Nintendo LABO Variety Kit

Nintendo’s Labo kits bring maker culture to the gaming world.


Nintendo has historically paved its own path through the gaming industry; while Sony and Microsoft compete head-to-head for the ‘serious gamer’ market, Nintendo has engaged casual players with unexpected treasures like the Wii’s motion controllers and the Switch’s portable tablet screen. Nintendo’s latest innovation is Labo, a series of maker kits for Switch that empower young users to build their own tactile interfaces out of cardboard, string, and the occasional rubber band.

Here’s a look at the Variety Kit, which includes a half-dozen of these customizable, interactive “Toy-Cons.”


The large box contains several dozen sheets of cardboard, a small bag with a few accessories, and the game cartridge; all the assembly instructions are presented on-screen within the game’s interface.

The first activity, building a simple holder for the Joy-Con, is the simplest. The instructions prompt the user to punch out the required elements from the cardboard sheets, crease them at the fold lines, then assemble them into three dimensions. The cardboard elements snap out of the sheets and into themselves cleanly and crisply. The instruction animations can be rewound, zoomed, and even spun-around to ensure that the physical assembly matches the virtual one; I only made one (easily correctable) error in assembling the whole kit.

labo piano pieces

The next challenge is the Remote Control Car. This one took about 10 minutes to assemble, and is deceptively simple. The two Joy-Con controllers slide into slots on either side of the tray-like structure, and it’s complete. And it works – the app lets users steer the car from the Switch’s touchscreen using the controllers’ vibration and some simple physics. It’s an extremely simple toy, but something about the DIY aspect makes it a fun, and surprisingly rewarding, experience.

Once complete, the game software unlocks ‘Discover’ mode, which explains the technology behind the toy and reveals some hidden features. Using the controller’s built-in infrared camera, the car can chase targets, follow a track of reflective material, or even spy on unsuspecting friends.

With the basics complete, it’s time to try the remaining toys, presented here in rough order of complexity:


Toy-Con Fishing Rod:

labo fishing rod

The Fishing Rod is estimated to take 90-150 minutes to complete. I figured that, as a fairly competent adult, I would finish in a fraction of that time. I was wrong. The bulk of the time is spent punching out the cardboard pieces and pre-creasing them, and there’s no shortcut for manual labor.

Fortunately, there are ‘voila’ moments throughout the assembly process to keep the user engaged. For the fishing rod, one of these was creating a hexagonal reel out of flat cardboard that rotates effortlessly. String connects the reel to the “sea,” a small box that holds the Switch screen.

The fishing game is simple and nicely detailed; spinning the reel lowers the virtual hook into the sea; any left-and-right motion the user makes is reflected seamlessly in the on-screen physics. When a virtual fish catches, the user must pull up the rod to hook the creature, then reel it in as quickly as possible. The game mechanics are simple; try to catch the biggest fish you can find. It’s a bit challenging, and more fun than it sounds, but not terribly deep.


Toy-Con Motorbike:

labo motorbike

Similar in complexity to the Fishing Rod, the Motorbike structure fits the controllers into handlebars, with the Switch screen housed in-between. A few cardboard buttons activate the controller buttons, but like the Fishing Rod, the Joy-Con motion sensors do the bulk of the work in interpreting the user’s interactions. Players steer by shifting the handlebars left and right, and accelerate by twisting the right handle forward.

The Motorbike works with two games; Stadium presents a free-form obstacle course, while Grand Prix is a competitive racing game akin to Mario Kart. They are both fun, engaging games that take good advantage of the controller’s possibilities; that said, they are fairly shallow experiences that don’t approach the level of standalone racing games.

But they do have some cool customization features that set them apart. Stadium lets users create their own obstacle courses, using the infrared camera to photograph a 3D object and apply its shape to the terrain. In Grand Prix, one can design a racetrack simply by gesturing in mid-air with the controller. These are both nice touches and should add to the game’s repeatability, though the lack of online sharing capability seems like a missed opportunity.


Toy-Con House:

labo house

The house takes 2-3 hours to complete. Its front wall holds the Switch screen, with the controller fitting into its ‘chimney.’ Three separate activators allow for interaction: a push button, a crank, and a twisting ‘key.’ Unlike the previous assemblies, this one requires users to precisely apply small stickers, which the IR camera uses to track motion.

In the game, a series of activities are triggered by plugging the activators into holes in the base, left, and right walls of the house. The push button switches from day to night, the key turns on and off a faucet, and the crank activates a toy carousel. Plugging different combinations of activators into the house simultaneously uncovers a slew of minigames, from bowling to jumprope to ringtoss. Completing the games rewards the player with candies, which they can feed to their avatar to change its appearance. It’s all very bizarre, and very Nintendo.


Toy-Con Piano:

labo piano

This is the most challenging of the assemblies, taking 3 full hours to assemble. More than fifty pieces of cardboard, and quite a few stickers, go into making this 12-key keyboard and its various accessories. A simple piano application does what you’d expect, but inserting cardboard dials allows users to change the timbre of the piano to screaming cats, distorted voices, or to sound generated solely through the vibration of the Joy-Con devices.

The Studio app goes further, giving visitors the power to record multi-layered compositions and manipulate sounds more precisely. To change timbre, visitors can cut a waveform out of paper, insert it into the top of the piano, and use the IR camera to photograph and digitize it. Similarly, by making a pattern of holes in a cardboard guide, users can create their own rhythm track, and wave the Joy-Con like a conductor’s baton to change its tempo.

Both the Piano and House add a new twist to the Discover mode; in these cases the Switch shows a live feed of the Infrared Camera, providing a clear sense of how the system uses the reflective stickers to track and interpret the motion of the physical interfaces.


Finally, there’s Garage mode, a simple graphic programming interface that invites users to connect inputs and outputs to create their own Toy-Con devices. I fiddled with this for a while; the input control is impressive, allowing one to program responses to controller buttons, orientation, IR camera input, and more. Beyond that, it was a bit disappointing; there’s no programming capability for variables or loops, and the outputs are limited to on-screen boxes, controller vibration, and music notes. It’s possible to make a simple trigger for a custom cardboard creation, but there’s no capacity to build games or graphic interfaces.

It’s hard to categorize Labo, and I’m curious to see how people end up using it long-term. Once I accustomed myself to the slow build times, I found assembling the Toy-Cons an oddly therapeutic process. After spending hours folding together piano keys, I felt genuine excitement when I was finally able to use them to make music…

For a few minutes. There’s nothing in the variety kit’s games and apps that isn’t done better elsewhere; the content is beautifully crafted but more shallow than most mobile games. I can’t imagine much replayability here. There are much better, more robust keyboards and stronger games available for far less than Labo’s $70.

But making the controllers, and taking ownership over their functionality, is rewarding and fun, and is really the main attraction here. The Discover mode provides good insights for young tinkerers into how the physical/digital interfaces work. And Nintendo encourages personalization, through a few duplicate parts and a separate decoration kit of stickers, stencils, and colorful masking tape.

Labo’s Variety Kit isn’t the greatest maker kit, craft kit, music app, or game, but it manages to combine these elements into something uniquely Nintendo, and uniquely engaging.

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