Plan Toys' miniaturized, legless Foosball Soccer game probably looks like a lot of fun. You'd only be half wrong if sort of fun is half of very fun, but we'll leave the math to you.

Now, our six-year-old daughter enjoys playing with this foosball game as much as anything we encourage her to play with us. She really likes full-size foosball, and kids work well on teams on a full-sized table, against each other or against adults who are not competitive jerks. But foosball is a game that simply does not work unless each player meets at least one of the two following conditions:

1. You have the mental capacity to manage multiple controllers along two vertices as a small ball rolls unpredictably past them.


2. You have the emotional capacity and sense of self-preservation to restrain yourself from reaching into the game and grabbing the ball when #1 fails you.

So foosball has a lower age limit - nothing wrong with that. Trouble is, that pretty much leaves this really cute miniaturized version of the game without an audience. Kids over eight will be frustrated by having to use T. Rex arms to control their team on this roughly 15" x 20" field. The lack of a "roll-in" ball chute means that you actually have to place the ball by hand on the center field line; the big problem there turns out not to be getting your hand out quickly but being fair - if you try to place the ball right in the middle and leave it still, neither player's team can reach it, and if you give it a nudge, well, you're deciding who to give the start to. This may not matter too much to an adult playing with a young child, but to a couple of children, it's a recipe for disaster.


The table is made of the same natural rubberwood and non-toxic paints and finishes that are behind all Plan Toys.


Some of the figures block the ball even when they are in "bottoms' up" position. It comes with two wooden balls, and dimples to store them in. Some sort of closure or containment device would be helpful; we've lost one of the two custom-sized wooden balls already.

The toy also needs feet of some kind - its natural playing surface is a coffee table - but the little pads you can buy at a home improvement/hardware store work fine.

We love Plan Toys line in general and most of the toys of theirs we've used, including a one-of-a-kind building set one of our favorite early toddler toys ever. But we can't recommend this misguided product, which really doesn't offer much use life for its $70 price tag.

You can find the Plan Toys Foosball Soccer game at Kangarooboo.