- Brickadoo
- RS2Play, $18 to $20 a kit
Sure, your kids can build a decent house with standard wooden blocks, but that playtime creation would look a lot more like a real brick-and-mortar building if they used, well, real bricks and mortar. Brickadoo is the closest they can get to genuine construction, if on a decidedly smaller scale. Each of the nine Dutch-made building sets—from the house (shown) to the fire station to the charming dormered "villa"—comes with little white-clay bricks, wooden doors and windows, and nontoxic cement powder (just add water). Laying brick on brick and spreading the adhesive in between gives kids a hands-on lesson in how edifices go up. And the cement is water-soluble, so not only are spills easy to clean, but the mini domicile can be dismantled and reconfigured at will. The process does require precision and manual dexterity that are likely beyond very young children—but for handy older ones, Brickadoo offers a truly different style of construction play. —Ages 6 and up
- Froggy Boogie
- Blue Orange Games, $19
Five-year-olds aren't exactly known for their attention spans. Then again, when you factor in the many distractions they cause, neither are their parents—so in the end, this observation-memory game offers a pretty level playing field. In it, a bevy of cute wooden adult frogs sits at the center of a ring of lily pads; in order for your baby frog to hop around the circle to the finish line, you need to remove one of the adult frogs' eyes and look underneath. If it's the blank eye, you're free to move, but if there's a picture of a baby frog there, your turn is over. A roll of the dice tells you which color frog to try, and if you've carefully watched other players' turns, you should be able to remember which is the good eye and which is the bad. All you need to do is stay foc—hey, who put the baby's rattle in the cat food?—Ages 4 and up
- Cranium Kabookii
- Ubisoft, for Nintendo Wii, $50
Just as it did with its many board games—which allow players who don't excel at art, for instance, a chance do well at puzzles, trivia, or charades instead—Cranium has designed this video game with multigenerational play in mind. Team members pass around the motion-sensitive Wii remote for use in various challenges: Draw a picture for teammates to guess, act out a series of motions (using a hammer, rowing a boat), unscramble anagrams, or hit the notes of a song. Win or lose, fun will be had. —Ages 6 and up
- Nights: Journey of Dreams
- Sega, for Nintendo Wii, $50
Aided by a shape-changing harlequin named Nights, a sleeping child must save the dreamworld from a nightmare infestation. Flying, appropriately, is a big part of the action; most of the levels keep you airborne, weaving through a surreal obstacle course as you try to, say, hop on the back of a mythical bird. Nights morphs from a rocket to a dragon to a dolphin to get you wherever you need to go. The Dali-esque art direction makes watching this game almost as much fun as playing. —Ages 6 and up
- Xeko: Mission Indonesia
- Matter Group, $25
Think of it as Pokémon with a conscience: Xeko is a collectible-trading-card game that puts the focus on real-life endangered species. Players build up their decks not with Pikachus and Jigglypuffs, but with clouded leopards and proboscis monkeys. As you lay down a card representing a species in peril, your goal is to claim territory and "save" that animal's habitat. But your opponent will be trying to do the same—with climate change as the real enemy. Xeko's latest edition, set in the richly biodiverse islands of Indonesia, comes packed in an eco-friendly wooden crate, naturally. —Ages 8 and up
