When looking for the right gifts for engineers, you’ll need to appeal to their left-brained nature. Find a gift that challenges them and puts their particular brand of smarts to use and you’ve got a winner. For today we present you Brainy Christmas Gifts from Marbles.
Rock Me Archimedes
Archimedes was a Greek mathematician, scientist and all-around uber-genius who discovered the laws of the lever, which in playground terms is basically a teeter-totter. The idea of levers and balance inspired Matt Buchanan to enter (and win!) the 2012 Marbles Game Design Contest with a game aptly named Rock Me Archimedes.
Rock Me Archimedes is a marble game based on Archimedes’ laws of balance and levers. The game consists of a wooden board that rockes like a see-saw. To win, you have to roll the die and be the first to get four marbles across the board, without letting it hit the table below. Rock Me Archimedes is for ages 5 and up. Combining strategy, skill and a little bit of luck, the game consists of a wooden board that rocks like a teeter totter, a special die and 28 marbles. To win, just be the first player to oh-so-carefully get four marbles to your end of the board without reaching the tipping point, causing it to touch the table.
Wobble Chess Set by Umbra
The Umbra Wobble Chess Set has a concave landscape which stabilizes freely quivering chess pieces, making for lively interaction between board and game pieces. The Wobble chess set, designed by Adin Mumma, recieved an Award of Merit from HOW Magazine’s 2008 International Design Award competition.Umbra, headquartered in Toronto, Canada, designs and manufactures exciting, affordable products that add contemporary and artful details to every room in the home.
Did you hear that? That’s the sound of your coffee table desperately asking you to adorn it with a well-designed, sophisticated display worthy of your impeccable taste. And that? That was just the sound of your brain shouting, “Exercise me!” And this? This is one of those moments when your design aesthetic and intellectual yearnings blissfully meet and all voices in your head point to the Wobble Chess Set by Umbra. Designed by industrial designer Adin Mumma, this striking chess set features pieces with decidedly simple curves and a wobbly base atop an ironic surface of maple and cherry wood. Your coffee table and brain would approve.
