Thames & Kosmos Spy Labs Inc: Secret Codes and Ciphers Learn How to Make & Exchange Coded Messages! | Essential Tools & Tricks of The Trade from The Detective Gear Experts for Young Investigators

This review is for the Thames & Kosmos Spy Labs Inc: Secret Codes and Ciphers, Learn how to make and decipher four types of secret codes.I love that this comes in a metal tin to store the spy tools. The kit itself is a little underwhelming. It includes a small direction insert, cardstock pieces for a cipher disk and polybius square, a piece of rope for Quipu (knotted codes), and chalk to leave vagabond messages. The knots and chalk are more of a suggestion for kids to create their own secret spy code.Overall the box is fantastic and the kit is good but not what I expected. The pieces are flimsy and some of the code methods are much more simple than expected. Despite my underwhelm I think that my kid will have some fun with it and will enjoy using the tin to store treasures in when he’s done with the coding tools.

This is a good teaching kit for a child that is interested about codes and passing information back and forth. It does lack the information about when cyphers were used and for what. I did gift it with a book about spies during the revolutionary war.

This came and was much smaller than expected. My daughter received it for Christmas and was excited, we will see how it holds up!

This review is for the Thames & Kosmos Spy Labs Inc: Secret Codes and Ciphers Learn How to Make & Exchange Coded Messages! | Essential Tools & Tricks of The Trade from The Detective Gear Experts for Young InvestigatorsRemember when Ralphie gets his Little Orphan Annie decoder pin and is disappointed when the message is an ad? Yeah, this doesn't have an ad but it will leave you feeling a little like Ralphie. It comes in a small metal box and you have to punch out and assemble some of the tiny pieces. I think of all the codes/ciphers in the box, the cipher disk would be my favorite, if it wasn't so hard to turn. I found that pushing up on the pin with a finger on my left hand and turning with my right helped. I was not fond of the vagabond symbols and the chalk arrived broke. The rope to knot around thin paper doesn't work too well. A popsicle stick would be better. You can learn and have fun with this, but I wish the pieces were better (lasting) quality.

It's not amazing, but I suppose if you're trying to teach a kid basic ciphers so that you can move on to doing more advanced escape puzzles, then this is a good starting point. Everyone has to start somewhere.