Bringing Tangrams into the 21st CenturyColor Tangram Magnets Now Available! Click here!Tangram Fury was featured on NewsWatch TV on Discovery Channel! See the clip by clicking here.
Tangram Fury Paperback Puzzle BooksThe Tangram eBooks have grown up. Now, they're bigger, have more puzzles, and are in paperback. Each is 9"x6" and has at least 130 pages. Feel free to solve these themed puzzles yourself, or give your kids something fun and educational to tinker with. See more here. Making bowls, cats, and bunnies is fun, but with the Tangram Fury Puzzle Books, you can make Spiderman Dangling, the Millennium FalconTM, the Starship EnterpriseTM, Princess LeiaTM with a Blaster, a snowmobiler, the Karate Kid, Ninja Turtles, Christmas elves, Tinkerbell, or even Mary kneeling at the Manger, all as seen below, or hundreds of other characters, newly designed by Doug Nufer!Learn How to Make Tangram Christmas ArtBy clicking here.The Daily TangramClick here to get to the Daily Tangram page. Free fun for all!
Tangram Fury as seen on Discovery Channel's NewsWatch TV:
See Tangramming in action:
What's Tangram Fury?Tangram Fury is a surprisingly fun, fast-paced, table-top game based on the ancient Chinese tangram puzzle. What gives this its edge over other tangram games is that this is competitive. Up to 4 players race against each other to build tangram images that are shown on cards. The first to win 5 cards, wins the game. It's actually a lot more fun than it sounds. Think "competitive Tetris," but where you physically arrange the pieces.(Don't tell the kids, but it's also educational. They'll think they're just having a blast and not realize they're developing their spatial reasoning skills.) The Deluxe version of the game comes with 8 puzzles. This means that up to 8 players can compete with each other, or the game can be split between 2 groups of 4, or you can come up with your own ideas for competing. The Simple Game of Complex ShapesTangram Fury is a competitive and amazingly addictive table-top game based on the ancient Chinese puzzle known as a "tangram." Players attempt to be the first to recreate images using the seven pieces of a standard tangram puzzle.
Fun for everyone! Tangram Fury can be played individually, or in teams, with as few as two players. How's It Played?
The first player done, wins the card. The first player to earn five cards, wins the game. Tangram Fury has two levels of play: "Fan" and "Expert." The Fan level is easier, because the shapes on the cards have borders that show how each of the seven tangram pieces fit together to form the shape. The Expert level only shows a silhouette of the shape and players must figure out which pieces go where. Both modes can be intense, though, because you're competing against other players. All seven pieces must be used to build each tangram and pieces may not overlap each other. The game includes four categories of tangram images: people, animals, fish & birds, and objects & shapes. Each category is represented by colored cards. Rolling a multi-colored die determines which category (or color) of card to draw. How is this New?Tangrams have been in the US since around 1815, when Capt. Donnaldson, of the USS Trader, brought a couple tangram books back with him from China. At that time, they were already considered to be "ancient" in China. The Chinese weren't sure how old, because they were considered to be a "kid's game," so they didn't keep detailed records of them.Over the centuries, tangrams have gone in and out of popularity. Some fads had people grow almost obsessed with solving the puzzles. When Napoleon was exiled, he had a set of tangram pieces (tans) and whiled away the hours solving tangram puzzles. Edgar Allan Poe is said to have tinkered with tangrams. Lewis Carroll apparently made tangram puzzles of some of his literary characters. (Scroll to the bottom of this page to see samples.) So, tangrams are not new. Tangrams have been used as a teaching tool in schools for decades. Tangram toys or games have also been around for quite some time. What is "new" about this is the competitive nature of the game. The other tangram games I have found, are 1-player games. They typically consist of a player sitting alone and viewing an image on a card and solving that puzzle with tangram pieces. In Tangram Fury, 4 players each have a complete set of tangram pieces and race each other to solve the same image on a card as soon as it is played. It's that competitive aspect that brings new vibrancy to this ancient game. It's that flurry to outpace your buddy that makes this so much fun. If you're competitive enough, you can make a competition out of tying your shoes...this is a bit more structured than that. This frenzied activity of trying to beat your friends to be first is where the word "fury" fits the game's name so well. And, although either side of the cards can be played (the one with the solution showing, or the one without), all players see that same image, so they all have the same advantage or handicap as they rush to be first in their mad quest to solve the puzzle. Yeah, and if you want to play the game solo, with you or your child sitting alone solving the various images, you can do that, too. It's a much quieter and subdued, if not tranquil, approach to the game, but if you play it that way, you should probably scratch off the word "Fury" from the box...
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Fun with Dates
Just for fun, various products were launched on dates with interesting numbers. Here are a few noteworthy ones.:
11/11/11: Tangram Fury officially released.
12/12/12: The Daily Tangram became a regular feature.
11/12/13: The first Tangram Fury Print-and-Play Activity eBooks launched.
12/13/14: The first Tangram Fury Fonts released.
5/15/15: The first batch of Tangram Fury Paperback Books printed.
6/16/16: The first series of COLOR tangram magnets available.
7/17/17: The series of full color tangram posters available.
8/18/18: The series of jigsaw puzzles tangram jigsaw puzzles available.
Doug would love to hear from you:
Email Address: doug at tangramfury dot com
Star Wars proper names © Disney, Star Trek proper names © Paramount, other proper names © their respective copyright owners.