MAGNA-TILES: kind of like Lego, but less creative and stable

The manufacturer’s charging just under 130 francs for a 100-piece set on its own website (in German). That’s taking creativity a bit too far. The same set is currently significantly cheaper in our shop.

I got the box for a review. With an average rating of 4.8 stars, the magnetic construction toy seems to be really well received by buyers. I want to know what makes MAGNA-TILES so special. I have a bit of a weakness for magnetic things. For example, I still use the Pixio cubes that I tested a long time ago.

The MAGNA-TILES follow a similar concept. Like the cubes, the colourful plastic plates also contain magnets. Here, they’re built into the edges – six in the smallest triangles, eight in the squares and a whopping 16 in the large base plates. This ensures sufficient attraction.

If you’re reasonably clever with how you go about it, you can build a MAGNA-TILES tower up to a metre high. It helps that the edge of the most frequent square tile in the 100-piece set measures an impressive 7.5 centimetres. A total of 46 triangles provide variety when building.

And this is where MAGNA-TILES’ educational approach comes in. You may remember from your maths lessons that there are different types of triangles: isosceles, equilateral and right-angled. Although if my old maths teacher were reading this, he’d rightly point out that an isosceles triangle can also be right-angled. But let’s leave that for now.

This is intended to inspire children to put together complex or even simple constructions from various basic geometric shapes. In other words: two small right-angled triangles have the same area as a square plate. Twelve large triangles can be used to create something almost circular – it reminds me of pieces of cake. According to the manufacturer, MAGNA-TILES are a «valuable educational resource» and used in lessons, especially in the USA, where the company was founded.

A nightmare for perfectionists

However, there are some limits to children’s creative imagination, especially when building upwards. Sometimes the pieces don’t stay at right angles to each other, pulling together where you don’t want them to. Clap! One square’s suddenly lying on top of the other, even though it was supposed to be a side wall.

And even if the piece stays where you want it, the MAGNA-TILES aren’t positioned in a way that makes the structure stable. For example, if I build a cube out of six square tiles, the polarity of the magnets means that it’s always a bit wobbly. Sometimes they repel each other; sometimes they attract each other. This causes unclean edges. My perfectionist tendencies – I’d have liked to be an architect – are being seriously tested.

Children are less bothered by this and happily carry on building. And they can also live with the fact that their creations will collapse with a bang at a certain point.

For my test, I encouraged various children to collapse a building. The plastic elements even survived falls from the height of a skyscraper unscathed. The material – ABS plastic – is high quality and not very susceptible to scratches. But that’s what I expect for the price.

That brings us full circle, back to me asking myself: what do you get for your money with MAGNA-TILES? In a set of 100, each piece costs around 70 cents (or euro cents) on average. That’s fair. You pay a similar amount per brick with a [DUPLO mix from LEGO](https://www.galaxus.ch/en/s5/product/lego-duplo-mix-lego-duplo-23744524. But I think that with DUPLO bricks – and later with LEGO – you can build much more varied and stable things and enjoy them for longer.