My eight year old son received the Electronic Talking Silly Six Pins toy for Christmas. Unsure what type of fit it would be for him, I decided to watch him play with it and review it.

Silly Six Pins is a children’s game made by Milton Bradley. The game comes in a box containing six pins, a stand and a ball. Everything is made of hard durable plastic. The vividly colored pins are yellow, blue, purple, green, red and orange. The ball is blue. The stand is beige and has a speaker built into it. Three AA batteries are needed to get the toy to work, and they are not included.

The top left picture is of the pins on the stand. The top right picture is of the stand itself. The bottom left picture shows my son placing the pins on the stand, and the bottom right picture shows me holding one pin in my hand.

The stand has six spaces for the pins, each one color coded. Ideally each pin will be placed into its color matched space, but the pins will work in any space. My son does know all of these colors and we encouraged him to say the colors as he was resetting the pins. I can see kids not knowing their colors getting some benefit from this.

The pins all have different voices, both male and female. They make comments before a ball is rolled as well as after, like “it’s getting quiet down here”, “let’s get the ball rolling” and “where’d everybody go?”. None of the comments are inappropriate or rude. The sound of pins falling is very much like the authentic sound of a strike. I thought this toy would seem noisy and loud but it was actually not too bad. It doesn’t have a volume control, and there were actually a couple of times it could’ve been a little louder.

Players are told how many pins they got if they knock any down. This was where the one fault I had with the game was found. If the numbers called out are written down by a player or spectator and added after a number of frames, you end up with a score and could have a fun competition. The problem is this. If the pins are put back too quickly, the number is never called out. Children really could benefit from hearing a number and correlating it to the pins they can see they knocked down. My son was having so much fun and so eager to play some more that he rushed right over to put the pins back up. So he didn’t get too much benefit numerically because he rarely heard them called out.

This toy is not a passive one. Kids must move away from the pins to roll the ball, and then go to or past the stand to pick up the pins and set them back up. All of these force the children to move around, which is good because kids benefit from the exercise.

I found I had surprised myself when I decided the toy was appropriate for my younger son and that I was going to recommend it. Electronic Talking Silly Six Pins is tagged as ages 3+ and is currently being sold in stores and online for approximately $20.00.

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