Mattel FFB15 Bloxels Game

Highly recommended. My 10 year old daughter has thoroughly enjoyed experimenting with the different features in the app and building, uploading and playing the games she has made. She has taken great enjoyment in checking how many others have played her game too! She used the game board to begin with, designing her first room layout and character, but as this feature is also within the app she quickly found that she preferred using this rather than using the physical game board and blocks - so although this is a great idea, in practice I have found the physical element of the game board and blocks to be redundant.

I ordered this product in good faith. Unexpectedly, when purchased, the FREE app has been discontinued. This means if you purchase this product you have to pay a further £20 to sign up to the app you HAVE to have to make the product usable.After many attempts to ask the seller to add these details to the product description and ask for a refund based on being mis-sold the product, I have now given up. The customer service is totally unacceptable and sadly the seller is actually very rude with it (Agreed by Amazon once I had made a complaint but as they are a third party seller they can do very little) but I am taking the opportunity to let future customers know here.IF YOU PURCHASE THIS PRODUCT YOU WILL NEED TO PAY ADDITIONALLY FOR AN APP FOR THE PRODUCT TO WORK.Sadly I believe the seller bought these as a job lot very cheaply once the FREE app had discontinued, he unfortunately will not accept this responsibility.NB I received a direct email from the Bloxel manufacturers to confirm the FREE app has discontinued.

The box itself may not say much. Just a black board with holes for different color cubes.The concept behind it is fascinating. You can create your own game, room by room, adding different colors which represent land, hazardous areas, enemies, power-ups. The app allows you to customize many aspects of the game. The board is basically the way in which you represent your game design.It's a great component for a computational thinking workshop with children and teenagers. You can start planning your entire game on paper using grid paper and then continue with the board to scan it.

I'm pretty cross about this purchase if I'm completely honest, the game is great and my son likes it but I was really annoyed to find out on Xmas day that this isn't a complete game! You pay the £25 for this to then find they require an account. An account that costs an additional £18.95!! Making the total nearing on £50! Now I don't mind paying £50 for a game but I like to know that is what I am paying. I do not appreciate purchasing my son something to find out after he's opened it that I need to pay out more money! What if I didn't have the extra money to pay? How heartbroken who he have been Xmas morning. I've looked through the listing and I cannot find anywhere that it tells people that it will require further payment and I personally feel this is something that should be listed in a nice bold writing so all can know before they buy and open the product.So yes we like the game but be warned that it will actually cost you more than the price of this product to be able to use it.

So, firstly my ten and a half year old son absolutely loves this. He said he wanted to be able to make video games and that is exactly what he can do with it. At an age appropriate level he is having fun while learning new skills and seeing his concepts turn into a platform game- or a game like Mario as he would say. Bought it as a Christmas ‘surprise ‘ gift for him and now it is up and running it is a complete success and based on that he would definitely give it 5 stars. He is very excited about it.However... The original app is no longer active so in the UK you now have to get an app called Bloxels Edu and you can use that as a personal user so there is an app you can use, however- our first issue was it looked like we had to pay another £20 which we thought was a bit odd to have a substantial hidden cost to the product but we eventually realised if you type in the numbers near the bar code on the box you don’t have to pay that. But the next issue was the camera, our excited son had filled in the coloured blocks on the board and we had to take a photo of it using the app to capture and upload the image but the capture feature just didn’t seem to work.. We tried various positions, lighting, touching the screen etc on an amazon kindle and an android phone and just could not get it to work so were losing hope a little and then thought we would try one more phone and it worked straight away on the iphone6. Not too sure why this is.. For us, the issue is resolved and our son can and is having a great time now playing with it and learning as he goes but if we hadn’t had success with the app capture feature on the third device we tried it would have been a different story.

Bloxels has brought hours of smiles to my 9 year olds face. A little tricky to get started but never has learning been so much fun and productive at the same time. A neat little toy and app that teaches kids the basics of design and game mechanics without them realising it's educational. The best learning toys are definitely the ones where the kids think they're just playing and this falls into this category.Very recommended and will probably buy some time in the future for nieces or nephews!