Anki Overdrive Is A $150 ‘Toy’ That Wants To Replace Slot Cars And Mario Kart

Anki is gearing up to release the successor of its popular toys-to-life game September 20. The company cleverly turns the genre on its head, so that instead of letting the toy cars be lifeless figurines, the playthings are the star of the game.  Simply unpack your new box, build one of the eight unique battlefields, charge your cars by inserting them in the base charging station, download the Anki App on your IOS or Android device, and you're off and away and ready to race and annihilate your enemy.<img src="https://www.boxmash.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/anki-300×200.jpg" width="254" />

You can also upgrade your circuits with the Rails kit (£10) which should help keep the action on the track, the Bank Turn kit (£10) which adds Nascar-style sloped corners, and the Elevation kit (£10) to raise sections of track and build hills, bridges and overpasses.

The $30 Launch Kit, for example, vaults the cars off of an elevated track—but even with the risers in the right locations, I couldn't get the cars to land properly on the other side and keep going more than one-third of the time (Amazon buyers report much the same ). They'd crash or fall short and then try driving under the track, or just spin around in place.

But Anki is crafting a system that allows them to transpose those systems on the real world, which not only excites the gamer in me, it also makes me excited about the possibilities that result when we figure out how to make robotic systems understand and interact with the world we live in.

However, once inconsistencies are introduced into the equation (cards of varying difficulty, not studying at the same time every day), SM3+ is more prone to incorrect guesses at the next interval – resulting in cards being scheduled too often or too far in the future.