Toy Reviews

Brio toys are such lovely quality and are brilliant traditional toys for young children to play with. The Brio Light & Sound Garbage Truck is no different, and our toddler N (nearly 2 years old) has been really enjoying this toy.

The Garbage Truck comes with a little peg person driver, and two pieces of recycling and rubbish to place into the back of the truck, like a mini shape sorter. It also has lights on top, and sound effects, and the batteries come already installed and included so you can play straight out of the box with no fuss which is great.

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Beasts of Balance is a really cool toys to life balancing game that uses your tablet as well as the beautifully crafted beast figures and artefacts to bring new worlds to life, create new combinations, and test your balancing skills.

As soon as my boys (7, 9 and 10) saw this game, they were drawn to it straight away and really excited to play, and it did not disappoint.

Beasts of Balance comes in a box with the plinth (which you use as a base when balancing your pieces), and artefacts including beasts, element blocks such as fire, water, air and earth, and some special shaped pieces which have special effects in the game.  All of the beasts are beautifully created, and so pleasing to look at and handle. You can tell a lot of thought has gone into the design and aesthetics of these pieces as well as the concept of the game, and the digital side of it.

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Ravensburger Let’s Visit Santa! is a beautiful puzzle, with 1000 pieces to give you a good challenge and last a while before it’s completed, but at the same time the picture is not too difficult, meaning that it’s a lovely one for older children to get involved with too and it can be made together for some festive family quality time.

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Ravensburger My First Puzzle, Christmas Friends is a set of 4 simple puzzles for toddlers, ranging from a 2 piece puzzle up to a 5 piece puzzle. This set is perfect for this time of year, with friendly Snowman, Santa, Reindeer and Elf designs and I’ve found the level of these puzzles is great for N, at just under 2 years old.

It’s really nice how this box of puzzles has increasing difficulty, so if you’re starting off with a younger toddler, you can start off with a couple of the easier ones to help them get the concept and then move on to the harder two once they’re more confident. Even the two piece jigsaws help little ones understand the idea of puzzles and how to place the two pieces together to complete the picture, and helps to build confidence as they are more achievable for such young children.

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This year, one of the popular items on many kids Christmas list are robots. These are such a great way for kids to experiment with coding and robotics while having a lot of fun! We were sent the Dash robot from Wonder Workshop to try out and my boys have really enjoyed playing around with it and exploring all of the possibilities.

Dash is an interactive robot suitable for ages 6+, which comes ready built, so all you need to do is connect it via Bluetooth to your phone or tablet with the compatible (free to download) apps and the kids can get into playing and experimenting straight away. There are multiple apps to allow the children to explore different things, and give more variety to playing with Dash.

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Make ‘n’ Break is a fun family game from Ravensburger, suitable for older children of around 8+. The game involves racing against the clock to recreate wooden block structures, according to the patterns show on the card you pick.

The game concept is really interesting, and is very different to any other board games we already have. It can also be quite co-operative as when playing with 3 or more players, each player can team up with the person to one side of them to build as a team which I thought adds a really nice element of working together rather than just racing to beat each other, as my boys do in a lot of games!

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Jurassic Park DANGER is a new strategy board game from Ravensburger, just in time for the release of the new Jurassic World II movie on DVD! We’ve all enjoyed the Jurassic World movies in our family, so the boys were really excited to give this game a try.

The game is more complex than some of our other board games, so provides more of a challenge and allows you to get more strategic. The game is recommended for ages 10+ as it is more challenging than some of Ravensburger’s other games, but as our boys are all big fans of the movies, all three boys (ages 10, 8 and 7) wanted to play and all of them have managed the game well with an adult playing alongside.

The concept of the game is that one player plays as the dinosaurs, and the other plays each play as one of the human characters. The humans then work together to help as many of them as possible escape from the dinosaurs onto the helicopter and away to safety.

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The Smart Globe Myth from Oregon Scientific is a 2 in 1 day and night globe, with audio stories from around the world and an Augmented Reality app that can be used to enhance the globe even further.

I love the concept of smart globes, as there is something so fascinating about exploring the map of the world and understanding more about our planet. I remember spending hours lost in the pages of our world atlas as a child, and luckily my boys have always been very interested in finding out more about the world too so the smart globe is perfect for them.

Smart Globe Myth is a really unique globe, as not only can you learn about the countries in the normal way but when it’s dark you can turn up the lights on the smart globe, and reveal a whole display of constellations which is really effective and cool. All of the kids were impressed by this, and it adds a great atmosphere as you sit and listen to the constellation myth stories with the globe lit up in this way.

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