Toy OTD: Gary Baseman Cranium Playing Pieces: Betty, Billy, Becky Sue, Señor Verde (2008)

It's always nice to see a toy have design continuity. Gary Baseman designed Cranium's original packaging some time ago, and recently Baseman fans have been rewarded with a special version of Cranium Wow, an offshoot game featuring Baseman-designed playing pieces! As a kid who preferred playing with the pieces more than with the actual game, I couldn't resist picking this up.

These are pretty simple little figures, but they're made exceptionally well. The sculpting is elemental - very basic shapes - but it's appropriate for Baseman's style and super-cute.

The color work and printing also look great! Both support the source style nicely, and work with the small scale.

Naturally, there's no articulation, but you can remove their hair/hats (as well as their feet) and interchange them for a little customization. Nice!

The packaging of this edition is really sharp, too - bold black with cool fonts to appeal to older gamers and collectors. Another smart move - letting the game play to its new strengths by displaying the figures as part of the overall design! As you may have already guessed, there's another reason for this. Each game has a randomized group of playing pieces, so you can see which characters you're getting!

If you're a Cranium fan, you'll probably have no trouble buying another game to get the figures. If you're not really a board game fan, you may be bummed about wasting the materials (and money) for a whole board game just to get some cool exclusive figures. Then there's the thought of buying multiple games to get all of the figures - there's overlap in every set of four, so getting a set would be really expensive and wasteful. Unless you give everyone you know Cranium Wow for a holiday gift (each stocked with game pieces you already have), how would you do it? What was Cranium, Inc. thinking?

Originally, there was a plan for this. Collectors could go to cranium.com and buy a full set of the figures without having to buy the game at all! The only catch was that to learn this, you had to buy a game and open it - or stumble across the info at their website. So they certainly sold more games, but didn't encourage people to buy dozens of extras and throw them out.

These days, unfortunately, the figures aren't for sale on the site any longer. If you want these pieces, you'll either have to buy the game and be content with four, or go on eBay and see if anyone's selling a set that they bought a year ago. As it turns out, there's a set of twelve (that may be all of them, I'm not sure) for sale right now for $15.98 + shipping. Go to it!