Best Toys

If your child is asking for Bakugan Battle Brawlers, you may be understandably confused as to what they are.  Put simply, they are little balls that transform into action figures.  They are used to have battles like the duels in the Yu-Gi-Oh! card game, but in this game there are little toys, which seem to make it more fun.  These toys became very popular very quickly.


Each toy begins as a tiny ball, roughly the size of a ping-pong ball.  When a child rolls one of the balls onto the playing surface, the Battle Balls pop open and turn into a Battle Brawler action figure.  This is accomplished with tiny magnets in the balls and a magnetized playing surface, either the game board or the playing cards.  After the Bakugan have rolled onto the battlefield, the players engage in battle according to the official rules.  The playing cards that come with the Bakugan each add a new twist to the outcome of the battle.  To get your child started playing this game, you need the battle arena game board, a launcher, and several Bakugan Battle Brawlers balls.  You’ll need to download the official rule book from the Bakugan website so that kids can play according to the rules.  There are started packs, booster packs, and other combination packs for you can buy to build your child’s set faster.

During the kid section of our review process, we put a group of elementary school aged boys on one side of the room with a Bakugan setup and a big crate full of Battle Brawlers.  On the other side of the room, we provided the same setup to a group of boys ages nine through thirteen.  As we sat down to watch the fun, we realized very quickly that the Bakugan game as it is meant to be played is simply too complex for the younger age group.  That said, the younger boys still had fun playing with the Bakugan Battle Brawlers.  They loved it when they rolled the balls and watched them pop open into little alien looking creatures.  In fact, that was what they spent the rest of their review time doing:  Roll the ball, cheer when it transforms on its own, grab the toy and change it back into a ball, and repeat the process.

They seemed to have a really great time.  After a while, they started incorporating some pretend play into the process, like a child does with any other action figure.  One helpful piece of information we gathered from the younger age group’s play time is that if the balls are thrown, particularly against the wall in an effort to make them transform and land on their feet, the balls will certainly break.  The younger boys’ Bakugan army suffered three casualties during this particular experiment.

The reviews with the older age group went more according to plan.  They read and followed the official rules, and at the end of three hours, all of the boys were experts at following the rules of battle.  It wasn’t the quietest game we’ve ever tested, as there was a lot of cheering and other verbal expressions, but the older boys did have fun playing the game.  This toy is highly recommended for boys ages three to fourteen or so.