Air-Powered Hockey Recreation with Elastic Boundaries – Air Puck for Tabletop Play, 2 Mini Targets, Elastic Rope for Rebound Motion, Good for Youngsters & Household

Awesome set, great fun, but problematic
My review of this item is complicated. Put it this way, when it works, it’s awesome. Last night my 6 year old grandson and I played for hours, and he was giggling and squealing the whole time. The puck is great, the hand held thingys are fine, and the string system actually works–with a lot of tweaking. It’s actually kind of amazing to me that such a simple string system can be used to create an air hockey table. As long as I remember to charge the puck, I foresee a lot more play in the future.Here, however, are the cons:- The nets are terrible. The suction cups are very small and won’t hold for more than a minute or two on any surface. For most of our play, we kept having to straighten/move the nets after every score.- The suction cups for the strings are not great. The company has clearly attempted to solve this problem by including stick-on squares that you apply to the table first and then press the suction cups down on that. While that is a wonderful idea and would probably solve the problem, nowhere does it tell you whether those squares are removable! I’m not about to ruin a good table just to make it work better for air hockey. So I’m not using them until I find out if they’re permanent or not. I assume they are, looking at the type of stickiness they have. That’s very frustrating.- While the string system works great, it’s by no means perfect. The puck flies over or under the string a LOT when you play. Fortunately, despite flying across the room a number of times so far, the puck still works, so at least it’s tough. But having to retrieve that puck over and over is not fun. Tightening the strings helps, but they are in no way foolproof.Nowhere does this set tell you what size surface you should be playing on, and that really bugged me at first until I realized that the string is completely adjustable with a pinch-and-slide clip for holding it in place. That’s a good thing, because when you first set it up, you have to keep tugging and pulling the string to get it tight enough so that the puck doesn’t slip through. Again, it still manages to slip through anyway, but the tighter the string, the less that happens. Unfortunately, the tighter the string, the more likely the suction cups are to pull loose from the surface, so it’s a real lose-lose situation.And yet…and yet it is SO MUCH FUN to play. So despite all of the above, I’m giving it 4 stars. If the company could also include information about these sticky squares that are intended to help with the suction cup problem, and if it turns out they are removable after play, then I might even revise this to 5 stars. Either way, this is definitely cheaper than buying an air hockey table, and, like I said, when it works, it’s awesome.

Some flaws, is fun but likely going to end in a 0-0 tie without modifications to the goal size
I’ve wanted an air hockey table but realistically don’t really have a place for one, so when I saw this pop up as something I could get an evaluation unit of, I jumped at the chance!For the most part, I’m really happy with this pickup. I cleared off my kitchen island and put the suction cups down along the perimeter and they stuck nicely to the granite. The kit comes with adhesive squares to help the suction cups stick better, but I definitely don’t want to use those on my kitchen counter, maybe I’d consider on a surface if I had a table to dedicate to games like this, and luckily the kitchen counter surface seems to work really well for the suction cups used for the elastic boundary. You definitely want to loop the elastic around each post and pull very tight, and make sure the elastic is up towards the top of every post to make sure it keeps the puck in play.The goals could have larger suction cups to stay in place better, they come loose fairly easily, but maybe that just makes it more like real hockey where the net can come off its moorings.The puck itself glides rather nicely, and it’s rechargeable by an included USB cable. It’s annoying though that the USB cable goes to a barrel connector – I feel it’d be better if either it included a standard AC cable for charging or, better, if the puck had a micro-USB or USB-C connector for charging. Also, with the size of the pucks, the hockey paddles could be a little larger, they’re very small comparatively to the puck and as someone with larger hands I might think about acquiring larger paddles for this game. The puck is pretty solid, it’s foam lined on the sides and bounces pretty well against the elastic boundary; before I got the boundary completely adjusted, it took a few spills onto the hardwood floor from counter height and no signs of wear or damage, so it’s at least durable.Overall I’d say this is a pretty fun way to enjoy air hockey at home on occasion if you don’t have the room or want to get an actual air hockey table. It’s not perfect but there’s really no deal breakers here, just a couple of things that could probably be done a little better in a “rev 2” of this product.Everything above was written upon setting it up and doing some solo testing…After playing for real with my fiancee, a bit more feedback on this. The elastic doesn’t really do well at containing the puck at ‘game speed’ if you’re playing with any seriousness. The goal width is a bit small for how large the puck is, I can’t imagine how you’d miss blocking the puck unless you were a terrible goalie or totally not paying attention. There’s really very little chance either of us would be able to actually score a goal the way the game is setup on our kitchen island.So the concept seems much better than the actual execution when it comes to actually playing the game, but some modifications like making a physical boundary aside the elastic and making wider goals would make this 100% playable.As an added bonus, the puck leaving the table and then gliding along the hardwood floors with its noise and flashing lights made a fun distraction as the dog had no idea what to do when it went her direction.