Costume Puzzle

Costumes, Assembled By The Wearer

It is ten o'clock the night before World Book Day

You have known about this for three weeks. You have a bin bag, some gold card and a diminishing supply of goodwill. Costume Puzzle is felt modules that attach and detach without a needle going anywhere near anything, which removes an entire genre of domestic crisis from the calendar.

They design it, which is both the point and the risk

Fairytale, superhero, and whatever a seven-year-old arrives at by combining the two with considerable confidence and no external validation. There are step-by-step instructions in the box. Nobody over the age of five has ever consulted them.

Four to fifteen, apparently

A suspiciously wide age range for a toy, and it does hold, because the same set produces entirely different results depending on who has got hold of it. The younger ones follow the instructions. The older ones dismantle it and start again, which is arguably the better outcome and certainly the noisier one.