Hot Products > Toys & Games

Rapidough

bit pricey, 2007-11-15
This is a fantastic game! Really good fun to play as a family. Although this one is expensive, there are much cheaper versions out there, i bought one of those!

Uno Extreme

Fabulous fun for all the family, 2007-12-15
This game is great. We have spent many hours playing it. The girls are in hysterics when 6 cards come flying out of the machine.

The only downside we have found is that when the cards get a bit worn they re difficult to fit in the machine and also we have found with age the cards start to stick in the machine.

Otherwise overall a great game

VTech 9V Adaptor

Does exactly what it should, 2006-02-19
It works and saves on batteries, exactly what it should do.

Cranium

Great fun for all the family, 2007-09-05
We loved this game at family parties - it has something for everyone and little kids, big kids and even sulky teenagers seem to enjoy being involved. We discovered talents in the family that we never imagined! develops spatial awareness, confidence building, language, drama, teamwork, dexterity. lots of fun! You do need a minimum of 4 people to play and it's not really easy to adapt the rules to play with just 3 people but thats my only criticism. I gave 4 stars for durability becuse you do model with playdoh which dries out if you don't put the lid back on and over time you use up the paper provided for drawing pics.

Hedbanz For Kids

Fantastic!, 2003-11-17
This is a great game for children from about four upwards.

Sturdy plastic headbands hold picture cards (no reading required) and each child has to ask questions to guess what they are. A card might show a picture of sausages, so the child will ask "Am I furniture, can you eat me?" etc. The answers are yes or no.

It is a great game for all of the family as the adults can enjoy it equally. It really gets the kids thinking and racking their brains, you will be amazed by some of the questions.

Bandai - Catcha Beast - Red

• Catcha Beast lets kids search for and capture hidden beasts that fly about in the air
• Each Catcha Beast playset has BPS � Beast Positioning System
• Unleash the beasts and engage them in battle against your friends� captured creatures
• The Catcha Beast handset has loads of hi-tech modes
• The latest craze from Japan, Catcha Beast is set to be the next big playground craze!

Much more complex than you'd think from the advert, 2008-11-11
We got this for our son a couple of weeks ago for his 7th birthday.

The console bleeps at you when a beast is near then you have to swing the console around to find the beast and then reel it in with the little fishing reel on the side.

There are apparently 105 different beasts. They are divided into different levels of difficulty to catch, so you start with the easy ones. Once you have caught something you can either keep it (up to 3 at a time) and train it, or exchange it for a lure or sell it for gold. Some beasts only come out at certain times of day. Other beasts require you to have a certain lure in your arsenal from previous catches or you need a trained beast to help you to fight the beast and tire it out so you can catch it.

To find out more about it I recommend you visit the website (google it, it's a .eu address) where you can see more about how you catch things and what sort of beasts there are. Having said which it sounds terribly complicated when you find out all the different layers of things you can do with it, but you can still get started without loads of that knowledge. My son got going with about 5 minutes of us reading the instructions with him and in the way of kids, then went on to work out loads of the other things as he went along.

What I do like about it is that it requires some perseverance to collect different lures and enough gold to get a better beast radar, and that it can require quite a lot of strategic thinking to plan how to get the more difficult beasts. There is a lot of remembering of statistics and abilities like in something like Pokemon or Top Trumps,my son has started writing down all the stats for the beasts he has caught. The difference with this compared to something like Pokemon is that you only have to buy the console once, and then the beasts come free after that, you don't have to keep shelling out to increase your collection. Although I understand that if a friend has a blue one and you have a red one you can get the maximum number of lures and beasts.

My only irritation with it has been that some of the instructions require the screen to be slid shut while doing them, but there is no backlight and it is quite hard to read without the screen slid up. I have emailed the manufacturer about it and they have said that they have passed it on to the R&D team so that's fair enough.

Overall this is a more complex and better long term buy than I was expecting it to be. It's very new, so i dont know how long I will feel this way about it! but I'm quite pleased so far. Perhaps most importantly (!) my son took it in to show and tell and came out of school with a trail of admirers from his class, so I am definitely in the good books for this purchase!

The Yes! No! Game

• Stocked and sold by Kerfoots of Porthmadog - over 125 years of Customer Service
• For 2 - 6 players
• Take your pick of cards, but don't say yea or no
• suitable for ages 8 and up

Yes No Game, 2006-01-03
Fab game, lots of fun for all the family. Ask the questions really quickly and in different tones makes it more fun. Played it several times now and it still has us in stitches!

Cluedo Reinvention

Horrible Science - Explosive Experiments The Kit

Blokus

• 2-4 players
• Tactical game - block your opponents path
• Over 2 Million sold

If You Love Games......., 2008-01-09
you'll love this! Bought it for Christmas 2007 after having read good reviews. It lived up to expectations. Played it with both adults and kids and it is a good challenging and thought provoking game. It's quick, usually no longer than half an hour and not too intense for a strategy game. The board and pieces are well made and it works well with either two or four players - three players isn't brilliant- you'd have to play it to see why. Highly recommended!