Sifteo Cubes Review

The new Sifteo Cubes are out and they are amazing. If you haven’t experienced Sifteo, it’s a bit tricky to explain. It’s a gaming system comprised of individual cubes that talk to each other and have motion sensing and touch screens. You play games by tilting, turning, and rearranging the cubes, creating a wonderful tactile experience. And. unlike the previous iteration, these Sifteo Cubes are entirely portable; they make a great travel toy.

There are four pre-installed games, and right now you get a bonus download game with purchase. The games include Chroma Splash, Word Caravan, Code Cracker, and Cube Buddies. Chroma Splash involves removing colored dots by matching them with dots on other cubes. Word Caravan is an language arts game where you rearrange and tilt cubes to make words. Code Cracker is a math game where you have to complete math sentences to solve the code. Cube Buddies asks you to make specific faces by swapping the parts on different cubes. The bonus game, Sandwich Kingdom, is an adventure story where you move through the Kingdom by following the path through the cubes. It’s a great use of the platform.

The basic Sifteo Cubes set ($129.95) comes with 3 cubes, batteries, the Sifteo base, a USB cord, and a carrying bag. You can buy additional cubes for $29.95. Each cube, up to 12, extends your game play by adding another screen. You can make longer words and solve harder puzzles. Conveniently, the games generally get more difficult as you add more cubes, so you could give a child a new cube for each birthday to help extend the fun. The cubes communicate via the Sifteo base, which can also be connected to a computer to download additional games. The base is not only the brain of the system, but the speaker with an adjustable volume.

I hope to put together a video demo of Sifteo in action, but for now, you might enjoy the TED Talk by Sifteo co-founder, David Merrill. He explains the vision behind the project (the cubes were originally called Siftables) and you can get a sense for the wide range of possibilities that exist for a platform like this.

Disclosure: We received a set of Sifteo Cubes and the full range of game for review purposes. There was no additional compensation and no promise of a positive review. The opinions contained in this post are my own. This post contains affiliate links.

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