One of the events that my family is always excited about toward the end of the year is the Chicago Toy and Game Fair. This is a great time for my children to see what games are out in the stores for Christmas and what games we might enjoy for family game night. This year we found more than enough, but we will share our top three with you later on down the post.

1. MERGE CUBE

Let’s start off with the Merge Cube from MergeVR. Now VR is really taking off in the home market, but pricing is one reason many people are not jumping on the VR wagon yet. The Merge cube is here to change that. The cube is only $14.99 and you can use it with your smartphone or purchase the VR goggles ($49.99) for it. When you use it with your smartphone you can have tiny worlds in your hands. I downloaded an app called Mr. Body to use with my children so they can see how the human body works. 

Where the Merge Cube really shines is when you use it with the goggles. The goggles are pretty soft when you put them on and it really puts you inside the game that you are playing. While my daughter enjoyed playing with the cube through the goggles, I got a little motion sick trying them. Maybe it was still early in the morning for me, but I would like to try them out again and see what happens. 

One of the great things that we always love about attending ChiTag is the huge presence of Star Wars characters. If I can remember correctly, I think that every year I wear a Star Wars shirt to ChitTag just for this reason alone. This year we were invited to a Star Wars theme lunch and walked into the area with lightsabers drawn over our heads. 

What was pretty cool was that when my wife and I were married we were officially introduced to our wedding guest with the groomsmen holding lightsabers over our heads. As we walked into the lunch area, my wife said that we should take a picture of just the two of us to recreate that moment and we did, then took the picture again with our children. 

R2-D2 was everywhere that day and my children were lucky enough to take the inflatable R2-D2 home with us. The one bad thing about having a droid at home is trying to find the correct outlet to charge his battery. This guy needs a lot of juice to run every day. Maybe next time we can just try to get one of the little Sphero ones. I bet he does not need that much power to run around the house. 

2. ICE COOL

When I was little, playing with marbles was a huge thing. There was something about flicking that marble with your thumb and trying to hit the other marbles. It was so much fun to come home with more marbles than when you left the house. Playing the game Ice Cool gave me that feeling of playing marbles with my friends, but instead of using little glass balls we are flicking little plastic penguins. 

The game is pretty cool because you play as the fisherman trying to catch the penguins before the penguins can catch the fish. There is a lot of strategy to this game but you can also just hit the penguins and have them move around the board. Since we got home that day my children and I have been playing this game nonstop. 

Do you know the game Soggy Doggy? If you do not, this is going to be the biggest game of the holiday season. At ChiTag they had a huge Soggy Doggy for children to play with. I can tell you that watching the game was pretty fun to see. Imagine this huge dog shaking and water getting everywhere. Yeah, I can not wait to play this game with my children. SpinMaster has a hit with this game. 

3. ULTRA DASH

One booth that we love playing at while we are at ChiTag is the Playmonster booth. Last year my son had a field day playing with Yeti in my Spaghetti and my daughter loved playing with their Roominate sets.  My son this year enjoyed playing with the Automoblox ramp and later had fun swinging on the Super Spinner. 

Ultra Dash is a great game to get the family up and moving. The concept of the game is pretty simple. You put the different colored bases at various spots in your house and when you press start on the tagger you have to run around and push the tagger in the targets based on the color that it prompts you to push. Think of the game Simon, but running around to touch the colors.

I am going to love playing with this game because I know it will be a good way to tire out my children and have them going to bed early. There are different ways to play Ultra Dash too and the one that I would like to try is seeing how many bases you can tag within a certain amount of time. This game would be fun at family parties because you can place these bases as far as you want. Yeah, I think I am going to ask Santa for Ultra Dash for Christmas this year. 

There you go my friends, another exciting year at the Chicago Toy and Game Fair and I can not wait to see what fun and new games they will have next year. I know my children saw a lot of games and toys that they want for Christmas and I saw some that I want too. We’ll have to wait and see what the jolly man brings us this year, but in the meantime, I am going to try to find a copy of Shark Bite, because that was another game we enjoyed playing.