basic mechanics. You have tiles of different shapes and patterns. You arrange the tiles in interconnected lines so that either all the colors or all the shapes are the same in the line (but NOT BOTH). There are even WILD tiles. How hard could it be if it has WILD tiles?

Well, Pivit is more like a marriage between Qwirkle and Banangrams. I did not appreciate this confluence of game mechanics until I got my butt handed to me three games in a row by my step-daughter. You turn over your tiles (24 of them) and then try to be the first to create a crossword-style matrix. Your opponents are your timer. There are score blocks that are laid out in the middle of the table—one fewer than the number of players. Once you complete your matrix, you grab the highest score block you can.

The pressure is intense. Not only from other players but from the concentration it takes to differentiate the patterns. The patterns aren’t subtle but they have enough similarities that it is easy to confuse them in the heat of the moment. Mistakes were common which means that you could go from having the highest point block to nothing very quickly.

This is not a leisurely paced tiling game. It is a great lesson for those of us who have gotten complacent in what we expect from familiar categories of games.

We’ve been playing a lot of great games from MindWare recently and this one is no exception. The design of the materials, the clarity of the rules, and the elegant game-play speak highly of the care that goes in to their games.

Limber up your fingers and your minds and check out Pivit. It’s Major Fun.

2-4 players. Ages 8+

Castle Blast

06/11/201406/13/2014 - Will Bain Leave a comment

Castle Blast As anyone knows who has ever played with building blocks, the apotheosis of the constructive activity is the moment when you bring it all crashing down. For every castle or city or log cabin there is some dragon or dinosaur or marauding army that is merely biding its time.

Castle Blast is a building game that comes with its own wrecking ball. The good folks at Mindware embrace the Truth that what goes up must come down (especially since the game will probably have to go back in the box eventually). It’s about time kids learned that nothing made by human hands will endure.

In the words of Percy Bysshe Shelly, “Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair! For only my Twinkies and long-chain hydrocarbons remain!”

Or something to that effect.

The rules are simple: build a castle to protect 3 items (a princess, a treasure, and a dragon); roll the die to see how many swings you can take; swing the wrecking ball until you knock the three characters out of the fortification. The game comes with a small game-board and a castle design that you can follow. Or not. Build your own castle and see how it goes.

In the end, it all falls down.

When you successfully knock a character out of the castle, you get a token that corresponds to that character. Collect all three character tokens to win. Depending on how many players you have, you will probably have to reconstruct the castle multiple times.

The game looks great. The wooden blocks are solid and smooth and colorful. The rules are simple and provide several variations of play for those who want to add some variety to the endless cycle of creation and destruction. If you already have wooden blocks scattered underfoot and in the bottom of toy boxes, you could incorporate them in very easily.

Things fall apart. The center cannot hold. Major Fun is loosed upon the world… (apologies to Yeats)

2-4 players. Ages 5+

Staxis

06/09/201406/09/2014 - Will Bain Leave a comment

MindWare’s Staxis is like playing a game of pick-up-sticks in reverse. And I don’t mean that way you start the game by dropping a handful of long toothpicks in a pile, but rather imagine having to carefully place each stick so that they stand on end or balance against each other without touching the table.

The game comes with a base structure that looks like a Soviet era satellite has come to rest in your home. Once you have Sputnik assembled on your playing surface, players divide the 50 long stacking sticks between them. The first player to get rid of all their sticks is the winner.

Before you balance one of your sticks on the Epcot Spaceship Earth you have to roll a die. This tells you how many points of contact your stick must have with any wooden part of the structure. A single point basically means that you have to balance your stick horizontally across another stick. A double point means that your stick must touch two other sticks.

Although the two-point option seems easier and more stable, it proves very tricky as the game proceeds. Sticks balanced on two points generally form angles that make the single-point rolls even more challenging. The double-point sticks also seem to cause the weight to shift in unexpected ways.

A player must successfully balance one stick on his or her turn, but any sticks that fall off are collected by that player. This encourages players to take chances in order to leave their opponents with increasingly unstable configurations.

Staxis takes a steady hand and a keen eye. The tension builds steadily which lends itself to a lot of good natured trash talking and goading. The rules are barely necessary and that’s only for the first time you build the base Tesla Tower. The game is well constructed although you should be careful with the wooden stacking sticks. They do lend themselves to splinters.

Our kids had a blast with Staxis and it made for a great game with mixed ages. Major Fun game for dexterity, balance, and show-boating.

2-6 players. Ages 6+