That game of magnets, that made us feel like engineers

Not only cubes and icosahedron, but also reconstructions in miniature of the Taj Mahal and of the Eiffel Tower. With Geomag, the magnetic game that marked the childhood of many of us, required only the fantasy and some notions of geometry to create anything.

The basic rule of Geomag is really easy: the boxes of the game contain nickel-plated steel balls and little magnetic bars. Every magnetic bar has a positive magnet and a negative magnet, succeeding in this way to reduce between the balls a power of 4.116 Newton that allows to realise solid and very high buildings to be built. 

The idea, needless to say, came to the Swiss: Geomag was born in 1998 and since then it has been produced in Novazzano. The game can develop the logic notions and the multidimensional vision not only in teenagers: indeed also adults like it very much.

It’s no surprise that in 2009, when the economic crisis hinted at a difficult moment for the firm, the company restructured their products with three lines: Gbaby for younger children (large magnets with animal forms, that cannot be ingested), Kids (for older children) and Pro ( stronger magnets, to realise stronger buildings). It has overcome the unsafe allegations , that had marked its past history from which it has come out  in the best possible way in the last report of the newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore.

Being the favourite game of engineers of the past, it doesn’t surprise that Geomag is really fashionable on the web. On the Internet there exists a highly popular forum and there is also a wiki, to share models and projects. A real idol on the web, instead, was Rafael Millàn, an artist who died in 2008 and was famous for his imposing Geomag construction.

All pieces, made by magnets and feelings, that now risk to disappear. Video games are killing another famous victim, another of those games that were able to turn on the mind.