REVIEW: Brain Blox Wooden Building Planks by Brain Blox

Holden and I were happy to review Brain Blox Wooden Building Planks by Brain Blox and try out our creative building skills!

WHAT IS IT?:

Brain Blox Wooden Building Planks are solid pine wood, uniformly-sized, smooth, flat building blocks that can be used in a myriad of ways.  Children can use them to make letters and numbers, build creative structures, or demonstrate math concepts like understanding fractional parts.  In fact, adults can enjoy building with them, too!

They come in sets of 100, 200, or 300 pieces.  For this review, I received a set of 200 building planks, which can be purchased for just $44.95.  They come in a cardboard box with a canvas draw-string backpack inside that can be used for easy storage and transport of the blocks.  The package also includes an idea booklet to help you get started.  In addition, more free resources are available on the company’s website, including downloadable idea cards with 8 levels of difficulty, an e-book, brain puzzles, curriculum, building videos, and more!

OUR EXPERIENCE:

There are so many things you can build with these blocks.  The possibilities are endless!  I am not that creative, so I was happy that the idea booklet was included to give us ideas on how to get started building really cool things with these planks.  My 11-year old son and I worked on the projects together.  We started out just using the pictures in the idea booklet.  Our first project was to build the Parthenon.  We have been studying ancient Greek and Roman history, so that was a natural choice for us.  Holden loved the way it turned out!

 

Next, we built the boat dock from the booklet.  That was pretty cool, too! 

 

As we chose more complicated structures, we realized we needed more help than just a picture of the finished building.  That’s when we noticed in the booklet that you can go to a series of step-by-step instructional videos on YouTube that show the construction process for each project in the idea booklet.  The videos were entertaining, too…when we built the pirate ship, the video had a wooden plank cartoon character that was a pirate who called the shots on how to complete the project.  At the end of the video, he jumped into the finished pirate ship to sail away.  Cute!

 

The pirate ship took over 150 planks to build, and it was nearly the width of my huge recreation table!  As you can see, the more planks you have, the more complicated structures you can build.  We really enjoyed building with these, and we would recommend going with one of the larger sets so your projects are limited by the number of blocks that you have.  At first, we were drawing a blank as to what to do with them since they were all one uniform size and shape, but the idea booklet was a great help in visualizing how versatile these blocks really are.  They are really fun!

While you’re checking out these building planks, you might also be interested in exploring Fun Family Chess by Brain Blox, which we just recently reviewed, as well.

Take a look at what other Crew members have to say about Brain Blox Wooden Building Planks by clicking on the banner below.