The Toy-Con Variety Pack comes with smaller Toy-Cons you can use on a table, like a piano and fishing rod. All the step-by-step instructions are on your Switch, and when you finish a Toy-Con, a mini game is unlocked. You slide the Switch touchscreen into its designated slot in the cardboard, then slip in the Switch’s two motion control Joy-Con controllers into, say, the handle of the fishing rod you just assembled, and off you go. Before you know it you’re reeling in digital fish.
This kit includes five main projects (a pair of RC Cars, a fishing rod, a house, a motorbike, and a piano) to build and decorate, along with a few standalone odds and ends for personal experimenting. Five projects may not seem like much, but when you first open the box you may be legitimately surprised by the amount of cardboard sheets and other materials it takes to build every toy.
Starting with the build, the Nintendo Labo Robot Kit was a joy to make from start to finish of its 3-hour long build time. The instructions themselves are simple enough to follow along with and the builder can use the touch screen on the Switch to look at different angles of the subject to ensure what they’re doing is correct before they snap everything together in real life. There’s a real sense of wonder as you’re putting stuff together, which mainly stems from wondering “How the hell does this become that?!” Understanding what the elements are likely to do though, and the ingenuity that it must have taken to put the whole thing together, is a constant source of delight. 
The Robot Kit, much like the Variety Pack, is constantly surprising, and the solidity and functionality of the finished article is deeply impressive. From the thick strong shoulder guards through to the hefty internal weights – which are still just cardboard – it’s hard to believe that it began life as twenty thin cardboard sheets and a plastic bag of bits. That thinness does dictate that you need to be fairly gentle during the build, which is probably the toughest thing to communicate to a child, but once you’ve got a few pieces together it really starts to look and feel like a genuine contraption, cardboard or not. As a building project, Labo displays a sense of ingenuity that few things do, and as an introduction to design and engineering it’s clear, fun, and solid. It’s a shame then that the game itself is a little too simplistic.
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