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Pythagoras Red Riding Hood

Our little Pythagoras Red Riding Hood – Arishka. It’s amazing how you can build wearable things from this set.

Pythagoras, Tiko, and Tako are vintage building sets. They have big panels of different colors and shapes, that connect by the edges. Each piece has sockets and balls that can snap together, connecting the pieces. You can also connect the pieces of different shapes, as long as their sides match. This connection is strong enough to hold even the biggest structures together.

Because of the sockets’ form, Pythagoras and Tiko panels can form both flat surfaces and 3D shapes. The flexible joint connection means that you can connect the pieces at different angles. The bigger panels are huge – they are a few inches long, so kids can create toy hats or items to hold, and not just toys. They are sturdy enough to wear and to play with. There also are smaller pieces that can help connect the bigger pannels together or make smaller crafts. The pieces of this set have all kinds of shapes – there are different triangles, rectangles, squares, pentagons, and so on, all in different colors.

Sadly, Amazon seemingly has no sets exactly like Tiko and Pythagoras, but some very similar concepts also are interesting enough.

Pythagoras Red Riding Hood
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The Owl From Honduras

Made from the Tegu Jungle set. The children decided that such a small tree-green owlet must live somewhere in the tropics between North and South America, basically, where Honduras is located – the birthplace of Tegu cubes. In fact, in Central America there really are owls – so-called neotropical owls. Some of them live in abandoned termite mounds.

The Owl From Honduras
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KID K’NEX Budding Builders Set – Human

Another Kid K’Nex Budding Builders critter. One of the reasons why K’Nex is so great is its basic “flake” pieces, which you can connect to the rods both by the side or by the centre. The connection will be different, of course, but you can assemble your pieces on almost any angle. So the same piece can be a paw or a part of the body.

KID K’NEX Budding Builders Set - Human
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Top Race Gear Train

Top Race is a brand of RC toy cars and other vehicles. This Gear Train set, however, is somewhat unusual to the Top Race brand. It has 96 gear pieces, and control whatever you built using the included wireless remote.

This Battery-Powered DIY kit comes with easy-to-follow step-by-step instructions in the manual, enabling your children to assemble the train. Or you can build some unique machine – there are countless ways to create a toy that will roll around. The gears of this set are mostly decorative – they are colorful and have flashy stickers, and look especially impressive when they rotate. The main moving piece – a train chassis – makes train-like sounds and has lights.

Overall, there are not that many building options with Top Race gear train, but it allows you to create actual RC vehicles, which few sets can offer. Their racing qualities can vary depending on your design skills. Of course, you can also build a stationary thing with the gears thta will rotate when you use the remote control.

The remote control has a control range of about 10500 feet and operates on 2.4GHz technology. The Top Race train requires 3 AA batteries, while the remote control uses 2 AA batteries (batteries not included).

Top Race Gear Train
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Playcube Princess With A Fan

These are cubes of French origin – Playcube. The edge size is 2,5 in. The material is either rubberized plastic or very dense rubber. And they also have some kind of sweet smell, similar to vanilla. In addition to the cubes, the set includes extra figures for decorating crafts – they are a little denser to the touch than Tedico games.

This vintage set has a bunch of big cubes with rails and openings on their sides. The cubes can interlock with any of their sides. The direction of the rails sometimes limits the number of possible positions. But it’s not a big problem, since all the pieces are cubic and all their sides are equal.

The set also includes soft plastic figures to decorate the crafts. These figures are flat, they are just silhouettes with no further details. They are thick enough to hold between the rails on the cubes’ sides without falling out. They come in different shapes – there is a shell, a teddy bear, a horse, and so on. They also have different colors.

This set is simple and fairly basic. It has very few pieces and no extra pieces like wheels or alternative shapes. There are many things you can build from this set, but it has way fewer possibilities than the building sets for the older kids. However, it’s a good toy for younger children, with big pieces that are also pleasant to touch. And the connection method is somewhat unique, there are very few building sets that offer something exactly like it.

Playcube Princess With A Fan