Review: Giggle Wiggle

As a parent of young children you learn to tolerate a lot of noisy, plastic toys. From the moment they’re toddling about they begin to amass various musical shape sorters and melodic vehicles that all have their own noises. Before long, all these noises begin to form a background ambience to pretty much everything else that happens in the home. As the kids get older, the toys become quieter (or bleepier) and the noisy toys become refined down to one main genre; the crazy mechanical kids game.

Whether it be Hungry Hippos, Mousetrap or Operation, these kinds of games remain noisy fun for years to come. If not the noise of the game itself, then the cacophany of screams and laughs that these games inevitably bring on is infectious and it’s one of my favourite ways of getting the kids playing together on a rainy day.

Giggle Wiggle is a fun, noisy kids game from John Adams (the people who brought us the Sands Alive Glow) and it has become an immediate hit in our house with all the children, irrespective of ages. The aim of Giggle Wiggle is to try and balance balls of your own colour on the hands of a gyrating caterpillar. As he wiggles around and hands are darting everywhere it becomes incredibly tricky to land the balls on the little caterpillar gloves. Just as you think you have a handle on it, he spins around!

 

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We loved the fact that this was an activity that all the adults and kids could enjoy together and it was easier than we imagined to stop the tiny balls from pinging off the table. Smaller players may be better suited to the outermost hands as they will be less likely to be knocked aside by bigger hands as everyone tries to get their balls onto the caterpillar. We try to make sure no-one is at a particular disadvantage but once that salsa music starts it’s every man for himself!

Often with these games, you find that the gimmick outweighs any real fun that can be had. Eventually the novelty wears off and you’re left with a pretty shallow experience. It’s a few games where the mechanic is integral to the actual fun and that’s what keeps us coming back to this particular game again and again.

We’re big fans of Giggle Wiggle (not just because we’ve lost a lot of the balls out of Hungry Hippos) and it’s become one of our go-to activities for a rainy Sunday. Something we’ve had a lot of recently.

Giggle Wiggle is available from Amazon.co.uk.

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