My toddler loves playing tabletop games of all types, but when she plays card games, she tends to lay her cards out on the table where everyone can see them, because her hands are too small to hold them. UberStax is an excellent solution: it’s a modular card-holder (that works for other types of game pieces, too).
UberStax were originally funded through a Kickstarter campaign last November by David Papp (also the designer of the recent 5ive: King’s Court card game. They’re now available in some game stores and online; the price is about $10, though it varies depending on where you get them. Update: The UberStax online store is now open as well.
Each set comes with 6 identical pieces in a single color. (There are 10 colors to choose from.) The piece has two pegs on the right edge, two pegs on the bottom, and matching holes on the left edge, top edge, and the face. There’s a shallow “tray” on the front with a lip, deep enough that you could use it for Scrabble tiles or cardboard tiles if you wanted to.
The basic use is to take one piece, plug it into the face of a second piece, and you have a (fairly narrow) tray. The holes in the face are angled backward, so that the tray leans back, and the back corner of the piece is accordingly chamfered so that the piece fits against the base.
If you put two pieces side by side, you can actually use just a single base piece, so you can get two stands out of a single UberStax set. It’s wide enough to hold three cards next to each other, but if you overlap them you can get a pretty good hand of cards in it.
If that’s not enough, though, you can use all six pieces to make a two-tiered stand. It requires two pieces for the base so that it doesn’t tip over backward, but now you have room for two rows of cards.
The one issue is that you’ll always have some remaining pegs sticking out here and there, so it has that sort of not-quite-finished look to it, but they work just fine.
My 10-year-old doesn’t need the UberStax to hold her cards up, but she still likes using them and has been requesting them when playing games. Even if you have bigger hands, it’s pretty convenient to have all your cards held up for you—for one thing, it frees up your hands for eating snacks!
Whether you’ve got little kids who have trouble holding up their cards, or you’ve got other games that would benefit from a tray for the pieces, check out UberStax for a handy solution!
Disclosure: I received two samples of UberStax for review purposes.
