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I picked up Skylanders along with six extra figures for Kian this Christmas and he was super stoked to open them.  We play a lot of co-op together and this game looks great and scratches that old collectible itch for me.  My Holiday Shopping Guide Post said that Skylanders was a great choice this holiday season, but had no idea just how fun the game is.

The basic premise is that you play as a portal master and the game comes with an actual portal device that you hook into the USB port of your console.  There are versions for the 360, PS3, Wii, 3DS and PC.  Each figure comes with a registration code for skylanders.com so you can play the web version as well.

To play the game, each player places a figure on the portal and that character shows up in game instantly and you take control of them.  You can hot swap characters at any time and everything works really smoothly.  Kian loves to change characters pretty often, luckily it's a very fast process so it doesn't become annoying  too quickly.

They did a really great job of making the different character types worthwhile in the game as well.  You can upgrade each Skylander as you play through the game giving them more powerful abilities as you play.  They also integrated them into the world by having gates to certain areas that require a Skylander of a particular type(Fire, Water, Magic, Tech, Air, Undead, Earth, Life).

They also already have two expansion scenarios available and I can only assume more coming soon.  These figures are sold out everywhere so Kian has only been able to accumulate a little over half of what they have created.  It's such a great business model and Activision will likely make money off this for a long time.

Unlike a lot of kids games out there, Skylanders is really well done and a blast to play.  I highly recommend it.  The only downside we've found so far is that achievements are only given to the first player, luckily Kian plays alone when I'm not home so he's getting them as well :)