Training Games: Building Site

May 31, 2021

This is part of a series called Training Games, where I review children's games when playing (with modified rules) with my twin toddlers. This review was written when my twins were 20 months old.

Building Site is a memory game where you’re gathering materials in the correct order to build a house. There’s a little toy dump truck that you move around to collect the pieces, and the house is made up of little wooden blocks.


There are a lot of pieces in this game, so I need to be careful if I bring everything out, since sometimes my boys like swiping at the pieces and they go all over the floor. I’ve stopped bringing out the circular cone pieces, so they just have the big boards, the wooden pieces, and the dump truck. One of my boys really loves playing with the toy dump truck in this game. He likes moving toy cars around, so he does a similar thing with the dump truck, sometimes placing the Bear figure into the bed of the truck.

Playing with the dump truck

For my modified game, I show them how the wooden shapes match up to the boards. I also show them that the boards are a puzzle, but they don’t seem to be that interested in putting together this puzzle. They’ve been getting better at matching the shapes to the boards, and they also like pointing out different things on the boards like the ball and the sun. But I think the main reason my boy always pulls this one out is because of the dump truck. It’s easy for him to tell which one it is too, since the dump truck shows through the window of the box cover!

Matching the pieces to the boards

Chew Test
  • Dump truck: 5/5 - plastic and very durable
  • Wooden bear and house pieces: 4/5 - good quality wooden pieces, but the some are small enough to fit in the mouth
  • Puzzle piece boards: 3/5 - thick cardboard like other HABA games (my kids no longer put everything in their mouth though)
  • Circular cone tiles: 2/5 - thick cardboard, but smaller pieces so they could fit in the mouth (and get thrown all over the floor)

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