Tangible Play's Osmo is something special. It feels new and exciting the first time you play around with it, and you’re pretty much sold as soon as you experience it.

This iPad accessory and gaming platform for kids is dead-simple to use, but a bit harder to explain. The best way to think of it is an analog Kinect for your iPad, but one that uses a simpler design and is made exclusively for playing with physical pieces, like solving puzzles with blocks or for playing word games with physical letter tiles. Osmo's first games are built purely for kids, but it’s easy to see how the platform could inspire a new wave of games for anyone.

First, you clip a plastic mirror reflector onto the iPad’s front-facing camera, which flips the camera’s field of view 90 degrees downward. From there, you can use real-world objects—word tiles, puzzle pieces, hand-drawn sketches, and practically anything else—as game pieces in Osmo's three free apps. That little mirror clip, combined with superb optical recognition and AI capabilities, turns the table top in front of the iPad—an area a little larger than a piece of paper—into a digital game board.

The first games include Words, a hangman-style game where two players can compete against one another by placing word tiles in front of the iPad to fill in the blanks. Tangram is a game that lets you use Osmo's set of colored shapes to match onscreen puzzles, with the iPad letting you know when you’ve achieved the correct placement. Newton, a physics game, requires no special game packs; you can use a pen and paper—or any object placed in front of the iPad—to create mazes that guide an onscreen ball to its target.