creative and collaborative play with eeboo toys :: review

If you’d asked me a month ago what eeBoo was, I would have had no idea. But now? It’s my go-to store for kid toys, games, and crafts. eeBoo is a boutique toy manufacturer that specializes in useful, beautiful and well-made educational games and gifts. Their products are sold in specialty toy stores, high-end gift shops, museum stores, bookstores, art supply stores and other non-big box venues. (You can find them online here). They create unique, wholesome, and beautiful toys, craft kits, games, and gifts for children. eeBoo games and activities are based on old-fashioned formats which they have re-invented with cheerful artwork (often commissioned artwork from from well-known and well-loved children’s book illustrators) and contemporary design. Everything they make is meant for wholesome individual or family play.

eeBoo began in a basement apartment while Mia Galison and her husband were trying to find a way to spend more time with thier 3 small children while also wanting to create wonderful products for all children. And they’ve certainly done that! Since eeBoo’s beginning, they have been awarded 201 Oppenheim Toy Awards! 45 of them Platinum, 156 Gold, and 16 SNAP awards (which means that the toys are Special Needs Adaptable)!

But even above the awards and accolades, there are so many things that I like about eeBoo. As I mentioned before, the artwork is spectacular. But the quality of the products is also very impressive. All of the products that we have tried (some review products, some of which I have purchased on my own) have held up well, even in my house. It has to be sturdy and well-made in order to survive here, especially in the hands of my 5 year old, whom we affectionately call Captain Destructo. And you know that we’re a relatively ‘green’ family and I love that eeBoo products don’t come with a ton of unnecessary packaging and all of the paper products are made with 90% recycled materials and are printed with soy-based inks. Oh! And the instructions are printed inside the box top. No more scrambling around, looking for lost instructions and then finally giving up and making up your own rules. 🙂

Okay, I feel like I’m gushing all this info without giving you details! So here’s a quick look at three of our favorite eeBoo products: a game called Community, one called Obstacles, and a set of Tell Me A Story cards. Community is the game you see here with the hexagonal spaces. You start by placing different “location tiles” on the board. The first location tile you place is Home. Then you add other important community locations such as School, Hospital, Park, Fire/Police Departments, etc. Once those tiles are placed, you take turns trying to place “road tiles” so that the roads connect the various locations. It doesn’t sound hard, doesn’t? It isn’t. At first. And as your community gets bigger and there are more and more roads, it requires more and more teamwork to figure out how you can make everything connect. I love that while playing, we’re working on spacial thinking, pre-planning and strategic thinking, as well as group cooperation and team work. Bonus: the board and the backs of the tiles are flocked and they don’t slide around once you place them down! So even if someone shakes the table or knocks the board, the pieces stay where they’re supposed to be!

Obstacles is a game of imaginative solutions. There are two types of cards in this game: Tool Cards and Path Cards. The Tool Cards are things you might be able to use to overcome an obstacle, things like a mop, a camel, a compass, or a sponge. The Path Cards show different obstacles you might encounter, such as an ogre, a windstorm, or fire. Each player is dealt several Tool Cards and a trail of Path Cards is put in the center of the playing area. Each player uses one of her/his Tool Cards to explain how (s)he could use this tool to overcome this obstacle. Once all players have all presented their ideas, everyone discusses why some of those ideas work and consider whether or not they could combine their tools to overcome the obstacles even more easily! When the brainstorming is over, the group selects the best suggestion and that round is complete. Everyone gets new Tool Cards and you go to the next Path Card in the trail and start over. We laughed SO hard while playing this game. Some of the ideas we came up with were completely silly and others completely brilliant. There were a lot in between, too!

Do your children love to tell stories? Or ask you to tell stories? If you’re like me, sometimes it’s not so hard to come up with a little story but other times I have complete story-teller’s block! And of my four kids, I have 2 who can come up with any story any time about any thing and 2 who sometimes have a harder time coming up with new ideas. These Tell Me A Story cards are perfect for both of those scenarios. We’ve been using The Mystery in the Forest Tell Me A Story cards for bedtime recently. We typically let each child choose several cards and then work together to decide which order we’ll put them in. Once we have our story outline created, we go through each picture card and take turns telling the next part of our story, trying to connect one illustration to the next. I recently overhead my 3 and 5 year old playing this together and I wish you all could have been a fly on that wall! They were laughing so hard at the silly story they were creating that I could hardly understand what they were saying! So, so cute!

Okay, so I know this was an unusually long post for me, but I wanted to really share all the details about our new favorite toys. These are high-quality and well-loved games that I imagine I’ll be able to save for years to come and maybe even one day play with my children’s children.

Community game :: $19.99
Mystery in the Forest Tell Me A Story cards :: $9.99Obstacles game :: $16.99

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