SKU'd View
Maria Weiskott -- Playthings, 8/1/2001
Enginious!
Enginuity Games introduces a signature collection this year of high quality, solid wood games, including 3 Stones, Doubles Wild and Soli2.
Soli2 is new to 2001 and is based on peg solitaire (jump over a marble and remove it). Enginuity updates the game by introducing a two-player element.
Treasured
A pirate chest or a future heirloom? It's up to the artist.
My Treasure Chest is one of Balitono's Paint It Wild kits, each a handcrafted solid wood sculpture that contains acrylic paints, new artist paintbrush, glossy varnish, sandpaper and painting guide. In addition to the treasure chest, other Paint It Wild kits include Pretty Dresser Kit, Nature Tic-Tac-Toe Kit and Best Friends Frame Kit.
A new twist
Here's a change of pace from hi-tech entertainment.
Aaron's Balloon Animals offers four kits, complete with instruction books by balloon artist Aaron Hsu-Flanders, for making balloon animals. Each kit also contains balloons and a pump. The company also offers mini-kits for making specific animals including dog, mouse, swan, rabbit, giraffe and teddy bear, among others.
Goal oriented
Flick it & Kick it Football—FIKI Football—is an upscale version of the old tabletop football game, a school cafeteria amusement for more than 30 years.
Instead of using fingers and a piece of paper folded into a triangle, 3Point Enterprises has replaced them with more hi-tech materials: a triangular 'football' featuring all the characteristics of a real football including genuine leather, a pro-style pebble surface, laces and coil stitching and a plastic goalpost. The object of the game is to score a touchdown by 'flicking' the leather triangle on a tabletop so that one of the tips of the 'ball' extends over the table's edge.
Child's eye view
An eyewitness account, Pearl Harbor Child, narrates the memories of the attack on Pearl Harbor by the book's author Dorinda Makanaonalani Nicholson, a native Hawaiian who was 6 years old during the bombing in 1941.
This personal account chronicles the event and its impact on her family and friends. The book, which has an accompanying video, is meant to provide a first-person account from a child's view of the incident that prompted U.S. entry into World War II. The 60th anniversary of the Pearl Harbor bombing will be noted this year on Dec. 7. Published by Woodson House Publishing, information about the edition is available at www.pearlharborchild.com.
Spinning out
Duncan Toys has put a whole new spin on things with its Tetra Top Spin-Top line, a new generation of tops with more than one axis of spin.
Composed of different arrangements of spheres, the tops do not have a single stem like traditional tops, but instead have the ability to spin on any of their spheres. In addition, they can stack on one another into towers.
Available in four geometric shapes— the Tetrahedron, Octahedron, Cubeoctahedron and Icosahedron—two different Tetra Tops come in each package, except for the Executive model, which is single packed.
