Review: Mickey’s Mouse-ke-TAG

Written on Sep 22, 2009 by Brian and filed under Reviews, Wild Planet

We first head about Mickey’s Mouse-ke-TAG from Wild Planet at the beginning of the year and caught an early mock-up at Toy Fair. Mickey’s Mouse-ke-TAG is ready for release now though, we’ve been playing with our review unit. The game gets kids up and moving with an engaging game that leverages RFID technology and a kid favorite brand, Mickey Mouse Clubhouse.

Mickey’s Mouse-ke-TAG is an active learning game that has kids 3 and older running around in response to Goofy’s call outs. The way it works is the red Clubhouse has a speaker and RFID reader in it. Goofy’s voice tells kids which character to find. When they place the Clubhouse over the character, it reads the character’s RFID tag and either moves on to the next call out or let’s kids know they need to try again.

Mickey’s Mouse-ke-TAG offers several game modes, designed to be played from 1 to 6 children. The common theme though is that kids run around the room to best each other in timed games. Each game comes with four levels too, which even had kids much older than the target involved. In fact, parents had fun too scooting around with the Clubhouse, trying to remember which character has yellow shoes for instance (hint: Donald doesn’t wear shoes).

There’s a lot to like about Mickey’s Mouse-ke-TAG. First, kids get running around, which is great. Second, the diverse skill levels make it interesting, probably up to the 6-8 age group, depending on their affinity for Mickey Mouse Clubhouse. Lastly, while kids don’t really get the technology behind the game, but universally we found them to think it was neat that the Clubhouse “magically” knew which character it was over.

We really only have two complaints; the first is that the characters easily come off their bases, which disrupts play. We recommend gluing the bases onto the characters before you get going, this one quick step will save you from having to put the pieces back together during the games. The other issue is that the game only counts up to 99 seconds due to a limitation in the game’s storage space. If you keep the game contained to a decent sized room however, you’ll probably never notice this.

With a suggested retail price of $25, it’s hard to complain about a lack of memory though. Mickey’s Mouse-ke-TAG provides a lot of fun for kids and stretches to include a wide variety of age groups – parents included. Wild Planet has done well here to create a game that not only gets kids active, but is a great value as well.

Editor’s Rating – 4 out of 5 stars

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