Category: Toy

Review

With the huge success of real-life Escape Rooms all around the world, more and more puzzle manufacturers have been trying to recreate the experience with their solve-at-home kits. ThinkFun‘s latest offering, Escape the Room: The Cursed Dollhouse, is possibly the closest you can get to the real thing, so far.

The setup of “The Cursed Dollhouse” is quick and simple. Within a few minutes you get to build a cardboard model of a dollhouse, turn on the recommended soundtrack of creepy music, and light up a few candles to get into the right mood. Once you do this, you can start reading the story of the house and unravel its mysteries.

You begin the adventure in the living room, where you have to solve several puzzles, involving a broken bookshelf, a dusty carpet, and a spiderweb on the wall. Then, you make your way through the rest of the house: kitchen, bathroom, bedroom, until you get to the attic. Each of the rooms you visit contains multiple objects, including hidden ones, which you need to use in order to solve its three challenges. Once you solve a challenge, you get a cryptic symbol which you must enter in the “solution wheel”. Get the three symbols correctly and proceed to the next room.

As you progress, you will encounter various puzzles, including many mechanical ones. You will have to cut, fold, entangle, and do all kinds of fun activities. The puzzles are logical and satisfying to solve. There were one or two which my group found a bit confusing, but fortunately, ThinkFun has created a website, where players can get small hints without spoiling the entire puzzles. In the end, all participants were very happy with the time we spent playing together.

While the price of “The Cursed Dollhouse” is a bit steep, the game provides a lengthy and immersive experience which justifies the cost. It also can be replayed by another group of people using the provided printable forms from the official website.

• 1-4 players, 13 years and up
• over 30 puzzles to solve within 2.5 hours
• realistic small-scale Escape Room experience
• puzzles are re-printable from the official website

GET ESCAPE THE ROOM HERE

Review

Minecraft: Magnetic Travel Puzzle (M:MTP for short) is a travel game by ThinkFun in which the goal is to arrange 3 types of objects, each coming in 3 different colors, in a 3 by 3 grid, such that certain conditions are satisfied.

As you progress through the 40 included challenges, the types of conditions you encounter become gradually more complex. While in the beginning you may be given all the colors of the objects with one clue and all the types of the objects with another, later on you need to analyze 5 or 6 clues at once, which makes the game more challenging and fun. That being said, at the hardest levels, M:MTP is still relatively easy, so experienced puzzlers will probably breeze through it within an hour or two.

At its core, M:MTP is identical to ThinkFun’s previously released Clue Master. Both games are presented in the form of magnetic notebooks, so they are easy to pick up and travel around with. The illustrations of the Minecraft edition are all based on the popular video game, so its fans may be particularly appreciative.

If you are looking for a casual puzzle to pass an hour or two on a road trip, then M:MTP would be a great choice. I only wish there were more challenges included, especially more difficult ones.

• 1 player, 8 years and up
• 40 challenges with increasing difficulties
• easy to transport and play on the go
• cool Minecraft based art
• most puzzles can be solved with a few simple techniques

GET M:MTP HERE

Review

Cat Crimes is a logic game by ThinkFun inspired by classic deduction puzzles. It consists of 40 challenges split into four difficulty groups.

Each challenge presents the player with a cat crime which they must solve. One of six items on a carpet has been ruined, and several clues written on a card point towards the cat which is responsible. The player must analyze each of the clues, as well as the models of the cats and the carpet (included in the box), and find the perpetrator. Even though the puzzles can be completed just as easily with pen and paper only, the inclusion of cardboard models makes the solving process much more fun. The beautiful artwork of the set and the sturdy cardboard additionally improve the experience.

The included puzzles are best suited for students in primary and middle schools, but older people can enjoy them as well. Overall, Cat Crimes is a wonderful twist on a traditional type of puzzle, and I highly recommend it.

• 1 player, 8 years and up
• 40 challenges, 4 difficulty levels
• a fun variation of a classic deduction puzzle
• beautiful models of cats and carpet

GET CAT CRIMES HERE

Review

In an age of video games and noisy high-tech toys, Brainwright’s Manifold is a rare find. I got truly delighted by the idea of folding little papers into origami, trying to achieve some easy-to-understand task. The goal is simple – you start with an 8×8 paper which has 16 black, 16 white, and 32 empty squares printed on its front. You must make several folds so that the paper ends up as a 4×4 piece with all black squares on one side and all white squares on the other.

For just about $10 I was able to get a set of 100 puzzles, which translates into several hours of gameplay. The difficulty of the puzzles gradually increases, which makes Manifold appropriate for all ages. Despite my highly positive impressions, I have to point out several (minor) flaws. First, the glossy paper, despite its high quality, may not be the best choice for making origami. Second, there is too much space left at the edges of the papers, which may get in the way when one needs to make many folds in one puzzle. Finally, since the creases can’t be removed from the paper, it is unlikely that you’ll be able to solve the puzzles more than once.

If you want to try some sample puzzles from the set before buying it, you can print them from this PAGE.

• 1 player, 10 years and up
• 100 challenges, 4 difficulty levels
• origami-based puzzles
• many hours of gameplay
• the glossy paper makes it hard to fold
• puzzles are likely to be discarded after solved

GET MANIFOLD HERE

Review

Gravity Maze is one of the most popular and recognized products by ThinkFun. The goal of this puzzle/game is to build a 3D structure using blocks and tunnels. The structure should enable a small marble to travel from a starting point at the top to a finishing point at the bottom.

Gravity Maze comes in a large box and includes a plastic 5×5 grid, 11 colorful blocks of varying sizes, 3 marbles, and 60 challenge cards. The blocks are composed of small cubes and contain short tunnels passing through them. They can be positioned on the grid horizontally or vertically, and can also interlock, like LEGO blocks. This allows the solver to design an extended system of tunnels, essentially creating a labyrinth for the marbles to travel through. The challenge cards are split into 5 groups by difficulty, ranging from simple beginner puzzles (involving just a few blocks) to expert puzzles (involving up to ten blocks). Solving each of the puzzles requires careful analysis of the given pieces and all the possible ways in which they can be combined. When the structure is completed, the solver must drop a marble into one of the pieces and watch it find its way to the destination. Testing whether the constructed solution works is arguably the best part of the puzzle and it is what makes Gravity Maze so much fun.

Even though the recommended age for Gravity Maze is 8 years and up, many of my academic friends enjoyed playing with it. I am sure that middle and high schoolers will like it even more.

• 1 player, 8 years and up
• 60 challenges with varying difficulty
• unique and fun concept
• finding the solution is very satisfying
• the challenge cards are a bit flimsy

GET GRAVITY MAZE HERE

Review

Smart Eggs are maze type puzzles created by the Hungarian inventor Andras Zagyvai. The basic idea is to navigate a plastic stick from the top of an egg to its bottom, pushing, pulling and moving the stick around various holes and tunnels carved in it.

The original six 1-layer Smart Eggs are extremely simple to solve and targeted towards very young children. There is only one natural path the stick can take, and you simply have to follow it. The eggs are also fairly small and initially may look a bit underwhelming. The designs, however, are beautiful, and the construction is solid. Despite the low difficulty level and lack of hard challenges, the 1-layer Smart Eggs are fun to play and fidget with, both for kids and adults. Collecting them all results in a wonderful shelf collection.

The 2-layer Smart Eggs are the bigger, better, harder version of the original 1-layer Smart Eggs. The goal remains the same – navigate a stick from the top of the egg to its bottom. The collection consists of three Dragon Eggs – blue, red, and black, listed according to their difficulty level. The first thing which makes impression is the beautiful art – on every egg there are three dragons depicted, no two of them the same. These toys have much higher quality than the original Smart Eggs – they are around twice the size, come with metal sticks, plastic stands, and much more intricate designs. Inside every egg there is a core which can rotate and also slide up and down, creating many possibilities for the stick’s movement. Even though the blue egg is fairly straightforward to solve, the red and the black ones can pose a real challenge. The 2-layer Smart Eggs have high replay value, and you will probably find yourself coming regularly back to them. They are fun, smart, and highly recommended puzzles.

• 6-8 years and up
• 1-layer and 2-layer options
• various beautiful designs

GET SMART EGGS HERE