Educational Toys from Gigamic (France)

I came across some interesting toys in Singapore Bookfest held by Popular bookstore. The games are all mind-teasing and made of good quality wood. We spent some time understanding the rules and trying out some of the games.

According to the salesperson, the company is called Gigamic. The games originated from France and won many awards. The distributor in Singapore is Avolution Pte Ltd (http://www.familydiy.com), with online stores and retail stores listed on the website; but the products are also being sold at some of the bigger Popular bookstores in Singapore.

Here are some interesting games we saw:

• Quoridor Kid. On a game board with 7x7 squares, to be played by 2-4 players, each assigned a mouse and a piece of cheese. The cheese is static and the aim of the game is for the mouse to eat the opponent’s cheese by moving the mouse one step at a time. The interesting part is that a 2-block width fence can be placed in between the squares to block your opponent’s move. This is a kid's version, simplified from the original Quoridor classic version which uses a 9x9 squares game board and the aim is to reach any of the 9 squares on the opponent’s baseline.
  

• Quarto. On a 4x4 game board, for 2 players with 16 game pieces of different attributes – black/white, short/tall, round/square, solid/hollow. Each player takes turn to put down a piece given by the opponent on the game board and the aim is to line up 4 pieces of the same attribute in a horizontal, vertical or diagonal row. It is not easy as you need to look at all 4 dimensions.

• Cathedral. The concept is very similar to Japanese boardgame Go, where 2 players take turn to put down a piece and capture the space surrounded by its own pieces. The pieces are of different sizes and imitate famous buildings of the world like the Pyramid, the Eiffel Towel and the Statue of Liberty, which makes it attractive.

• Katamino. A puzzle for single player, the aim is to fit in blocks of different shapes into an allocated rectangular space. It is quite common and I have seen a few other games with similar features, including one published by Popular bookstore.

In the end, we did not buy any as we already had a library of games at home and each game above cost at least SGD50. It is also a way to teach our children that we will not buy everything that we like.