ThinkFun Rush Hour - Traffic Jam Logic, Brain & Challenge Game - STEM Toys for Boys & Girls Age 8 Years Up

Rush Hour has to be one of our best toy discoveries of the year - it's a portable puzzle game that has everyone who has played with it in this house from age 6-70 enthralled. The game consists of a plastic box with a 6x6 grid on it, 42 game cards and, as the name of the game would suggest a number of vehicles (4 trucks and 12 cars) that fit onto the grid and are the pieces you play with. Everything is compact - the grid is about 13.5cm by 16cm, and fits into a small drawstring bag, making the game very transportable and quick to set up. Game play is simple but engaging - in theory it's for one person to play at a time but we quite often find that one person will play and several more will get involved leading to co-operative puzzle solving and much discussion and scratching of heads. The basic idea is to use one of the cards to set up a traffic jam of trucks and cars, these being variously 2 or 3 squares long of the grid, and then to free the red car and let it "drive" out of the gap in the grid, a bit like the illustration on the packaging as seen above. The cards show in pictorial form how to lay out the cars and lorries horizontally and vertically. To make it easy the pieces are all totally different colours and made of a hollow, light, but robust plastic. Once you have the game is set up you move the vehicles forward and backwards, but in no other direction, as much as you want until you find the sequence to free the red car. It's a bit like tetris in reverse and instantly addictive. I like the fact that there is a little drawer in the grid to store the game cards and the game itself is expandable as you can buy more cards and special vehicles. We have just stuck the basic game so far, the cards come in three different challenge levels and have kept members of this house amused for hours. A card can take seconds or up to an hour to solve, it depends on the complexity of the card and the skill of the player. The solution is printed on the back if the jam becomes too much, when playing you really do have to think about how to work out the puzzle it's great fun but also can get quite frustrating as you wonder how a few pieces of plastic can have you so stumped! The set is pretty well made and well worth the purchase price in my opinion, it's definitely a great item to fill an ideal five minutes or the tricky time for children in a restaurant when colouring no longer appeals. I like the fact that it is so tactile - the game is available on i-Pad also but somehow in 2-D, though it is to all intents and purposes identical, is much less involving than having to physically push real pieces around a board. I'm not a huge board game fan in general but this game is great, and it's a real must-have for holidays. There is a junior version available Rush Hour Junior but this one is suitable for anyone aged 4 or above who will be able to access it in different ways, with the very youngest setting out and pushing around the cars and older players enjoying the very real challenge that such a fun looking game can provide. Highly recommended.

Bought as a stocking filler for my grandson and he loves it. Well made, not flimsy. The cards give you lots of challenges at different difficulty levels to keep all age groups entertained. Don’t worry if you can’t resolve one as they give you the solution too.

Like many of the reviewers here I bought this game for a kid's birthday, in this case my 9 year old niece. On the day I spent more time playing it than she did (which she wasn't entirely happy about!). The game itself consists of a plastic gameboard, the size of a desk calculator, in which there is a drawer holding the puzzle cards. The board and game pieces (around 20 pieces) come in a handy carry bag. You'll need the carry bag to keep everything together neatly, but you don't need to tip the whole contents out to find the pieces you need, since there are not many of them and they are not tiny. As a side note, since the pieces are not tiny and are brightly coloured you can easily find them if they fall on the ground. As the playing the game, well it really makes you think and is also very fun. You get a smug feeling of superiority when you finally manage to figure the puzzle out. The puzzle difficulty ranges from very easy indeed to ferociously difficult. The hardest puzzles had me stumped and I am supposed to be pretty clever! But don't worry, the puzzle cards also have the answers (on the back) so you can figure it out like that if you need to! Although there are 'only' 60 cards or so, they are easily replayable as you are not going to remember the pemutations of every one. I recommend this game, fun for all ages, intelligent and easily portable. I'm already looking forward to visting my brother again so I can have another go...

We purchased a few of these as Christmas gifts. They have all been well received. I am yet to play this one so this review rating is based on feedback from those that had the game. They find it a great challenge and this can even be played by youngsters of course. Everyone that had it loved it. If you like tricky games with a nice easy start this is excellent fun. It is great to have all the cars and trucks so you can be tactile with the game too. Fun and certainly recommended.

I love puzzles so treated myself to this game. The idea is to match the cars on the grid to the cards provided and then try to manoeuvre them around to get the red car out of tricky parking situations. At first I thought I'd wasted my money. Each problem was super easy and I solved them in about twenty seconds. By the time I got to card fifteen though everything changed! Super easy has now become super difficult! I love this game because you can buy extension packs which have more cards (problems to solve) and extra cars to complicate the situation. This is a game you can play again and again as you're unlikely to remember the solutions to all of the puzzles after you've solved them.

Got this is as a stocking filler for my 8 year-old son - he'd played with it before at his grandparent's house and he'd enjoyed it very much. It's funny how the most low-key present of the day is the one that ends up fascinating everyone and I've found my wife and visiting friends wanting to have a go after seeing my son playing it. The concept is very simple: arrange the vehicle pieces of varying sizes and colours on the board according to the card - there are lots of cards marked beginner, intermediate and advanced - the vehicles can only move along the axis they are placed and amongst the vehicles is a red car which you have to get to the exit. It's like one of those sliding block puzzles but in 3D and the cards provide many, many challenges. The learning curve through the cards is steady and starts off very simple. A marvellous toy / puzzle. Well built and comes with a draw bag where you can put all the bits and throw away the box it came in.

This is an excellent brain teaser for both my husband and I and our sons. I'm a home-schooling Mum and every now and then I'll get this out and leave it on the kitchen table, the rule being that if your working on a puzzle you leave the card in place and you have till bedtime to finish it before someone else gets a go. Sometimes you'll get on a roll and finish 6 in a row and other times the old cogs aren't turning so well and its a struggle to get through 1. Our youngest (7) isn't all that interested in this puzzle game (though he has fine motor skill problems so it is probably more the struggle to control the pieces without picking them up out of their place that he struggles with, not so much that the puzzle is beyond him) but our 9 and 12 year old's really enjoy doing them. Definitely a great rainy day activity!

I am 7 and my mum bought this game as a prize for me. It is a really good puzzle. I am going to warn you it is not good to travel with because it has small pieces. It has 40 different cards to do! There are different levels, easy, medium, hard and challenging. What is even better is that you do not need to keep the box because there is a fabric bag which comes with it so you can put the cars and the board in it to keep it safe. I find it great to play with.