MagnetCube vividly reminds me of one of the greatest online games of our time. No, not Minecraft. Try a little older. Remember Rollercoaster Tycoon? And how if you didn’t have enough money to buy preset Rollercoaster designs, you had to build your own? Between you and me, I’d try to make the most outrageous coasters even if I DID have the money. Building a track together piece by piece, aligning the last piece to the end of the station to complete the track, and just watching as the virtual park-visitors screamed in sheer delight through the coaster ride. There’s something about that joy of creation that the MagnetCubes captures. Part creation, part elaborate gravity trick, MagnetCubes lets you build your own ball-bearing racetrack using its modular setup. With an incredibly exhaustive variety of track-shapes that let you build the ball-bearing rollercoaster of your dreams and a transparent framework to hold your creation up, the MagnetCubes is an engaging toy that’s infinitely customizable so you’re never bored, and it teaches you a fair bit about physics too – just like how RC Tycoon taught me never to bump up the velocity of the coaster beyond a certain limit, or that rollercoaster paths should always be closed and continuous.
Using a transparent framework of pillars and beams held in place by magnets, MagnetCube lets you build and test your ballbearing racetracks. The cube construction is much more versatile than the plug-and use tracks in Hot Wheels kits. With MagnetCubes, you can build in the third dimension too, and the hollow cubes let you see your track as you build it, making the construction process as engaging and fun as the playing process. Available in Standard and Advanced variants the MagnetCube kit is modular, allowing you to be small and efficient, or embrace a go-big-or-go-home attitude and make a wild track that’s filled with twists and turns. Each kit comes with ball-bearings that ride on the tracks you build, relying on their design and a combination of gravity, inertia, and potential/kinetic energy to get from A to B. It’s this fun approach to learning that allows kids to embrace concepts of physics, architecture, and even a fair share of mathematics… all while exercising their creativity, testing the limits of nature, and staying entertained without being attached to a screen – unless they’re filming it for their Instagram. I probably would.
Designer: Steven Wolfe of DesignNest
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