Speaking of sustainable forestry practices, we've loved playing with (and marveling at) the set of Tegu blocks the company sent us to review. Tegu has done something important, added something truly inspiring, and then thrown in something we wouldn't have thought possible. The combination is a rare kind of toy magic that threatens to outflank the play value we obsessively hone in on when assessing toys at ZRecs, so I'm going to get the feel-good stuff out of the way at the beginning. From there we'll get down to the detailed critique of the play experience of Tegu blocks, and there may even be a few insights you can reflect on the next time you're trying to examine your own (or your child's) play experiences. We will offer our impressions of how well they work, what playing with them is like, and whether, in an age in which young children have died after ingesting magnets from toys that were never intended to break free of their products, they are even safe to bring into your home.

As an added bonus, I will attempt to punctuate the heading of each section of this review in unique, if grammatically questionable ways.

0. The basics.

Tegu blocks are wooden blocks, colored and sealed with water-based paints and stains, which contain one or two magnets that enable users to attach blocks together either at their center (square blocks) or at either end (plank blocks). Attaching and detatching Tegu blocks from each other, and figuring out how to balance them and create representative objects with them, is addictive fun, and even taking them from or putting them back into the box is likely to elicit giggles.

Their cost is high -- $55 for a twenty-six-piece set, $100 for fifty-two, and $110 if those fifty-two blocks are colored. We won't try to answer the question of whether these blocks are "worth" $55 or $100 -- 52 of them fit neatly in a roughly 6"x8"x3" box -- but there is a sourcing story and a mission behind them that may make them more valuable to you than even the highest-quality "architectural blocks" you could buy for your child. You can see Tegu blocks in action on the company's (brilliant) home of the faceless Master Builder, who spent the holiday season building things on the fly with Tegu blocks based on Twitter requests. Many of the highlights from those sessions are available for viewing here, where you will quickly get a sense of how these blocks work.

1. The question all modern wooden blocks must answer:

Tegu blocks are sustainably forested from local hardwoods by a company whose explicit mission is to create long-term jobs and positive benefits for one country in need: Honduras. Wood is sourced from Forest Stewardship Council (FSC)-certified cooperatives who cut in Honduras under the oversight of various non-governmental organizations (NGOs). The company is also in the process of seeking FSC "chain of custody" certification for their factory, which will mean that the FSC has verified that they know what they say they know about the wood they are using at every stage of the process.

Some environmentally-responsible blocks are made using the scraps from other harvested wood, or from wood that served a different long-term purpose before and had to be cut down anyway (rubber wood). Some are made by very small companies that can speak to the origin of their wood in a very personal way, and be accountable for what happens in those forests on an intimate basis. And some are made of wood that is fast-growing and is rapidly reforested on a massive scale under intensive government oversight. Based on the inspiring thing about Tegu (next section), it sort of seems like Tegu has found another way, one that combines elements of these other approaches but has other benefits as well.

2. The inspiring thing about Tegu.

Tegu is a company that was explicitly founded on the mission of making things better for the people of Honduras. The founders tell the story themselves this way:

It all started with an innocent, curiosity-driven question: "Could we create a for-profit company based in Honduras that would foster a positive social impact through its business?" Chris posed that question during a work trip to Honduras in May 2006 where he reconnected in Tegucigalpa with friends dedicated to an impactful humanitarian project; seeking an answer to the question sparked the idea that became Tegu -- a toy business founded to address unemployment, neglected natural and human resources, and the need for entrepreneurship in Honduras.

It's a great idea, not just because the company promises to be founded on a mission to do good -- many companies these days are, and we are generally suspicious of them. Tegu's thinking is both smaller and bigger than that. Their goals are concrete, human, and ultimately, they should be measurable. We like that.

3. Tegu safety (and the thing I thought I'd never say)

But here's the thing: Magnets can be dangerous. They typically have no place in toys for young children, because when they get out, and are ingested, they kill, and when they don't, they can still cause life-altering injuries. Even though Mega Blok's MagNext systems are a better design than Magnetix were, I can't honestly say I'd buy them for use in a home that had or might someday have a small child wandering around who could encounter those tiny, high-powered magnets when the plastic housing has broken down and started dropping them around.

I have tried to break a Tegu block. Lord knows I have tried. I have greatly scuffed and uglified a few Tegu blocks, by balancing them at various angles on rocks and bricks and concrete blocks. The bottom line is, these blocks, which are made in two halves that are then sealed together with the magnet inside, cannot be opened by mortal means. I'm kidding about the mortal part, but there is really no way a child is going to get these things open, unless that child is Baby Huey and probably also has access to power tools, in which case you have bigger problems to worry about. Tegu blocks do not break when thrown against concrete (many times), and the longest of the planks (4"?) supported my full weight (roughly 160 pounds) at 30 and 45 degree angles with the slightest flexing, and did not warp, splinter, chip, or otherwise separate.

In short, I'd be perfectly comfortable giving these blocks to anyone with a child age three or older, because I don't think these blocks are likely to ever see a magnet come out of them. And that's something I never thought I'd say about a toy designed around small magnets.

4. But are they fun to play with...?

For some, the answer would be simple: Yes, they are. A lot! But for us, that is not enough. We have spent a while thinking about why they are fun, and how that fun compares to the fun children have playing with building blocks, and what the particular itch Tegu blocks scratch is, and whether it is worth scratching. In the end, what we realized is that Tegu blocks do not really serve the same play function as regular blocks at all, despite the fact that they are square or rectangular and relatively plain and look like blocks and are even marketed somewhat like blocks. What we discovered in playing with them and sitting and thinking about them really hard, is that they are really quite different from blocks, that their blockness is a kind of disguise, and that this is the source of their appeal, and also of their limitations.

Tegu blocks are fun for both kids and adults to play with, and I don't just mean "adults who like playing with their kids" -- I mean, you (an adult) could play with these alone, and if someone came in and said "Hey, what are you doing?" you'd say, probably without even looking up, "I'm trying to make this peacock's tail feathers stand up straight, and I think I just figured out how to do it." They are a puzzle and a game and a building set, but they are smooth and plain and, unlike other building sets, even wooden blocklike ones, that suggest their own designs based on the types of parts they contain -- pegs to fit in holes, nuts to be threaded on bolts, wheels, et cetera -- Tegu simply sits in silence and waits for you to start fiddling with them.

There is a novelty value to Tegu blocks that can wear off. Unlike blocks, they have "rules of attraction" that constrain what you do, and these rules are much simpler than what you can accomplish with a more robust toolkit. You can't, for example, balance a cube block or a plank on the center of another plank, because there are magnets at both ends, and the block is attracted to one of them or the other. This means a plank can't serve as a figure's shoulders, with the head on top, and more generally that everything operates on an oddly "binary" pattern that makes sense when you think about the forces at work.

But there is fluidity on another plane. Because they are attached only with magnets -- rather than, like AroundSquare's brilliant Twig Building Blocks, by pegs and holes -- once that invisible linkage is made, the blocks can rotate 360 degrees around the pivot point, and be held in any position by gravity, or by the frictional or magnetic forces of other blocks.

There is an art to building with Tegu, and it is not a skill everyone will care to master. Casual play is at times rewarded, and at times disciplined, and shifting your sense of the constraints from those of gravity (which, conveniently, always pulls in one direction) to magnetism (which requires a "by-feel" manipulation of blocks to find the right poles of attaction, and regular testing of their strength) is surprising, kinesthetic, and fun.

The cost of the blocks, and the size of the set, impose their own limitations. You can build two peacocks with 26 blocks, but you can't build much of a house. In fact, Tegu blocks are really better at creating creatures, people, vehicles, and other things with a complex and sometimes hovering arrangement of parts -- things regular blocks are very bad at doing -- than environments, which is what most people expect from a building block set. At times playing with Tegu blocks can feel like building with an oversized executive desk toy, and the mindset required is not where we typically go when we think of having fun with blocks.

5. Time to venture into the deep end of toy philosophy. Hope we don't drown!

It's probably better, in the end, not to think of Tegu blocks as a replacement for building blocks at all, but as a stripped-down building set or a puzzle-based game scaled up into a creative toy capable of sculptural self-expression. There is an impermanence to it that can lead to a "Well, now what?" after a building goal has been achieved; complex creations will not be "usable" in the way that many block creations, or built constructions, are -- Tegu figures are fragile, balanced, poised just so.

This means that Tegu blocks really aren't suited for use in "make believe" in the way that regular blocks are -- building a space and then populating it, enacting scenes in it, investing it with a story. And that may go against the grain, so to speak, of the reasons we usually buy blocks. Buying blocks is a way parents express their love for their children -- a way that is different, at least in Western, industrialized culture, from the way they express their love through other purchases. It reflects our desire to see our children engaged in wholesome play, in simple play, in play that engages with natural materials, and in play that satisfies our nostalgia for our own childhoods.

Fifty years ago, parents bought blocks because toys were viewed primarily as things that were played with throughout childhood, not replaced each year. Parents today buy blocks because there is a moment for each of us (sometimes lasting, sometimes temporary) in which we feel that our current model of play is broken (our consumer culture overwhelmingly presents play activities as the use of toys; toys are designed primarily with attention and sales, not use life or extended engagement, as the primary consideration; ergo, play occurs despite, not because of, the tools we apply to its practice), and that our goals and aspirations for toys are complicated and sometimes contradictory (we want their lives to be richer and fuller than ours, but equally simple and unencumbered, and both comparisons are based on a half-remembered dream). One of the solutions to that psychic problem, as we stand in the toy store aisle and ask ourselves What kind of parent is it that you want to be, anyway? is to strip away all the bells and whistles and arrive at a mode of play that we can consider pure, and that play is performed with blocks.

In our view, Tegu cannot occupy that role with integrity. Their product simply does not offer that kind of basic play experience. And this makes marketing their product trickier. They are in a position of needing to sell "blocks and..." or "blocks plus" when we typically buy blocks to escape the tyranny of pluses.

If you are going to bring Tegu blocks into your home, you need to look past the outward projection they share with "building blocks" -- the Zenlike simplicity, the natural materials, the open canvas -- and recognize that what you are actually buying is not a new twist on blocks, but a new twist on Tinker Toys. Tegu blocks speak to Millennials (the ones buying toys now for kids who are now 3-7 -- and, by the way kids, whatever we end up calling you, I'm sorry) in the same way that Lite Brite spoke to children who had grown up in the 1950s when they were buying toys for the children of the late 1960s. Tegu's vision of play (plain-spoken, tactile, harmonious, and quietly surprising) would be as incomprehensible to those children of the 1950s as Lite Brite would be if it were introduced as a new product today. The fact that these two toys -- each forward-thinking in their way -- reflect diametrically opposed values is, among other things, a sign of just how much our fortunes have turned on that Lite Brite mentality.

6. Please just tell me whether I should buy these?!

Overall, Tegu's constraints will set some minds busily tinkering, building and destroying and working through the extensive possibilities of blocks that will "self-adhere" at set points and hold each other in mid-air, but they will cause others to drift back to the less rules-based universe of traditional building blocks. One thing we can say with certainty is this: Tegu makes blocks that are more likely to engross children and adults equally, cooperatively, and creatively in building play together. And that attraction (if you'll forgive the pun) is a sweet spot that many toy companies would kill (well, SuperSoak) to get a taste of.

And then, of course, there is plenty of playing to be done even when you aren't building. Here's Lynn Colwell, co-author of Celebrate Green! (a sourcebook we'd recommend to any family to help establish eco-friendlier holiday traditions), enjoying Tegu blocks with her grandchildren:


In the end, that laughter -- which we heard from Z, from us, and from others as we played with our loaner set of Tegu blocks -- says it all. Tegu blocks are fun in a dynamic, intellectually stimulating way that approximates the experience of using a nicely made construction set stripped down to an elemental form. For the right family, they'll see years of productive, creative play.

You can buy Tegu blocks on Tegu's website or on Amazon.com

We received a 52-piece Tegu block set for review on Z Recommends. We'll be sending them back, scuffed up testing blocks and all, at the company's expense.