The Monster Mash-Up

It’s hard to think of October without thinking of candy, trick or treating, pumpkins, and costumes. It’s also the time when you watch scary movies, tell ghost stories, and sleep with the lights on. This month in the “Toy Box,” I’ve found some great toys to celebrate this month without giving you the urge to check under the bed when you go to sleep.

First, there’s the Design Your Own Monster from curlyqcuties.com. These aren’t the monsters that go “bump” in the night. They’re the ones that you cuddle with when you sleep. Design Your Own Monster is a stuffed monster that you get to create by going to designamonster.com or curlyqcuties.com and clicking on what size monster you wish to create. Then you are taken to a monster creator where you pick the body, eyes, mouth, belly shape, and colors of your monster. For a little extra, you can even have the monster embroidered. They cost between $25 for the smallest (11.5 inches tall) to $135 for the extra-large (2.5 feet tall), and you can buy them at designamonster.com.

If the design part is more up your alley, Fuzzoodles may be right for you. Fuzzoodles can be easily described as Mr. Potato Head, but instead of a potato you have pipe cleaners. The kits come with several long and short pipe cleaners as well as eyes, mouths, and other accessories that give you a wide range of creation. When I first saw this product, I was a little wary of the pipe cleaners. The pipe cleaners you normally think of are pretty small and wimpy. However, the Fuzzoodle pipecleaners were larger than I expected, and the fuzz in the pipe cleaner is actually pretty lush. The accessories have hooks that keep them in place and the set also comes with an idea booklet that shows you how to make some Fuzzoodles and also gives you some techniques that you can use to design your own. The big box cost $20, but there are smaller boxes that are $10. You can buy them at ToysRUs or at Amazon.com.

Finally, who can think of Halloween without thinking of The Great Pumpkin. From the pages of It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, comes Yahtzee. I had never played Yahtzee before seeing this, and I have to admit I really like the game. With Yahtzee, you have five dice and you roll them three times with the aim of getting certain sets of numbers. After three rolls, you write your score on the score card, and then it’s the next person’s turn (unless you’re playing by yourself, and then you get to go again). Once the scorecard is full, the person with the highest score wins. What makes the Charlie Brown version of Yahtzee different is that the dice have all your favorite characters on their sides with the number in the corner. I didn’t have a problem distinguishing between the sides, but you may want to start off slowly so you don’t confuse some of the drawings. The cost of the game is $17 on Amazon.com. And if you want more Great Pumpkin, you can also play The Great Pumpkin Countdown at www.greatpumpkincountdown.com and win some prizes.

Find Them Online:
Design Your Own Monster
Fuzzoodles
It's The Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown Yahtzee

Thinking Game

Get your thinking caps on. This one's a tough one.

I was browsing the web a while back and I ran across this game on Thinkgeek.com. It's called the Lonpos Pyramid and Rectangle Game. It's a black box and you get several little pieces of different colored balls stuck together in different shapes. It comes with two booklets both filled with puzzles. They range from ridiculously easy to stressfully hard. The start you off by showing you were some of the pieces go and then it's your job to fill in the rest. Even though the easy puzzles are basically one missing piece, I'm glad there is at least one of them there, so when I give up doing the hard puzzles I can at least put the game away quickly. I would have liked to see some more variety in the puzzles. For some reason they all start putting pieces on the left side and the right side is always bare. I would have liked to see a puzzle where you place some in the middle, maybe there are some out there. However, you can just remove all the pieces and just try to put them all back in, and as long as everything fits, you win! Also there are 3D puzzles for the bottom of the box to make a pyramid using the same pieces, which are somewhat harder. Soon I'm going to make a video showing how this game works.

The game costs $15.99 and you can find it at http://www.thinkgeek.com/geektoys/games/d245/
and if you want to test it out online you can do that at http://www.lon-pos.com/en/en_101_8_1.htm