Rokenbok has been around for a while now, though not nearly as long as The LEGO® Company. It looks like the Rokenbok toys first released around 1997, and many of us may even recognize this toy if we saw it. These used to be featured at Toys R Us stores in a big table display much like you would see the wooden train tables they have set up now. There would be a wired control pad leading to something much like a video game console, except the controller didn’t control characters on a screen, and instead moved these small construction vehicles around, which you used to scoop and move red and blue balls around to things like a conveyor belt that took them to a sorting station. Later versions of these displays would also include a large working crane and a monorail. They were eye catching, and fun, and our first look at Rokenbok. Rokenbok was the sort of toy that you needed to see in action , so when Toys R Us took down these displays, sales of the product went down, and the stores stopped stocking them. For the past few years Rokenbok products have been hiding in out of the way learning toy shops, and lurking in their online store, where only people who had previously known about them could really find them.

What makes Rokenbok interesting is that its not just driving a car around, or making a building, you create an environment that these RC cars work in, and interact remotely with it, using the features on the RC vehicles to complete tasks. The vehicles are mostly designed to transport and manipulate the red and blue balls, called “Roks”. Expanding the vehicles you have will enable you to do more things with your environment, and many features of the vehicles compliment the design and augment the use of the others. In short you can have lots of fun with one machine, but the more you add the more entertaining it becomes.

The RC Loader can scoop up roks and dump them onto a tray on it’s back, and then it can dump them from it’s tray into a conveyor belt which takes them to a sorter. From there the loader can then grab the sorted roks and take them to a designated area. If you have a forklift ( featured later in the same video ), the loader can take the sorted roks and dump them into bins which the forklift can then hoist to out of reach storage racks. The same bins can also be loaded onto a sort of elevator ( same video ) that lifts the roks to the top of a tower and dumps them into a sorter at the top, and then returns the empty bin to ground level. For a lot of scattered roks, you can call upon the Bulldozer or the Sweeper . If the roks are mixed up with other junk like the orange barrels, the bulldozer can push them up a ramp that lets the roks fall through holes to a quarry while the junk is pushed out of the way. The Loader’s arm isn’t great for scooping up loose roks, so the bulldozer can push roks into the scooper on the Loader’s arm. Optimally the sweeper can pick up loose roks no problem. For more precise work, there’s the Trans-gripper , which has rubber padded gripping arms that can pick a variety of objects, while the monorail can be built high off the ground using the same beams the buildings are made from as a track to roll on, and go places where the other vehicles could not conceivably go. These are just a few examples of the vehicles and what they can do.

The building aspect of the toy may not always be as complex and detailed as other brands for small scale construction, but you can be just as innovative with it, the only downside is that you require a lot of room and a good budget to get the most out of building with Rokenbok, just take a look at their forums and see what they have built . The construction elements are mostly just interlocking girders and cubes, with decks and chutes, hoppers, and various other functional parts you can snap onto the structures. I have learned from experience that this is the kind of toy that almost requires a dedicated hobby room if you want to get the most out of building with Rokenbok elements, as even my fairly compact rig is bulky enough to block off whichever part of the room I move it to.

Rokenbok is one of those companies that make you feel like your part of the family, and to elaborate on this, you could join their forums, send a PM to the company founder and chairman (Paul Eichen), and get a response in about a day. Ive seen several of their employees from across different departments participating in the forums and talking about the products with the forum members. Recently, they even worked out a schedule where they mailed out some of their latest products to a forum member who would try them for five days and send them out to the next forum member on the list. In another topic of the forum, Rokenbok was asking what colors they’d like to see in next year’s lineup of vehicles.

Soon they will be releasing their biggest innovation to the toy yet. The current Rokenbok system supports up to four players, but you have to buy an expensive starter set containing the command deck, a controller, and a control pad . From there you can add up to three control pads to the command deck (to have a total of four controllers), at about $35.99 USD per controller. Each controller has a long cumbersome cable, not to mention the power cable going to the deck itself, and two or more other cables leading from the deck to power the conveyor belts. The command deck lets each controller select from up to eight vehicles, each vehicle is designated by it’s own numbered key. When one player selects the vehicle with key number five, the deck prevents another player from choosing number five so another player doesn’t interfere with the player already operating the vehicle. The system is effective and fun, but it has it’s limitations and irritations. You can only control eight vehicles at a time, forcing you to physically pull out keys and swap them to get the full use of a larger collection of vehicles. The command deck is also bulky and requires a power outlet, meaning your stuck playing with it at your house within range of the transmitter and controller cables. Their latest innovation, Rok Star, changes this.

This is Rokenbok’s biggest year since they originally released the toys, though unfortunately for people like me who bought a bunch of the vehicles this past year, a whole new line of controllers and vehicles is being released, and while the new system can run simultaneously with the new Rok Star system, I have to switch to the old controller and deck to control the old machines, while using the new controller to control the new machines. The new controllers are little more expensive, but now you don’t have to buy a start set with a command deck to use them and save more money in the long run.

Rok Star controllers and vehicles now communicate via upgraded infra-red technology that actually bounces off walls and surfaces, allowing your vehicle to go out of sight of the controller, which standard infra-red controllers cannot do, while using visible light to lock onto and select your vehicle to control. Rok Star controllers can control an infinite number of rokenbok vehicles by assigning a random number sequence to each vehicle every time you select one, where the old system has a maximum of eight vehicles. This also means that you can have an infinite number of players. Cutting the ties to a command deck also enables you to play with Rok Star vehicles anywhere.

I may be sore about my machines being obsolete with this upgrade, but I’m happy to know that future buyers of this already great product will have the benefit of these innovations to the construction system. The dedication of the Rokenbok company to improve its customer’s experience, and the whole design of this particular construction toy makes it worthy of being called one of the Big Three, up there with The LEGO Company and one other construction toy for a future article.

At the time of writing, only the old system is available in their online store, and I highly recomend that potential buyers wait for the Rok Star system!