Fantastic Contraption

Looking to kill a few hours? Well Fantastic Contraption is your answer.

Fantastic Contraption is an online physics game that my kids and I have been playing a lot lately. The game works well because it's a simple premise (move a ball into a box) that uses simple tools (wheels and sticks) but gets progressively more challenging. It's easy enough for my kids to work on solving the problems but complex to keep me interested. That's a recipe for many hours of free time disappearing.

You can also save your designs so they can be shared with others. Then once you've completed a level and shared your design, you can view other designs for that level. It's interesting to see how others have approached the same problems. On the higher levels, when I've been completely stumped, I've resorted to YouTube for help. Lots of people record their designs and post them there.

You can view a few of my designs here, here, here and here. And my son has one's here and here.

Just remember...I warned you about it eating up hours and hours.