Left, the Dutch Hema box. Right, the German Technofix box.

A cute kids' game with two presentations. I added it to the site more than twenty years ago, but I confess I did not give it much thought at the time. I did not even have the game (the pictures were taken during a visit to Geert Lagrou), and I completely misunderstood that one of the versions was German; I thought it was French, and I even thought that "Multiplay" was the French company that released the game (actually, it was a Technofix brand introduced in 1977, maybe only for board games). Sorry if I mislead you.

Many years later I have both versions of the game in my collection, and it's time to have a closer look.

 

The board might look like it's made of metal, but it's just a small plastic board (29 x 20 cm), actually. As Siegfried L remarks, Technofix (founded in 1922) used to be one of the big players in the Nuremberg tin-toy business, so when they eventually switched to plastic, they kept the tin-toy look somehow.

 

 

Didn't they?

In case you wonder why the green rider is missing in some pictures, the reason is that it is in poor condition in one of the copies. Besides that, the contents of the two boxes are almost identical.

Or almost. Notice the different colour of the spinners. In this case, the game with the blue spinner is Technofix's, and the one with the green spinner is Hema's, but that is just the colour of the games in my collection. Geert Lagrou had a game with a green spinner and one with a red spinner, though unfortunately I do not know which is which, since when I took the pictures I was not so attentive to details.

Both boards have the "Made in Western Germany" inscription, so it is likely that the Technofix version is the original and that it was released before (or at the same time as) the Hema version. The fact is that (and I must thank Siegfried L again for his research) Technofix folded in 1978, and this game, number 358, was the last they produced. Check R. Gremli's collection for more information on Technofix toys. I am not sure if Hema could have acquired the Technofix leftovers and continued distributing the game in the following years.

Notice that the board displayed on the box is slightly different from the one that was finally released. Siegfried L suggests that they might have taken the picture of an early prototype.

 

The Technofix version has rules in six languages, including Dutch, by the way. On the other hand, the Hema version only has Dutch rules, which are, word by word, identical to the Dutch rules on the German box. Furthermore, the Technofix product number (358) is printed on the backside of the Hema box.

Even the picture of the game displayed here is identical to that on the Technofix box.

Speaking of rules, here are the English ones. It is a simple roll-and-move (in this case, spin-and-move) game.

Number on the side of the Technofix box.

Thanks to Ludo Nauws for the Hema version and to Mathilde Cardinet for his father's Multiplay version.
Thanks to Siegfried L for his research.

Description rewritten in July 2026.

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