Accessories

Fun for the Whole Family, Apparently
I bought this for my nephew's 11th birthday. I don't see my brother's kids often, so I had no idea whether this would be something an outdoors-loving, sports-playing young electronics addict would enjoy. Two days after it arrived my brother called to tell me that it works perfectly, the discs fly pretty far (for indoors) and that the whole family was having a blast with it.

Good Family Fun
I purchased this Nerf game for my 12 year old son. It is really pretty cool and he and I have spent about 15 minutes on several occasions playing with it.
The first issue that we had was our 8 foot tall ceilings are not high enough for the product. Perhaps 10 or 12 feet are needed. We solved this by placing the product down in a stairwell with lots of clearance. We stood at the top of the stairwell and fired from there. In this arrangement, the disks were often at eye level or slightly below when we were firing. Also, we had to learn to track the path of the disk with the gun and fire near the top of the height of the disk.
The disk launcher can fire straight up or at a variable angle. Straight up worked fine for us. The variable angle would tend to hit the wall. One cool thing is that the height of the disk is intentionally varied to make this more challenging.
To start the disk, there is an IR (infrared) remote control mounted on the top of the gun. Press this button and the disk launcher starts a countdown process with a progression of beeps. When the disk is launched, try to follow its path from the launcher using the gun and then fire at the top of the arc. If I am careful, I can hit the disks about half the time. The darts are designed to stick to the disks, but that does not happen very often. This is not really a problem, but it would be cool if they stuck to the disks.
This product is very safe, however, you want to make sure that your child knows not to shoot someone in the face. You could do some eye damage at close range. Otherwise, you can safely take a hit a point blank range as my son and I often do.
This is a challenging and fun game and I highly recommend it.
Thanks
John C. Briggs

Nerf N Strike
As a grandmother I am out of touch with what my 10y and 9y old grandsons would like for Christmas. Because this toy was mentioned in Consumer Reports as a very good choice for grannies to buy I took a chance. Both boys called and said they loved them. Since both boys have little sisters I was worried who the targets would be but so far so good.

Noisy, challenging toy
We bought this toy for our 10 year old son for Christmas, and I am thinking of returning it. It really is too noisy. If you have a basement or a spare room that you can shut the game up in then you might be able to tolerate it. The toy is also pretty challenging, and it took quite awhile to learn how to hit the targets, so your player has to be pretty persistent.
I am just not sure how much lasting "play value" this toy is going to have in the long run. My fear is that after a few more play sessions it is going to end up in the pile of "badly conceived but heavily marketed" toys in my son's closet.
I guess I should have bought lego...

Would be fun....
If the disk shooter worked! We got this for Xmas - but unfortunately the disk shooter receiver didn't work. It will go back to the store this week but we will exchange it for another one - it just looks like too much fun so it deserves another chance. We all took turns tossing the disks in the air for others to shoot and had a blast. Can't wait to get a working machine!