How’s this for topical? A Xmas entry in mid-January! Every year we buy a small mountain of toys for our children and about half of them turn out to be total rubbish. Of the rest, though, several always turn out to be real gems and I feel it’s my solemn duty to let you know which ones have kept me the kids amused in the critical post-Xmas fortnight and which are already down at the hospice shop.
We’re already Geomag fans round here (they seem to have a cult following and many imitators) so we were pretty excited when they launched a line of little plastic panels in various shapes to snap into your magnetic constructions. These panels are very simple but really add to the pleasure of assembling the fantastically chunky, snappy, clicky Geomag rods and balls into pointless geometric shapes.
This is an impossibly satisfying toy, providing the kind of fingertip pleasure you just can’t get from Stickle Bricks. The plastic-coated Geomag rods are North-South magnets that you ‘stick’ together or join using shiny, nickel balls to form intricate, self-supporting, 3D structures. These panels allow you to give your skeletons lovely translucent walls and edges and fins and windows. Neat.
Actually, WE, don’t buy the Christmas presents, I do. And although 2003’s Mutant (or are they just Ninja now?) Turtle pre-fab hideout, and Snow White’s Bovis home (no less that 200 separate plastic pieces which required snapped out of their plastic frames cutting my fingers each time), were an ummitigated disaster, this year I think I did brilliantly.