Tag Archives: worst toy

Wow! I never thought a toy that looked as cool as this would be this bad. The Magnext Dynamix Gears and Elektronix is clearly the worst toy I have seen this year. The toy was billed as “helps understand the basics of physics in an innovative, fun and cool way” so I was drawn in fast. My son loves gears, rockets (see Falcon 1 post), electricity, magnets and pretty much anything that moves if you press a button. This was going to be the toy for him. I would find out after about 15 minutes that the other marketing line was slightly more accurate “Encourages patience, observation and a great sense of accomplishment”.  It definitely encouraged patience but I had none for this toy.

Here were the issues:

• the gears didn’t snap easily onto the base
• when the gears would snap onto the base, they hardly ever turned without a push
• when they did turn, they were quite uninteresting unlike the photo on the box
• no instructions were included in the box to help figure out how to make the “20 interesting designs”
• my son quickly lost interest in it

I think the best way to describe this is a technical toy that a product designer probably worked very hard on building but it’s terrible.  The toy was so bad that if I were the company, I would let the designer go.

Dana