One of the main things that we pride ourselves on is finding great toys that you won’t necessarily find at other toy stores. We travel to toy shows around the world (in future posts we’ll tell you lots about this!), and on one of our trips to the Nuremberg fair in Germany (the world’s largest toy fair. Picture a hockey arena filled with toys. Now triple the size of the arena. Now picture 12 of those arenas connected in a sprawling complex filled with toys. Yep.) we found one of our all-time favourites: Aquaplay.

Aquaplay is like a wooden railway system… except instead of trains it is boats in canals. You connect the canal pieces into different layouts and then fill them with water, and the play comes when you add boats, pumps, cars, trucks, people and fun! You begin your system with a start set, and you can add pieces to the layout from there. We even designed a waterproof set of table legs (using recycled material… very cool we’ll tell you about that sometime!) that you can use with the most popular start set (the deluxe 540) to prop the set up to perfect play-height.

We just love this toy; toys like this make you appreciate the people who designed them. Aquaplay takes the fascination with trains and boats, mixes in the “wooden railway” play pattern (designing layouts and pushing along the trains), adds water, and takes the whole thing outdoors for the summer! By the way, have we mentioned that Aquaplay is 15% off this May at Mastermind?

What a great toy. This year I want to develop an Aquaplay canal system that circles our office. Instead of emails, we’ll put messages in bottles and let them float from office to office. Sure, totally impractical, but tell me that wouldn’t be awesome.

---- Ryan the Toy Buyer