When was the last time you saw an actual prize in a cereal box?  I don’t think they really do that much anymore.  I’ve seen some that give you codes to unlock things in online games and such, but no physical prizes.  When I was a kid, cereal box prizes were everywhere.  We’d get things like stickers, cars, those baking soda submarines, baseball cards, rings, flipbooks, candy that we could pack in our school lunch that day, and much more.  One time in boxes of Chex, you could even get a computer game called Chex Quest (which I reviewed at The Dallas Morning News back then).  Sometimes, as a kid, the prizes were more interesting than the cereal itself.  So if I see a prize in a cereal box nowadays, I might notice it a bit more, especially if it’s Skylanders related.  And since Skylanders is a big deal here at GamerDad.com, here’s a write-up about the new Skylanders Skystones prizes in certain boxes of General Mills cereals!

I’m not sure what all the cereals are that have the prizes in them, but they are from General Mills, and I saw them in Honey Nut Cheerios and Cinnamon Toast Crunch.  I got the Honey Nut Cheerios box because it was the only one I saw that wasn’t too sweet for me.  I’m also not sure if it’s found just in regular boxes or the Family Size ones, but I only saw it on Family Size at the store I was at.  Here’s what to look for on the front of the box when you’re at the grocery store.  Also note that inside the packaging you can cut out coupons for a dollar off a Skylanders figure, or ten bucks off of a Starter Pack.  I’m not sure how long this promotion is going on either.

The prize inside is a box with a deck of Skystone cards used to play a simple card game featuring Skylanders characters on the cards.  The back of the box has a game board, but you really don’t need it if you know that the cards are placed in a 3×3 square like Tic-Tac-Toe.  But here’s what the back of the box looks like anyway.

The prize inside the cereal box is outside the bag, so you don’t have to go digging in the cereal to get it (anyone remember doing that as a kid?).  You get a little box that holds the cards, and on the bottom of the box is a code you can use to unlock things in a Skylanders tablet game.  The cards are on pretty good cardboard stock, and there are even a couple of shiny ones.  Supposedly there are four decks to collect.  The box also holds a card that has the rules, and a circular coin for flipping to see who goes first.  Although a regular coin would work just fine.

The game is like a cross between Tic-Tac-Toe and the card game from Final Fantasy 9.  And I don’t think it plays like the Skystones game in the Skylanders video games either.  Anyway, the cards have two sides, red and blue, with the same character on each side with some triangles on the four sides of the card.  Each player takes turns placing a card of their color on the playfield.  If the triangles on your card are more than the triangles on the card next to you, you can flip that card over to your color.  When the board is filled with cards, the player with the most cards of their color on the board wins.  So yeah, pretty simple little game, but interesting for Skylanders fans nonetheless.

Tags: Unplugged