Sago Mini
Review

Sago Mini (2017) games are designed for 3-5-year-old preschool children. Like Toca Boca games for younger kids, they offer interactive storybook characters with light narratives and open-ended play. Superheroes, space explorers, boat builders, robot parties and lots of other themes introduce characters doing simple activities.

Pull levers to launch rockets, dress a robot, press buttons to design cakes, tap hills and clouds to play tunes in hot air balloons. Drag and drop squares to build a desert island or design a town. Drive a digger through a building site to deliver some earth.

The scenes could have been pulled from a children's story, but here are eclectic and picked at random so the child can make up their own tales. The worlds and spaces in the games are designed to build emotional intelligence, creative problem solving and self-confidence through open-ended play – while allowing kids to play at their own pace.

Sago Mini School offers content designed to help children's self-discovery. Along with the educational subject areas, this offers an About Me feature where you can create a digital likeness of yourself (skin tones, freckles, birthmarks, hairstyles, head coverings, and wheelchairs).

All the apps can be downloaded and then played without an internet connection. They can be shared across multiple devices, so you can play on a smartphone and then a tablet. They are subscription games with no in-app purchases.

There used to be lots of small, separate Sago Mini games, but now there are a couple of subscription apps which get new content over time:

• Sago Mini World focuses on discovery through creativity, adventure, stories and tinkering
• Sago Mini School focuses on teaching reading, maths and sciences through holistic child-led learning

The individual Sago Mini apps are also available separately and include: School, World, Airport, Apartment, Babies, Babies Dress Up, Big City, Boats, Bug Builder, Doodlecast, Fairy Tales, Farm, Forest Flyer, Friends, Hat Maker, Holiday Trucks and Diggers, Monsters, Music Box, Ocean Swimmer, Pet Cafe, Planes, Puppy Preschool, Road Trip, Robot Party, Snow Day, Sound Box, Space Explorer, Super Juice, Superhero, Toolbox, Town, Trains, Trucks & Diggers, Vacation, Village, Zoo

Sago Mini Box is a craft and play subscription box that comes once a month. It contains activities and exercises that relate to the characters, places and play from the Sago Mini world. It's high quality and offers a collective figure each month.

Our examiner, Andy Robertson, first checked Sago Mini 3 years ago. It was re-examined by Jo Robertson and updated 8 months ago.