As you know, we are science experts. We have never placed much faith in the mystical babblings of so-called 'telepaths'. Hard fact and empirical evidence are what we need - and this clever device gives you an awful lot of both. Quite simply, 20Q is a wonder of modern science. Using the latest AI technology it is a handheld game that guesses what you're thinking - usually in less than 20 questions (making it a great deal cleverer than some people). But it doesn't do it using basic guesswork or what others might call 'magic'; no, it is powered by the latest in AI (artificial intelligence) technology. Here's how it works:In the best traditions of the classic 'yes/no' parlor game, 20Q asks a series of questions and then, using the AI technology, guesses the object that the player is thinking of. It does this through a neural network of neron-like nodes, mirroring the structure of a simple human brain - no, I'm not referring to you. Please don't be touchy.

Rubbish!, 09 Oct 2008
I was interested in buying this and saw one out for demonstration, so i thought i'd test it out before i bought it. Lucky i did! I thought of a racoon and began the game. It began promising, asking sensible questions, then went totally off the point. It never got it in 20 questions and only got it on the 25 question, which i felt was a bit of a cheat. I tried again with something simple, but this time, it never got it. I was glad when the words "you win" came up on the screen and it turned itself off, probably because it was embarrassed! At that point, i had to leave, which i felt glad to do, and was very glad i tried it before i bought it. Some of my friends, who were unable to try it, felt disapointed they couldn't and have since got rid of them. It's a good idea, pity about the actual product. It's cheaper (and a lot more fun) to play this game using real people than a computer which can't even guess the item you're thinking of is a pen.

Family fun for a short time, 28 Aug 2008
I got this for Christmas for the whole family to play with and it is fun and amazingly works most of the time unless you pick something really obscure. The only real problem with this is that it can grow old very quickly and within about ten minutes the 20Q will be collecting dust in the corner. Not so good if you have a short attention span.

Get outta my mind!, 28 Jul 2008
...says a bloke on the current 20Q TV advert. And yes, it appears for most of the time this little round gadget is reading my mind, as long as I'm thinking simple thoughts...

Okay, this little beastie tries to guess what someone is thinking about by asking a series of questions that can be answered by a simple yes/no/maybe. After 20 questions it tries to guess what you thought of with varying degrees of success. For example, think of cola and it might guess a can or a bottle; which to be honest isn't too far from the truth.

Personally, I think it's one of those "coffee table" objects; something that would sit on a table and maybe once in a while you'll try it out. Mind you, the expressions on people's faces when it guesses correctly is priceless!

Mind reader?? Er...nope!, 09 Jul 2008
I bought the Harry Potter version of this for my son and we really enjoyed it for a while, then it kind of lost its appeal and we could outwit it most of the time. So I thought I'd get this and see how we got on. The first ten items I thought of it didn't guess!! And they were pretty obvious things... picture frame, domino, sweetcorn, golf club etc I was trying to answer them very obviously but some of the questions it asked were pointless and we were really disapointed. I don't think the aim of this is to try to thin of things it WILL get rather than what it WON'T! Big disapointment I'm afraid after the Harry potter one!

stocking filler?, 27 Jun 2008
Quite a clever little toy! Its fun for a while and will amuse the kids but gets boring within an hour or two. Makes for a good little present for someone who likes silly thing :)

Rubbish!, 09 Oct 2008
I was interested in buying this and saw one out for demonstration, so i thought i'd test it out before i bought it. Lucky i did! I thought of a racoon and began the game. It began promising, asking sensible questions, then went totally off the point. It never got it in 20 questions and only got it on the 25 question, which i felt was a bit of a cheat. I tried again with something simple, but this time, it never got it. I was glad when the words "you win" came up on the screen and it turned itself off, probably because it was embarrassed! At that point, i had to leave, which i felt glad to do, and was very glad i tried it before i bought it. Some of my friends, who were unable to try it, felt disapointed they couldn't and have since got rid of them. It's a good idea, pity about the actual product. It's cheaper (and a lot more fun) to play this game using real people than a computer which can't even guess the item you're thinking of is a pen.

Family fun for a short time, 28 Aug 2008
I got this for Christmas for the whole family to play with and it is fun and amazingly works most of the time unless you pick something really obscure. The only real problem with this is that it can grow old very quickly and within about ten minutes the 20Q will be collecting dust in the corner. Not so good if you have a short attention span.

Get outta my mind!, 28 Jul 2008
...says a bloke on the current 20Q TV advert. And yes, it appears for most of the time this little round gadget is reading my mind, as long as I'm thinking simple thoughts...

Okay, this little beastie tries to guess what someone is thinking about by asking a series of questions that can be answered by a simple yes/no/maybe. After 20 questions it tries to guess what you thought of with varying degrees of success. For example, think of cola and it might guess a can or a bottle; which to be honest isn't too far from the truth.

Personally, I think it's one of those "coffee table" objects; something that would sit on a table and maybe once in a while you'll try it out. Mind you, the expressions on people's faces when it guesses correctly is priceless!

Mind reader?? Er...nope!, 09 Jul 2008
I bought the Harry Potter version of this for my son and we really enjoyed it for a while, then it kind of lost its appeal and we could outwit it most of the time. So I thought I'd get this and see how we got on. The first ten items I thought of it didn't guess!! And they were pretty obvious things... picture frame, domino, sweetcorn, golf club etc I was trying to answer them very obviously but some of the questions it asked were pointless and we were really disapointed. I don't think the aim of this is to try to thin of things it WILL get rather than what it WON'T! Big disapointment I'm afraid after the Harry potter one!

stocking filler?, 27 Jun 2008
Quite a clever little toy! Its fun for a while and will amuse the kids but gets boring within an hour or two. Makes for a good little present for someone who likes silly thing :)

Jenga with balls, 19 Nov 2008
WobBally is clearly influenced by the classic game Jenga, the twist being that this time it is a stack of balls you are trying to keep intact, rather than blocks of wood.

The game is well-made, bright and colourful. The idea is that players take turns to remove a ball from the stack, all of which are balanced on rings of plastic to form a tower. There are different variations in that the next ball to be removed can be picked by the player or by rolling two dice.

In theory, it sounds like a great game. In practice, sadly it is not. The tower of balls is extremely wobbly, meaning that when you try to poke one of the balls inwards (using a supplied plastic, er, `poking stick') the whole tower tends to lean precariously. A reasonable amount of force needs to be applied to make the balls move (there is not the lightness of touch associated with Jenga here). Add these two factors together and you get a spectacularly collapsed tower and therefore game over.

So games can last a matter of seconds or at best minutes. It's very frustrating, especially as putting the tower together again, whilst easy, takes longer than playing the game. Although in fairness, it's not as bad as some. I'm looking at you, Ker-Plunk.

For younger players their attention is quickly lost when it becomes clear how tricky the game can be. My 7-year-old lost interest rapidly and would much rather play Jenga.

Sorry to keep on comparing WobBally to Jenga, but after all that is what it is presumably attempting to mimic, and I'm afraid it doesn't pull it off. WobBally is just too fiddly and even perhaps slightly unfair to be all that much fun.

Great fun, 16 Nov 2008
WobBally is a sort of updated Kerplunk in reverse; a tower of balls are sandwiched between a number of rings and the object is to take it in turns to poke the balls into the centre without causing total collapse; last player standing is the winner. There are three games to play in the instructions: just poke whatever ball you like into the centre, roll a coloured dice to select the ball colour on your turn, and roll the colour and numbered dice to choose colour and level. The last game is the most fun, but for very young players, we had a three year old playing, the simpler game is best.
Obviously there is a fair chance that the balls are going to gradually disappear - probably into the vacuum cleaner - despite the plastic "wall" that comes with the game and which surrounds the tower during play.
Overall a fun game that even very young children can play.

Wobbally Party Game, 15 Nov 2008
This is a good quality, well designed toy with an ingenious design and self levelling mechanism. Slightly smaller than I thought - it's only 18cm high but for the price it is still value for money and makes a lovely looking gift. A more interesting present than Lego or Jenga for an individual or family.
I think it's best suited to older children 8+ as it's more difficult than it looks to successfully send a ball flying into the centre of the wobbly tower. My younger children also got frustrated with the time it took to rebuild the tower - 7 levels, counting out 14 balls each and 98 in total. There also seems to be a hide and seek element to this game as you hunt for 2 or 3 missing balls each time. Keeping an eye on 98 marbles isn't easy.
You have to play the game on a hard flat surface which means the balls bounce everywhere when the levels crash down. Playing it on a hard table means the balls gain maximum bounce to all 4 corners of the room. The game doesn't play as smoothly as you'd expect. A lot of the time more than one ball falls out and partial collapses are common. Trying to hit the balls nearer the bottom of the tower seems to help the game last longer.
It is fun and worth a try, especially if you like Jenga. There is no game quite like it on the market and I think anyone would be pleased to recieve it as a novelty gift. I don't think this will be played very often at our house because of the hassle factor of building it versus relatively short game play time but it's a game to try it out on all your friends and relatives if only to giggle at the look of concentration and performance anxiety on their faces.


Balls compared to Jenga, 12 Nov 2008
This is essentially Jenga with balls, which sounds like a compliment but which isnt. This might look better than Jenga before the game begins with its seemingly impossible tower of wobbling balls but it just cant match the originals simple but brilliant gameplay. The set up is too complicated, the capturing collar completely ineffective (meaning you spend most of your time trying to find your balls. A reinvention of the wheel. Poking balls with sticks is just no fun whatever way you look at it!

More like 'WHY-BALLY?', 11 Nov 2008
Parents - avoid this game like ricin poisoning!
Every time we played it those attractive colorful balls went flying across the room. We tried standing the game in a tray but it didn't help. The manufacturers helpfully include 4 spare balls in the box. These will last you approx' 8 minutes.

The game itself is a variant of Jenga with balls instead of wooden blocks. Players poke at said balls with pink sticks until the tower falls over. It sounds like fun. It ain't!

So what's wrong with Wob-Bally (apart from the obvious choking/tripping/lost ball hazards.)? It's far to easy to knock the tower of balls over meaning you spend most of your time rebuilding it. The manufacturers are obviously aware of this too and the instructions recommend that when the tower is knocked down the responsible player is 'out' and the remaining players rebuild the tower and keep going. Unlike in Jenga where the tower has a decent chance of staying up for a good ten minutes minimum (depending on players level of cack-handedness), Wob-Bally does well to stay up for 3 minutes tops.

Credit to the designers, they have developed a very clever mechanism for keeping the tower level, meaning that it can be played on most flat surfaces. But the darn thing just doesn't stay up once you start poking at it with sticks. And good luck finding all the run away balls each time!
Even if you love building things and hunting around floors on your hands and knees, this gets pretty tired pretty quickly.

If this all sounds swell to you, trust me you really are much better off with Jenga, a lego set and a good old fashioned game of 'hunt the thimble'.

You have been warned!

New Styling Studio lets you do digital makeovers with the power of your own computer for totally amazing results! Love changing your looks? Now you can style pictures of your or your friends with this Digi 2! Simply Take a photos and use the touch pad to choose different hair styles and more! This cool touchpad console comes with makeup lights! The digital camera connects to a monitor; you can take your picture and print your results or email them to your friends! Use the touchpad and stylus to change hairstyles, makeup and even accessories! Plus, Styling Studio has a photo booth mode so you can show off your latest creations! Styling Studio - Digi 2 is a great digital tool for girls! A wonderful way to develop creative skills!

Let's face facts. There comes a time when we all need to find the right form of words. Or when saying things in the wrong order could start a rather unpleasant civil war or get you into some other form or extremely serious trouble. Fret no longer. With Say What? you can practice unjumbling some of the world's most famous - and infamous - phrases and sayings to your heart's content. Over 300 famous phrases from popular culture (apparently that's tv, movies, music and suchlike) are pre-stored to fox you in no uncertain style. 3 skill levels and 5 shuffle modes help twist the phrases still further - and really pile on the agony. And full electronic scoring helps keep check of who's best able to unmangle the English language, and who needs to step back into remedial class for a swift but firm caning across the buttocks. It might look like an alien marital aid, but take our word that it's been through the most rigorous assessment process at gadgetshop HQ. And everyone who's had a chance to manipulate its balls has come back with a smile on their face. And all strictly in the interests of science. You should also note that it was invented by Americans, the undisputed world champions of mangling our beautiful mother tongue. So you can fiendishly assured rest difficult that will be it.

Rubbish!, 09 Oct 2008
I was interested in buying this and saw one out for demonstration, so i thought i'd test it out before i bought it. Lucky i did! I thought of a racoon and began the game. It began promising, asking sensible questions, then went totally off the point. It never got it in 20 questions and only got it on the 25 question, which i felt was a bit of a cheat. I tried again with something simple, but this time, it never got it. I was glad when the words "you win" came up on the screen and it turned itself off, probably because it was embarrassed! At that point, i had to leave, which i felt glad to do, and was very glad i tried it before i bought it. Some of my friends, who were unable to try it, felt disapointed they couldn't and have since got rid of them. It's a good idea, pity about the actual product. It's cheaper (and a lot more fun) to play this game using real people than a computer which can't even guess the item you're thinking of is a pen.

Family fun for a short time, 28 Aug 2008
I got this for Christmas for the whole family to play with and it is fun and amazingly works most of the time unless you pick something really obscure. The only real problem with this is that it can grow old very quickly and within about ten minutes the 20Q will be collecting dust in the corner. Not so good if you have a short attention span.

Get outta my mind!, 28 Jul 2008
...says a bloke on the current 20Q TV advert. And yes, it appears for most of the time this little round gadget is reading my mind, as long as I'm thinking simple thoughts...

Okay, this little beastie tries to guess what someone is thinking about by asking a series of questions that can be answered by a simple yes/no/maybe. After 20 questions it tries to guess what you thought of with varying degrees of success. For example, think of cola and it might guess a can or a bottle; which to be honest isn't too far from the truth.

Personally, I think it's one of those "coffee table" objects; something that would sit on a table and maybe once in a while you'll try it out. Mind you, the expressions on people's faces when it guesses correctly is priceless!

Mind reader?? Er...nope!, 09 Jul 2008
I bought the Harry Potter version of this for my son and we really enjoyed it for a while, then it kind of lost its appeal and we could outwit it most of the time. So I thought I'd get this and see how we got on. The first ten items I thought of it didn't guess!! And they were pretty obvious things... picture frame, domino, sweetcorn, golf club etc I was trying to answer them very obviously but some of the questions it asked were pointless and we were really disapointed. I don't think the aim of this is to try to thin of things it WILL get rather than what it WON'T! Big disapointment I'm afraid after the Harry potter one!

stocking filler?, 27 Jun 2008
Quite a clever little toy! Its fun for a while and will amuse the kids but gets boring within an hour or two. Makes for a good little present for someone who likes silly thing :)

Jenga with balls, 19 Nov 2008
WobBally is clearly influenced by the classic game Jenga, the twist being that this time it is a stack of balls you are trying to keep intact, rather than blocks of wood.

The game is well-made, bright and colourful. The idea is that players take turns to remove a ball from the stack, all of which are balanced on rings of plastic to form a tower. There are different variations in that the next ball to be removed can be picked by the player or by rolling two dice.

In theory, it sounds like a great game. In practice, sadly it is not. The tower of balls is extremely wobbly, meaning that when you try to poke one of the balls inwards (using a supplied plastic, er, `poking stick') the whole tower tends to lean precariously. A reasonable amount of force needs to be applied to make the balls move (there is not the lightness of touch associated with Jenga here). Add these two factors together and you get a spectacularly collapsed tower and therefore game over.

So games can last a matter of seconds or at best minutes. It's very frustrating, especially as putting the tower together again, whilst easy, takes longer than playing the game. Although in fairness, it's not as bad as some. I'm looking at you, Ker-Plunk.

For younger players their attention is quickly lost when it becomes clear how tricky the game can be. My 7-year-old lost interest rapidly and would much rather play Jenga.

Sorry to keep on comparing WobBally to Jenga, but after all that is what it is presumably attempting to mimic, and I'm afraid it doesn't pull it off. WobBally is just too fiddly and even perhaps slightly unfair to be all that much fun.

Great fun, 16 Nov 2008
WobBally is a sort of updated Kerplunk in reverse; a tower of balls are sandwiched between a number of rings and the object is to take it in turns to poke the balls into the centre without causing total collapse; last player standing is the winner. There are three games to play in the instructions: just poke whatever ball you like into the centre, roll a coloured dice to select the ball colour on your turn, and roll the colour and numbered dice to choose colour and level. The last game is the most fun, but for very young players, we had a three year old playing, the simpler game is best.
Obviously there is a fair chance that the balls are going to gradually disappear - probably into the vacuum cleaner - despite the plastic "wall" that comes with the game and which surrounds the tower during play.
Overall a fun game that even very young children can play.

Wobbally Party Game, 15 Nov 2008
This is a good quality, well designed toy with an ingenious design and self levelling mechanism. Slightly smaller than I thought - it's only 18cm high but for the price it is still value for money and makes a lovely looking gift. A more interesting present than Lego or Jenga for an individual or family.
I think it's best suited to older children 8+ as it's more difficult than it looks to successfully send a ball flying into the centre of the wobbly tower. My younger children also got frustrated with the time it took to rebuild the tower - 7 levels, counting out 14 balls each and 98 in total. There also seems to be a hide and seek element to this game as you hunt for 2 or 3 missing balls each time. Keeping an eye on 98 marbles isn't easy.
You have to play the game on a hard flat surface which means the balls bounce everywhere when the levels crash down. Playing it on a hard table means the balls gain maximum bounce to all 4 corners of the room. The game doesn't play as smoothly as you'd expect. A lot of the time more than one ball falls out and partial collapses are common. Trying to hit the balls nearer the bottom of the tower seems to help the game last longer.
It is fun and worth a try, especially if you like Jenga. There is no game quite like it on the market and I think anyone would be pleased to recieve it as a novelty gift. I don't think this will be played very often at our house because of the hassle factor of building it versus relatively short game play time but it's a game to try it out on all your friends and relatives if only to giggle at the look of concentration and performance anxiety on their faces.


Balls compared to Jenga, 12 Nov 2008
This is essentially Jenga with balls, which sounds like a compliment but which isnt. This might look better than Jenga before the game begins with its seemingly impossible tower of wobbling balls but it just cant match the originals simple but brilliant gameplay. The set up is too complicated, the capturing collar completely ineffective (meaning you spend most of your time trying to find your balls. A reinvention of the wheel. Poking balls with sticks is just no fun whatever way you look at it!

More like 'WHY-BALLY?', 11 Nov 2008
Parents - avoid this game like ricin poisoning!
Every time we played it those attractive colorful balls went flying across the room. We tried standing the game in a tray but it didn't help. The manufacturers helpfully include 4 spare balls in the box. These will last you approx' 8 minutes.

The game itself is a variant of Jenga with balls instead of wooden blocks. Players poke at said balls with pink sticks until the tower falls over. It sounds like fun. It ain't!

So what's wrong with Wob-Bally (apart from the obvious choking/tripping/lost ball hazards.)? It's far to easy to knock the tower of balls over meaning you spend most of your time rebuilding it. The manufacturers are obviously aware of this too and the instructions recommend that when the tower is knocked down the responsible player is 'out' and the remaining players rebuild the tower and keep going. Unlike in Jenga where the tower has a decent chance of staying up for a good ten minutes minimum (depending on players level of cack-handedness), Wob-Bally does well to stay up for 3 minutes tops.

Credit to the designers, they have developed a very clever mechanism for keeping the tower level, meaning that it can be played on most flat surfaces. But the darn thing just doesn't stay up once you start poking at it with sticks. And good luck finding all the run away balls each time!
Even if you love building things and hunting around floors on your hands and knees, this gets pretty tired pretty quickly.

If this all sounds swell to you, trust me you really are much better off with Jenga, a lego set and a good old fashioned game of 'hunt the thimble'.

You have been warned!


Another fabulous Game from Radica: who never let you down!, 15 Apr 2008

This is a great Game of memory and good listening ability.

Simple phrases and sayings that one would think easy to recall, but what leads to the confusion, is remembering where you heard which word and under which light of that particular phrase!

As always, this is another great quality Game from Radica:

Highly recommended fun!

Great game ... with one little "but", 11 Jan 2008
Found instructions a little lacking in describing exactly what you have to do (in fact I almost returned game as defective thinking it wasn't recognising a correct sequence). Once we figured it out it seemed obvious but I still think its a pretty basic oversight in an instruction leaflet. My little "but" aside we've had some great games. It is challenging without being impossible and really is fun for all the family. Can't really comment on durability because we've only had it a few weeks, but it seems robust enough.

Compulsive Christmas fun!, 14 Dec 2007
Have just bought this game and we are already hooked. It's great fun trying to unscramble the phrases, with the time allowance (or guess allowance) going down each time. You can vary the skill level so that younger members of the family can play too. Educationally, it's a great toy for exercising memory and sequencing skills and I would use this with my students at college for a bit of light-hearted fun.

Ball juggling mind games, 31 Oct 2007
I can't figure out how it works but each of the five balls is given part of a popular phrase. All you have to do is get them in the right order. Simple. Or so you'd think - it's against the clock or with limited guesses. Nothing like extra pressure to muddle an already confused mind.

Best thing is that it's really easy to work out the mechanics of the game - even for my 6 year old! The phrases are a mix of tv/movie, pop and popular sayings and seem fairly general. The difficult bit is remembering which ball is which part of the phrase and placing it in the right sequence in the time.

Much recommended as a party / family thing to do for a few minutes, as up to 5 can play. I bought it for a Christmas present - but as my daughter said ' why do we give away all the best toys?'- I'm keeping it!

Enjoy

Spread your targets on the ground to form your Hyper Dash course. The device will call out targets for you to tag as fast as possible. Once you tag a target, the device will call out the next one. Keep moving to set your fastest possible time. Listen fo

Rubbish!, 09 Oct 2008
I was interested in buying this and saw one out for demonstration, so i thought i'd test it out before i bought it. Lucky i did! I thought of a racoon and began the game. It began promising, asking sensible questions, then went totally off the point. It never got it in 20 questions and only got it on the 25 question, which i felt was a bit of a cheat. I tried again with something simple, but this time, it never got it. I was glad when the words "you win" came up on the screen and it turned itself off, probably because it was embarrassed! At that point, i had to leave, which i felt glad to do, and was very glad i tried it before i bought it. Some of my friends, who were unable to try it, felt disapointed they couldn't and have since got rid of them. It's a good idea, pity about the actual product. It's cheaper (and a lot more fun) to play this game using real people than a computer which can't even guess the item you're thinking of is a pen.

Family fun for a short time, 28 Aug 2008
I got this for Christmas for the whole family to play with and it is fun and amazingly works most of the time unless you pick something really obscure. The only real problem with this is that it can grow old very quickly and within about ten minutes the 20Q will be collecting dust in the corner. Not so good if you have a short attention span.

Get outta my mind!, 28 Jul 2008
...says a bloke on the current 20Q TV advert. And yes, it appears for most of the time this little round gadget is reading my mind, as long as I'm thinking simple thoughts...

Okay, this little beastie tries to guess what someone is thinking about by asking a series of questions that can be answered by a simple yes/no/maybe. After 20 questions it tries to guess what you thought of with varying degrees of success. For example, think of cola and it might guess a can or a bottle; which to be honest isn't too far from the truth.

Personally, I think it's one of those "coffee table" objects; something that would sit on a table and maybe once in a while you'll try it out. Mind you, the expressions on people's faces when it guesses correctly is priceless!

Mind reader?? Er...nope!, 09 Jul 2008
I bought the Harry Potter version of this for my son and we really enjoyed it for a while, then it kind of lost its appeal and we could outwit it most of the time. So I thought I'd get this and see how we got on. The first ten items I thought of it didn't guess!! And they were pretty obvious things... picture frame, domino, sweetcorn, golf club etc I was trying to answer them very obviously but some of the questions it asked were pointless and we were really disapointed. I don't think the aim of this is to try to thin of things it WILL get rather than what it WON'T! Big disapointment I'm afraid after the Harry potter one!

stocking filler?, 27 Jun 2008
Quite a clever little toy! Its fun for a while and will amuse the kids but gets boring within an hour or two. Makes for a good little present for someone who likes silly thing :)

Jenga with balls, 19 Nov 2008
WobBally is clearly influenced by the classic game Jenga, the twist being that this time it is a stack of balls you are trying to keep intact, rather than blocks of wood.

The game is well-made, bright and colourful. The idea is that players take turns to remove a ball from the stack, all of which are balanced on rings of plastic to form a tower. There are different variations in that the next ball to be removed can be picked by the player or by rolling two dice.

In theory, it sounds like a great game. In practice, sadly it is not. The tower of balls is extremely wobbly, meaning that when you try to poke one of the balls inwards (using a supplied plastic, er, `poking stick') the whole tower tends to lean precariously. A reasonable amount of force needs to be applied to make the balls move (there is not the lightness of touch associated with Jenga here). Add these two factors together and you get a spectacularly collapsed tower and therefore game over.

So games can last a matter of seconds or at best minutes. It's very frustrating, especially as putting the tower together again, whilst easy, takes longer than playing the game. Although in fairness, it's not as bad as some. I'm looking at you, Ker-Plunk.

For younger players their attention is quickly lost when it becomes clear how tricky the game can be. My 7-year-old lost interest rapidly and would much rather play Jenga.

Sorry to keep on comparing WobBally to Jenga, but after all that is what it is presumably attempting to mimic, and I'm afraid it doesn't pull it off. WobBally is just too fiddly and even perhaps slightly unfair to be all that much fun.

Great fun, 16 Nov 2008
WobBally is a sort of updated Kerplunk in reverse; a tower of balls are sandwiched between a number of rings and the object is to take it in turns to poke the balls into the centre without causing total collapse; last player standing is the winner. There are three games to play in the instructions: just poke whatever ball you like into the centre, roll a coloured dice to select the ball colour on your turn, and roll the colour and numbered dice to choose colour and level. The last game is the most fun, but for very young players, we had a three year old playing, the simpler game is best.
Obviously there is a fair chance that the balls are going to gradually disappear - probably into the vacuum cleaner - despite the plastic "wall" that comes with the game and which surrounds the tower during play.
Overall a fun game that even very young children can play.

Wobbally Party Game, 15 Nov 2008
This is a good quality, well designed toy with an ingenious design and self levelling mechanism. Slightly smaller than I thought - it's only 18cm high but for the price it is still value for money and makes a lovely looking gift. A more interesting present than Lego or Jenga for an individual or family.
I think it's best suited to older children 8+ as it's more difficult than it looks to successfully send a ball flying into the centre of the wobbly tower. My younger children also got frustrated with the time it took to rebuild the tower - 7 levels, counting out 14 balls each and 98 in total. There also seems to be a hide and seek element to this game as you hunt for 2 or 3 missing balls each time. Keeping an eye on 98 marbles isn't easy.
You have to play the game on a hard flat surface which means the balls bounce everywhere when the levels crash down. Playing it on a hard table means the balls gain maximum bounce to all 4 corners of the room. The game doesn't play as smoothly as you'd expect. A lot of the time more than one ball falls out and partial collapses are common. Trying to hit the balls nearer the bottom of the tower seems to help the game last longer.
It is fun and worth a try, especially if you like Jenga. There is no game quite like it on the market and I think anyone would be pleased to recieve it as a novelty gift. I don't think this will be played very often at our house because of the hassle factor of building it versus relatively short game play time but it's a game to try it out on all your friends and relatives if only to giggle at the look of concentration and performance anxiety on their faces.


Balls compared to Jenga, 12 Nov 2008
This is essentially Jenga with balls, which sounds like a compliment but which isnt. This might look better than Jenga before the game begins with its seemingly impossible tower of wobbling balls but it just cant match the originals simple but brilliant gameplay. The set up is too complicated, the capturing collar completely ineffective (meaning you spend most of your time trying to find your balls. A reinvention of the wheel. Poking balls with sticks is just no fun whatever way you look at it!

More like 'WHY-BALLY?', 11 Nov 2008
Parents - avoid this game like ricin poisoning!
Every time we played it those attractive colorful balls went flying across the room. We tried standing the game in a tray but it didn't help. The manufacturers helpfully include 4 spare balls in the box. These will last you approx' 8 minutes.

The game itself is a variant of Jenga with balls instead of wooden blocks. Players poke at said balls with pink sticks until the tower falls over. It sounds like fun. It ain't!

So what's wrong with Wob-Bally (apart from the obvious choking/tripping/lost ball hazards.)? It's far to easy to knock the tower of balls over meaning you spend most of your time rebuilding it. The manufacturers are obviously aware of this too and the instructions recommend that when the tower is knocked down the responsible player is 'out' and the remaining players rebuild the tower and keep going. Unlike in Jenga where the tower has a decent chance of staying up for a good ten minutes minimum (depending on players level of cack-handedness), Wob-Bally does well to stay up for 3 minutes tops.

Credit to the designers, they have developed a very clever mechanism for keeping the tower level, meaning that it can be played on most flat surfaces. But the darn thing just doesn't stay up once you start poking at it with sticks. And good luck finding all the run away balls each time!
Even if you love building things and hunting around floors on your hands and knees, this gets pretty tired pretty quickly.

If this all sounds swell to you, trust me you really are much better off with Jenga, a lego set and a good old fashioned game of 'hunt the thimble'.

You have been warned!


Another fabulous Game from Radica: who never let you down!, 15 Apr 2008

This is a great Game of memory and good listening ability.

Simple phrases and sayings that one would think easy to recall, but what leads to the confusion, is remembering where you heard which word and under which light of that particular phrase!

As always, this is another great quality Game from Radica:

Highly recommended fun!

Great game ... with one little "but", 11 Jan 2008
Found instructions a little lacking in describing exactly what you have to do (in fact I almost returned game as defective thinking it wasn't recognising a correct sequence). Once we figured it out it seemed obvious but I still think its a pretty basic oversight in an instruction leaflet. My little "but" aside we've had some great games. It is challenging without being impossible and really is fun for all the family. Can't really comment on durability because we've only had it a few weeks, but it seems robust enough.

Compulsive Christmas fun!, 14 Dec 2007
Have just bought this game and we are already hooked. It's great fun trying to unscramble the phrases, with the time allowance (or guess allowance) going down each time. You can vary the skill level so that younger members of the family can play too. Educationally, it's a great toy for exercising memory and sequencing skills and I would use this with my students at college for a bit of light-hearted fun.

Ball juggling mind games, 31 Oct 2007
I can't figure out how it works but each of the five balls is given part of a popular phrase. All you have to do is get them in the right order. Simple. Or so you'd think - it's against the clock or with limited guesses. Nothing like extra pressure to muddle an already confused mind.

Best thing is that it's really easy to work out the mechanics of the game - even for my 6 year old! The phrases are a mix of tv/movie, pop and popular sayings and seem fairly general. The difficult bit is remembering which ball is which part of the phrase and placing it in the right sequence in the time.

Much recommended as a party / family thing to do for a few minutes, as up to 5 can play. I bought it for a Christmas present - but as my daughter said ' why do we give away all the best toys?'- I'm keeping it!

Enjoy

Educational AND fun!!, 02 Nov 2008
I am a teaching assistant in a mainstream school and bought this for a 9 year old boy with auditory and motor processing deficiencies. My Headteacher could not believe that we were learning as we were having so much fun. The rest of the class cannot volunteer quick enough when I need extras to make up teams as this game is suitable for all ages and abilities. Hyperdash is a hugely underrated game, my own 13 year old daughter and her friend played it non stop for over an hour and laughed continuously. It takes a special game to get them off their computers! I cannot recommend it highly enough

Great fun!, 02 Jan 2008
this is a great fun game!
It is great for all ages young and old
and can be played in a small or large area
great excercise as you have to dart around
can be played 1-4 players!
I cant say anything bad about it!
I would recommended it from age 4 years up
you just need to know your numbers and colours!
this hasnt been given the attention it deserves

fabulous game, 01 Jan 2008
Bought this game for my nine year old for xmas no idea what it was like but drawn in by the fact it can be played solo or up to 8 players.
Tried it out fabulous! It was such good fun dashing about trying to match the colours/numbers that it calls out. We played all the different modes and they all worked well. We particularly enjoyed the team dash where you have to pass the plunger piece like a relay. The game says for 6 and up however the level one and two were played easily with our teams which included a 4 and 5 yr old.Great activity looking foward to using it with our friends at the next gathering. Would easily transfer from small table to large garden. Superb!

Test your Simpsons knowledge and be amazed when 20Q Simpsons guesses what you're thinking! Calling all Simpsons fanatics! Think you know everything about Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa and Maggie? Think of anything Simpson related, from the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant to Bart's infamous saying, 'Don't have a cow, man!,' answer twenty questions, and be amazed when The Simpsons 20Q guesses what you're thinking! This version of 20Q features a built-in light for day or night play and a trans-reflective screen for easy viewing. Even the biggest Simpsons buffs will need an extra donut to outdo 20Q! The perfect gift for any Simpsons fan!

Choose your box... then try to outwit your opponents by making the best deal. The banker's offer will appear on screen.

Will it tempt you... or will you stick with the contents of your own box? This electronic table top game allows up to four play

Rubbish!, 09 Oct 2008
I was interested in buying this and saw one out for demonstration, so i thought i'd test it out before i bought it. Lucky i did! I thought of a racoon and began the game. It began promising, asking sensible questions, then went totally off the point. It never got it in 20 questions and only got it on the 25 question, which i felt was a bit of a cheat. I tried again with something simple, but this time, it never got it. I was glad when the words "you win" came up on the screen and it turned itself off, probably because it was embarrassed! At that point, i had to leave, which i felt glad to do, and was very glad i tried it before i bought it. Some of my friends, who were unable to try it, felt disapointed they couldn't and have since got rid of them. It's a good idea, pity about the actual product. It's cheaper (and a lot more fun) to play this game using real people than a computer which can't even guess the item you're thinking of is a pen.

Family fun for a short time, 28 Aug 2008
I got this for Christmas for the whole family to play with and it is fun and amazingly works most of the time unless you pick something really obscure. The only real problem with this is that it can grow old very quickly and within about ten minutes the 20Q will be collecting dust in the corner. Not so good if you have a short attention span.

Get outta my mind!, 28 Jul 2008
...says a bloke on the current 20Q TV advert. And yes, it appears for most of the time this little round gadget is reading my mind, as long as I'm thinking simple thoughts...

Okay, this little beastie tries to guess what someone is thinking about by asking a series of questions that can be answered by a simple yes/no/maybe. After 20 questions it tries to guess what you thought of with varying degrees of success. For example, think of cola and it might guess a can or a bottle; which to be honest isn't too far from the truth.

Personally, I think it's one of those "coffee table" objects; something that would sit on a table and maybe once in a while you'll try it out. Mind you, the expressions on people's faces when it guesses correctly is priceless!

Mind reader?? Er...nope!, 09 Jul 2008
I bought the Harry Potter version of this for my son and we really enjoyed it for a while, then it kind of lost its appeal and we could outwit it most of the time. So I thought I'd get this and see how we got on. The first ten items I thought of it didn't guess!! And they were pretty obvious things... picture frame, domino, sweetcorn, golf club etc I was trying to answer them very obviously but some of the questions it asked were pointless and we were really disapointed. I don't think the aim of this is to try to thin of things it WILL get rather than what it WON'T! Big disapointment I'm afraid after the Harry potter one!

stocking filler?, 27 Jun 2008
Quite a clever little toy! Its fun for a while and will amuse the kids but gets boring within an hour or two. Makes for a good little present for someone who likes silly thing :)

Jenga with balls, 19 Nov 2008
WobBally is clearly influenced by the classic game Jenga, the twist being that this time it is a stack of balls you are trying to keep intact, rather than blocks of wood.

The game is well-made, bright and colourful. The idea is that players take turns to remove a ball from the stack, all of which are balanced on rings of plastic to form a tower. There are different variations in that the next ball to be removed can be picked by the player or by rolling two dice.

In theory, it sounds like a great game. In practice, sadly it is not. The tower of balls is extremely wobbly, meaning that when you try to poke one of the balls inwards (using a supplied plastic, er, `poking stick') the whole tower tends to lean precariously. A reasonable amount of force needs to be applied to make the balls move (there is not the lightness of touch associated with Jenga here). Add these two factors together and you get a spectacularly collapsed tower and therefore game over.

So games can last a matter of seconds or at best minutes. It's very frustrating, especially as putting the tower together again, whilst easy, takes longer than playing the game. Although in fairness, it's not as bad as some. I'm looking at you, Ker-Plunk.

For younger players their attention is quickly lost when it becomes clear how tricky the game can be. My 7-year-old lost interest rapidly and would much rather play Jenga.

Sorry to keep on comparing WobBally to Jenga, but after all that is what it is presumably attempting to mimic, and I'm afraid it doesn't pull it off. WobBally is just too fiddly and even perhaps slightly unfair to be all that much fun.

Great fun, 16 Nov 2008
WobBally is a sort of updated Kerplunk in reverse; a tower of balls are sandwiched between a number of rings and the object is to take it in turns to poke the balls into the centre without causing total collapse; last player standing is the winner. There are three games to play in the instructions: just poke whatever ball you like into the centre, roll a coloured dice to select the ball colour on your turn, and roll the colour and numbered dice to choose colour and level. The last game is the most fun, but for very young players, we had a three year old playing, the simpler game is best.
Obviously there is a fair chance that the balls are going to gradually disappear - probably into the vacuum cleaner - despite the plastic "wall" that comes with the game and which surrounds the tower during play.
Overall a fun game that even very young children can play.

Wobbally Party Game, 15 Nov 2008
This is a good quality, well designed toy with an ingenious design and self levelling mechanism. Slightly smaller than I thought - it's only 18cm high but for the price it is still value for money and makes a lovely looking gift. A more interesting present than Lego or Jenga for an individual or family.
I think it's best suited to older children 8+ as it's more difficult than it looks to successfully send a ball flying into the centre of the wobbly tower. My younger children also got frustrated with the time it took to rebuild the tower - 7 levels, counting out 14 balls each and 98 in total. There also seems to be a hide and seek element to this game as you hunt for 2 or 3 missing balls each time. Keeping an eye on 98 marbles isn't easy.
You have to play the game on a hard flat surface which means the balls bounce everywhere when the levels crash down. Playing it on a hard table means the balls gain maximum bounce to all 4 corners of the room. The game doesn't play as smoothly as you'd expect. A lot of the time more than one ball falls out and partial collapses are common. Trying to hit the balls nearer the bottom of the tower seems to help the game last longer.
It is fun and worth a try, especially if you like Jenga. There is no game quite like it on the market and I think anyone would be pleased to recieve it as a novelty gift. I don't think this will be played very often at our house because of the hassle factor of building it versus relatively short game play time but it's a game to try it out on all your friends and relatives if only to giggle at the look of concentration and performance anxiety on their faces.


Balls compared to Jenga, 12 Nov 2008
This is essentially Jenga with balls, which sounds like a compliment but which isnt. This might look better than Jenga before the game begins with its seemingly impossible tower of wobbling balls but it just cant match the originals simple but brilliant gameplay. The set up is too complicated, the capturing collar completely ineffective (meaning you spend most of your time trying to find your balls. A reinvention of the wheel. Poking balls with sticks is just no fun whatever way you look at it!

More like 'WHY-BALLY?', 11 Nov 2008
Parents - avoid this game like ricin poisoning!
Every time we played it those attractive colorful balls went flying across the room. We tried standing the game in a tray but it didn't help. The manufacturers helpfully include 4 spare balls in the box. These will last you approx' 8 minutes.

The game itself is a variant of Jenga with balls instead of wooden blocks. Players poke at said balls with pink sticks until the tower falls over. It sounds like fun. It ain't!

So what's wrong with Wob-Bally (apart from the obvious choking/tripping/lost ball hazards.)? It's far to easy to knock the tower of balls over meaning you spend most of your time rebuilding it. The manufacturers are obviously aware of this too and the instructions recommend that when the tower is knocked down the responsible player is 'out' and the remaining players rebuild the tower and keep going. Unlike in Jenga where the tower has a decent chance of staying up for a good ten minutes minimum (depending on players level of cack-handedness), Wob-Bally does well to stay up for 3 minutes tops.

Credit to the designers, they have developed a very clever mechanism for keeping the tower level, meaning that it can be played on most flat surfaces. But the darn thing just doesn't stay up once you start poking at it with sticks. And good luck finding all the run away balls each time!
Even if you love building things and hunting around floors on your hands and knees, this gets pretty tired pretty quickly.

If this all sounds swell to you, trust me you really are much better off with Jenga, a lego set and a good old fashioned game of 'hunt the thimble'.

You have been warned!


Another fabulous Game from Radica: who never let you down!, 15 Apr 2008

This is a great Game of memory and good listening ability.

Simple phrases and sayings that one would think easy to recall, but what leads to the confusion, is remembering where you heard which word and under which light of that particular phrase!

As always, this is another great quality Game from Radica:

Highly recommended fun!

Great game ... with one little "but", 11 Jan 2008
Found instructions a little lacking in describing exactly what you have to do (in fact I almost returned game as defective thinking it wasn't recognising a correct sequence). Once we figured it out it seemed obvious but I still think its a pretty basic oversight in an instruction leaflet. My little "but" aside we've had some great games. It is challenging without being impossible and really is fun for all the family. Can't really comment on durability because we've only had it a few weeks, but it seems robust enough.

Compulsive Christmas fun!, 14 Dec 2007
Have just bought this game and we are already hooked. It's great fun trying to unscramble the phrases, with the time allowance (or guess allowance) going down each time. You can vary the skill level so that younger members of the family can play too. Educationally, it's a great toy for exercising memory and sequencing skills and I would use this with my students at college for a bit of light-hearted fun.

Ball juggling mind games, 31 Oct 2007
I can't figure out how it works but each of the five balls is given part of a popular phrase. All you have to do is get them in the right order. Simple. Or so you'd think - it's against the clock or with limited guesses. Nothing like extra pressure to muddle an already confused mind.

Best thing is that it's really easy to work out the mechanics of the game - even for my 6 year old! The phrases are a mix of tv/movie, pop and popular sayings and seem fairly general. The difficult bit is remembering which ball is which part of the phrase and placing it in the right sequence in the time.

Much recommended as a party / family thing to do for a few minutes, as up to 5 can play. I bought it for a Christmas present - but as my daughter said ' why do we give away all the best toys?'- I'm keeping it!

Enjoy

Educational AND fun!!, 02 Nov 2008
I am a teaching assistant in a mainstream school and bought this for a 9 year old boy with auditory and motor processing deficiencies. My Headteacher could not believe that we were learning as we were having so much fun. The rest of the class cannot volunteer quick enough when I need extras to make up teams as this game is suitable for all ages and abilities. Hyperdash is a hugely underrated game, my own 13 year old daughter and her friend played it non stop for over an hour and laughed continuously. It takes a special game to get them off their computers! I cannot recommend it highly enough

Great fun!, 02 Jan 2008
this is a great fun game!
It is great for all ages young and old
and can be played in a small or large area
great excercise as you have to dart around
can be played 1-4 players!
I cant say anything bad about it!
I would recommended it from age 4 years up
you just need to know your numbers and colours!
this hasnt been given the attention it deserves

fabulous game, 01 Jan 2008
Bought this game for my nine year old for xmas no idea what it was like but drawn in by the fact it can be played solo or up to 8 players.
Tried it out fabulous! It was such good fun dashing about trying to match the colours/numbers that it calls out. We played all the different modes and they all worked well. We particularly enjoyed the team dash where you have to pass the plunger piece like a relay. The game says for 6 and up however the level one and two were played easily with our teams which included a 4 and 5 yr old.Great activity looking foward to using it with our friends at the next gathering. Would easily transfer from small table to large garden. Superb!

not as good as some people say, 04 Jan 2008
I bought this toy to play at Christmas as a family. I was a bit disappointed with the format of it as although it is fun to play the game in secret from other family members, it was a bit boring not really being able to see how the other players were doing as we were all trying to crowd round the small handset. If you like playing games as a group then I do not recommend you buy this and perhaps choose the DVD option instead- it is much cheaper and doesn't need batteries.

Fun, simple and easy, 03 Jan 2008
If your like me then board games are getting old fast. Don't get me wrong, i love the classics like monopoly and cluedo but i hate learning the rules of a new board game as their always too complicated.

This however is great, Its quick and easy to use and is good for playing on your own or with other people. Although i understand why some people are a bit disappointed. Put the addictive winning deal or no deal formula aside and there isn't a lot else. It could have done with a colour display, good sounds and at the least light up. I was annoyed when i got £250,000 and it didn't go mad and light up and make sounds but just said 'good deal'.

Overall it's a simple and fun toy and the gameplay should keep people interest in it for a good amount of time.

shoddy, 24 Dec 2007
minimum entertainment, maximum disappointment. very predictable gameplay and not at all the quality that we expected.

Deal or No Deal - Great, Exciting, Just One Catch, 06 Apr 2007
A brilliant game - very hard to put down. when i ordered it, the game was faulty (typical), and i waited and waited until the working version came. It's realistic, and captures the scenario of real life. there are two bad points:

1. no noel edmonds - his voice is nowhere to be heard - inside his speech is flickered along the screen for you to read,

2. the offers - if you have 5 pounds and 10pounds left the banker will offer 7pound 50p. he averages the remaining boxes, so he never becomes generous or in a bad mood as he would do on tv.

GR8 GAME THOUGH!!!

Excellent & Very Addictive!!, 27 Dec 2006
My son got this for Christmas & it is so easy to play, just switch it on & away you go. Its so much like the real game!
There are no ways to cheat (no peeping in boxes), so you have to play the game properly the same way as they do on TV. The music is the same, the phone rings the same & you receive offers from the banker the same, just like the TV show. It can be played by 1-2-3 or 4 players & it provides hours of fun.

I just wish it came with real money as I've won £250.000 on two occasions!

Thinking about buying it? I highly recommend it!!

This is the amazing Bop It Download : the follow up to the best-selling Bop It Extreme 2! It's a whole new world of game play - and unbelievably addictive fun! With the awesome Bop It Download, you can actually download new voices, music and sounds for your game! Customise your game for your ultimate experience! You can even record your own voice! Play One-on-One, Pass It or Solo! Can you reach the new top score of 1000 ?! With a smooth new look and cool new LED lights to match the Bop It commands, this game is hard to beat! When you download and run the application you'll immediately have access to new voices, music sounds and playback clips! Some of these can only be unlocked when you crack new levels, so don't waste time...BOP IT!

Hold onto your wand! The all-knowing 20Q knows everything about Harry Potter. Harry Potter, the top-grossing film property, now allows you to face off with the all-knowing 20Q. Fifty house points for you if you're able to out smart this A.I. wizard. Think of any Harry Potter topic, and 20Q will read your mind! The iconic Golden Snitch design, built-in light for day or night play and trans-reflective screen can make you feel like the Occlumency lessons have paid off! Although, it's up to you to find out if the mind of 20Q is faster than a Golden Snitch! Requires 2 x AAA batteries (included). 8 Years +

Rubbish!, 09 Oct 2008
I was interested in buying this and saw one out for demonstration, so i thought i'd test it out before i bought it. Lucky i did! I thought of a racoon and began the game. It began promising, asking sensible questions, then went totally off the point. It never got it in 20 questions and only got it on the 25 question, which i felt was a bit of a cheat. I tried again with something simple, but this time, it never got it. I was glad when the words "you win" came up on the screen and it turned itself off, probably because it was embarrassed! At that point, i had to leave, which i felt glad to do, and was very glad i tried it before i bought it. Some of my friends, who were unable to try it, felt disapointed they couldn't and have since got rid of them. It's a good idea, pity about the actual product. It's cheaper (and a lot more fun) to play this game using real people than a computer which can't even guess the item you're thinking of is a pen.

Family fun for a short time, 28 Aug 2008
I got this for Christmas for the whole family to play with and it is fun and amazingly works most of the time unless you pick something really obscure. The only real problem with this is that it can grow old very quickly and within about ten minutes the 20Q will be collecting dust in the corner. Not so good if you have a short attention span.

Get outta my mind!, 28 Jul 2008
...says a bloke on the current 20Q TV advert. And yes, it appears for most of the time this little round gadget is reading my mind, as long as I'm thinking simple thoughts...

Okay, this little beastie tries to guess what someone is thinking about by asking a series of questions that can be answered by a simple yes/no/maybe. After 20 questions it tries to guess what you thought of with varying degrees of success. For example, think of cola and it might guess a can or a bottle; which to be honest isn't too far from the truth.

Personally, I think it's one of those "coffee table" objects; something that would sit on a table and maybe once in a while you'll try it out. Mind you, the expressions on people's faces when it guesses correctly is priceless!

Mind reader?? Er...nope!, 09 Jul 2008
I bought the Harry Potter version of this for my son and we really enjoyed it for a while, then it kind of lost its appeal and we could outwit it most of the time. So I thought I'd get this and see how we got on. The first ten items I thought of it didn't guess!! And they were pretty obvious things... picture frame, domino, sweetcorn, golf club etc I was trying to answer them very obviously but some of the questions it asked were pointless and we were really disapointed. I don't think the aim of this is to try to thin of things it WILL get rather than what it WON'T! Big disapointment I'm afraid after the Harry potter one!

stocking filler?, 27 Jun 2008
Quite a clever little toy! Its fun for a while and will amuse the kids but gets boring within an hour or two. Makes for a good little present for someone who likes silly thing :)

Jenga with balls, 19 Nov 2008
WobBally is clearly influenced by the classic game Jenga, the twist being that this time it is a stack of balls you are trying to keep intact, rather than blocks of wood.

The game is well-made, bright and colourful. The idea is that players take turns to remove a ball from the stack, all of which are balanced on rings of plastic to form a tower. There are different variations in that the next ball to be removed can be picked by the player or by rolling two dice.

In theory, it sounds like a great game. In practice, sadly it is not. The tower of balls is extremely wobbly, meaning that when you try to poke one of the balls inwards (using a supplied plastic, er, `poking stick') the whole tower tends to lean precariously. A reasonable amount of force needs to be applied to make the balls move (there is not the lightness of touch associated with Jenga here). Add these two factors together and you get a spectacularly collapsed tower and therefore game over.

So games can last a matter of seconds or at best minutes. It's very frustrating, especially as putting the tower together again, whilst easy, takes longer than playing the game. Although in fairness, it's not as bad as some. I'm looking at you, Ker-Plunk.

For younger players their attention is quickly lost when it becomes clear how tricky the game can be. My 7-year-old lost interest rapidly and would much rather play Jenga.

Sorry to keep on comparing WobBally to Jenga, but after all that is what it is presumably attempting to mimic, and I'm afraid it doesn't pull it off. WobBally is just too fiddly and even perhaps slightly unfair to be all that much fun.

Great fun, 16 Nov 2008
WobBally is a sort of updated Kerplunk in reverse; a tower of balls are sandwiched between a number of rings and the object is to take it in turns to poke the balls into the centre without causing total collapse; last player standing is the winner. There are three games to play in the instructions: just poke whatever ball you like into the centre, roll a coloured dice to select the ball colour on your turn, and roll the colour and numbered dice to choose colour and level. The last game is the most fun, but for very young players, we had a three year old playing, the simpler game is best.
Obviously there is a fair chance that the balls are going to gradually disappear - probably into the vacuum cleaner - despite the plastic "wall" that comes with the game and which surrounds the tower during play.
Overall a fun game that even very young children can play.

Wobbally Party Game, 15 Nov 2008
This is a good quality, well designed toy with an ingenious design and self levelling mechanism. Slightly smaller than I thought - it's only 18cm high but for the price it is still value for money and makes a lovely looking gift. A more interesting present than Lego or Jenga for an individual or family.
I think it's best suited to older children 8+ as it's more difficult than it looks to successfully send a ball flying into the centre of the wobbly tower. My younger children also got frustrated with the time it took to rebuild the tower - 7 levels, counting out 14 balls each and 98 in total. There also seems to be a hide and seek element to this game as you hunt for 2 or 3 missing balls each time. Keeping an eye on 98 marbles isn't easy.
You have to play the game on a hard flat surface which means the balls bounce everywhere when the levels crash down. Playing it on a hard table means the balls gain maximum bounce to all 4 corners of the room. The game doesn't play as smoothly as you'd expect. A lot of the time more than one ball falls out and partial collapses are common. Trying to hit the balls nearer the bottom of the tower seems to help the game last longer.
It is fun and worth a try, especially if you like Jenga. There is no game quite like it on the market and I think anyone would be pleased to recieve it as a novelty gift. I don't think this will be played very often at our house because of the hassle factor of building it versus relatively short game play time but it's a game to try it out on all your friends and relatives if only to giggle at the look of concentration and performance anxiety on their faces.


Balls compared to Jenga, 12 Nov 2008
This is essentially Jenga with balls, which sounds like a compliment but which isnt. This might look better than Jenga before the game begins with its seemingly impossible tower of wobbling balls but it just cant match the originals simple but brilliant gameplay. The set up is too complicated, the capturing collar completely ineffective (meaning you spend most of your time trying to find your balls. A reinvention of the wheel. Poking balls with sticks is just no fun whatever way you look at it!

More like 'WHY-BALLY?', 11 Nov 2008
Parents - avoid this game like ricin poisoning!
Every time we played it those attractive colorful balls went flying across the room. We tried standing the game in a tray but it didn't help. The manufacturers helpfully include 4 spare balls in the box. These will last you approx' 8 minutes.

The game itself is a variant of Jenga with balls instead of wooden blocks. Players poke at said balls with pink sticks until the tower falls over. It sounds like fun. It ain't!

So what's wrong with Wob-Bally (apart from the obvious choking/tripping/lost ball hazards.)? It's far to easy to knock the tower of balls over meaning you spend most of your time rebuilding it. The manufacturers are obviously aware of this too and the instructions recommend that when the tower is knocked down the responsible player is 'out' and the remaining players rebuild the tower and keep going. Unlike in Jenga where the tower has a decent chance of staying up for a good ten minutes minimum (depending on players level of cack-handedness), Wob-Bally does well to stay up for 3 minutes tops.

Credit to the designers, they have developed a very clever mechanism for keeping the tower level, meaning that it can be played on most flat surfaces. But the darn thing just doesn't stay up once you start poking at it with sticks. And good luck finding all the run away balls each time!
Even if you love building things and hunting around floors on your hands and knees, this gets pretty tired pretty quickly.

If this all sounds swell to you, trust me you really are much better off with Jenga, a lego set and a good old fashioned game of 'hunt the thimble'.

You have been warned!


Another fabulous Game from Radica: who never let you down!, 15 Apr 2008

This is a great Game of memory and good listening ability.

Simple phrases and sayings that one would think easy to recall, but what leads to the confusion, is remembering where you heard which word and under which light of that particular phrase!

As always, this is another great quality Game from Radica:

Highly recommended fun!

Great game ... with one little "but", 11 Jan 2008
Found instructions a little lacking in describing exactly what you have to do (in fact I almost returned game as defective thinking it wasn't recognising a correct sequence). Once we figured it out it seemed obvious but I still think its a pretty basic oversight in an instruction leaflet. My little "but" aside we've had some great games. It is challenging without being impossible and really is fun for all the family. Can't really comment on durability because we've only had it a few weeks, but it seems robust enough.

Compulsive Christmas fun!, 14 Dec 2007
Have just bought this game and we are already hooked. It's great fun trying to unscramble the phrases, with the time allowance (or guess allowance) going down each time. You can vary the skill level so that younger members of the family can play too. Educationally, it's a great toy for exercising memory and sequencing skills and I would use this with my students at college for a bit of light-hearted fun.

Ball juggling mind games, 31 Oct 2007
I can't figure out how it works but each of the five balls is given part of a popular phrase. All you have to do is get them in the right order. Simple. Or so you'd think - it's against the clock or with limited guesses. Nothing like extra pressure to muddle an already confused mind.

Best thing is that it's really easy to work out the mechanics of the game - even for my 6 year old! The phrases are a mix of tv/movie, pop and popular sayings and seem fairly general. The difficult bit is remembering which ball is which part of the phrase and placing it in the right sequence in the time.

Much recommended as a party / family thing to do for a few minutes, as up to 5 can play. I bought it for a Christmas present - but as my daughter said ' why do we give away all the best toys?'- I'm keeping it!

Enjoy

Educational AND fun!!, 02 Nov 2008
I am a teaching assistant in a mainstream school and bought this for a 9 year old boy with auditory and motor processing deficiencies. My Headteacher could not believe that we were learning as we were having so much fun. The rest of the class cannot volunteer quick enough when I need extras to make up teams as this game is suitable for all ages and abilities. Hyperdash is a hugely underrated game, my own 13 year old daughter and her friend played it non stop for over an hour and laughed continuously. It takes a special game to get them off their computers! I cannot recommend it highly enough

Great fun!, 02 Jan 2008
this is a great fun game!
It is great for all ages young and old
and can be played in a small or large area
great excercise as you have to dart around
can be played 1-4 players!
I cant say anything bad about it!
I would recommended it from age 4 years up
you just need to know your numbers and colours!
this hasnt been given the attention it deserves

fabulous game, 01 Jan 2008
Bought this game for my nine year old for xmas no idea what it was like but drawn in by the fact it can be played solo or up to 8 players.
Tried it out fabulous! It was such good fun dashing about trying to match the colours/numbers that it calls out. We played all the different modes and they all worked well. We particularly enjoyed the team dash where you have to pass the plunger piece like a relay. The game says for 6 and up however the level one and two were played easily with our teams which included a 4 and 5 yr old.Great activity looking foward to using it with our friends at the next gathering. Would easily transfer from small table to large garden. Superb!

not as good as some people say, 04 Jan 2008
I bought this toy to play at Christmas as a family. I was a bit disappointed with the format of it as although it is fun to play the game in secret from other family members, it was a bit boring not really being able to see how the other players were doing as we were all trying to crowd round the small handset. If you like playing games as a group then I do not recommend you buy this and perhaps choose the DVD option instead- it is much cheaper and doesn't need batteries.

Fun, simple and easy, 03 Jan 2008
If your like me then board games are getting old fast. Don't get me wrong, i love the classics like monopoly and cluedo but i hate learning the rules of a new board game as their always too complicated.

This however is great, Its quick and easy to use and is good for playing on your own or with other people. Although i understand why some people are a bit disappointed. Put the addictive winning deal or no deal formula aside and there isn't a lot else. It could have done with a colour display, good sounds and at the least light up. I was annoyed when i got £250,000 and it didn't go mad and light up and make sounds but just said 'good deal'.

Overall it's a simple and fun toy and the gameplay should keep people interest in it for a good amount of time.

shoddy, 24 Dec 2007
minimum entertainment, maximum disappointment. very predictable gameplay and not at all the quality that we expected.

Deal or No Deal - Great, Exciting, Just One Catch, 06 Apr 2007
A brilliant game - very hard to put down. when i ordered it, the game was faulty (typical), and i waited and waited until the working version came. It's realistic, and captures the scenario of real life. there are two bad points:

1. no noel edmonds - his voice is nowhere to be heard - inside his speech is flickered along the screen for you to read,

2. the offers - if you have 5 pounds and 10pounds left the banker will offer 7pound 50p. he averages the remaining boxes, so he never becomes generous or in a bad mood as he would do on tv.

GR8 GAME THOUGH!!!

Excellent & Very Addictive!!, 27 Dec 2006
My son got this for Christmas & it is so easy to play, just switch it on & away you go. Its so much like the real game!
There are no ways to cheat (no peeping in boxes), so you have to play the game properly the same way as they do on TV. The music is the same, the phone rings the same & you receive offers from the banker the same, just like the TV show. It can be played by 1-2-3 or 4 players & it provides hours of fun.

I just wish it came with real money as I've won £250.000 on two occasions!

Thinking about buying it? I highly recommend it!!

"The all-knowing 20Q knows everything about Harry Potter"? Er, no..., 10 Oct 2008
My eight year old son, a huge Harry Potter fan, approached the Harry Potter 20Q with a mixture of intrigue and anticipation. Several goes later, with the "A.I. Wizard" 20Q having singularly failed to make even *one* accurate guess, my son asked if I could maybe take it back to the shop and change it for a book...

Awful.

Shockingly good fun - it's the famous lightning reaction game in miniature! Challenge your friends to the Pocket Shock It!

This hilarious game tests reactions and gives a small electric shock to the unlucky loser. All players take a place on the

Two cubes from Cube World Series 3. Cube World Series 3 introduces 4 entirely new and different characters: Chief, Toner, Dash and Sparky. Each man lives in a different coloured cube and has a colourful personality to match.... Meet Chief. The policeman with a colourful way of providing safety and security to the cube world population. Then there's Toner - he's a corporate desk jockey who doesn't know the meaning of organisation and frequently loses the plot. Dash is a different cube of pixels. He's a delivery man, always in a rush to keep every expectant customer happy. He has a few unfortunate incidents with a few parcels, but that's part and parcel of the job! Last but not least, there's Sparky. He's the most clumsy electrician to ever qualify from the Cube World school of DIY - he works on his cube day and night, with hilarious consequences! Place your cubes side by side or stack them high and that's when the fun really kicks off! Glad of some like-minded company, these cheeky little chaps sneak off to one another's cube to say hello! What follows is anyone's guess. A friendly chat. A riotous party. A fight. Maybe even a spot of bungee jumping. But if they're misbehaving, don't worry. Each cube is built with interactive motion sensors, which means you can shake it, tilt it or even turn it upside down, causing your stickmen to fall about. 2 cubes included - each measures approximately 5cm x 5cm x 5cm - perfect for sitting on your desk.

Two cubes from Cube World Series 3. Cube World Series 3 introduces 4 entirely new and different characters: Chief, Toner, Dash and Sparky. Each man lives in a different coloured cube and has a colourful personality to match.... Meet Chief. The policeman with a colourful way of providing safety and security to the cube world population. Then there's Toner - he's a corporate desk jockey who doesn't know the meaning of organisation and frequently loses the plot. Dash is a different cube of pixels. He's a delivery man, always in a rush to keep every expectant customer happy. He has a few unfortunate incidents with a few parcels, but that's part and parcel of the job! Last but not least, there's Sparky. He's the most clumsy electrician to ever qualify from the Cube World school of DIY - he works on his cube day and night, with hilarious consequences! Place your cubes side by side or stack them high and that's when the fun really kicks off! Glad of some like-minded company, these cheeky little chaps sneak off to one another's cube to say hello! What follows is anyone's guess. A friendly chat. A riotous party. A fight. Maybe even a spot of bungee jumping. But if they're misbehaving, don't worry. Each cube is built with interactive motion sensors, which means you can shake it, tilt it or even turn it upside down, causing your stickmen to fall about. 2 cubes included - each measures approximately 5cm x 5cm x 5cm - perfect for sitting on your desk.

The S2000 Sound Rocker lets you 'feel the action' from your video games, movies, and music. The bass is so huge and