As a tot, I loved the board game Mousetrap - for about five minutes. Rolling the dice and moving your little guy around the board was boring - putting the plastic pieces together and turning the crank to set the Rube Goldberg-esque contraption in action was the fun part. But after watching the trap catch a few mice, I'd get restless and try to build a new device with the pieces. To my frustration, they were molded to fit together just one way.
Widget Workshop, from Maxis, is a much-improved software version of Mousetrap. There's no game structure to get in the way of building things; you just stick a hand icon into the parts cabinet and start grabbing stuff: timers, speakers, pendulums, logic gates, light bulbs - even a beating heart. Once you have a circuit of things wired up, you turn it on and let the contraption do its thing. The dozens of different parts can be connected to create almost any kind of "widget" you can imagine, from a slot machine to a calculator that converts the number of cricket chirps per minute into the temperature.
Experimenting with the logic gates is a great way to teach yourself Boolean algebra (the form of logic used by computers). Want to make a virtual chip with a single bit of memory? Just grab the necessary logic gates and build a flip-flop circuit. Or you can build a binary-to-decimal converter.
The fact that you can combine beating hearts with electrical conductors and steel parts opens up all kinds of fascinating Frankensteinian possibilities for imaginative players. You might even want to try using Widget Workshop as an ice breaker at slow parties or as a way to get to know your new date.
Also included is a bunch of pre-built widgets, some of which are quite complex. People who like to take apart clocks and cars to figure out how they work will enjoy analyzing the pre-built contraptions.
Most of the pieces operate realistically. But the elephant in the gravity chamber doesn't splatter when it hits the bottom, even if you drop it from Mount Everest's peak. I guess that'd be too gruesome for the parents.
Widget Workshop for Mac: US$44.95. Maxis: (800) 336 2947, +1 (510) 254 9700.
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