My Blessings Homeschool: Solving the Skylanders Mystery

I'm sure someone else out there has had a similar dilemma. Standing in the aisle of Skylander figures and games and wondering how on earth it all works and what pieces go with what game! It took us a while to figure it out after buying one of the "giants" and having it not work on our original game that came with the XBox the kids got for Christmas. I'm not reviewing this game for anyone or anything like that, just figured there had to be other confused parents out there! I hope this helps solve the Skylanders Mystery for some of you!

What are Skylanders?

Skylanders is a video game that can be bought for XBox, Wii and Playstation. Unlike regular video games though this game has a really fun feature. You are able to choose your character by placing your Skylander of choice onto the "portal." That character is then loaded onto the game and away you go!

Another great thing about this game is that once you buy the figures they can be used with any game system. We have an XBox but if a friend has the Skylanders game for Wii, my son can take his figures over and still play the game there with his figures.

The Games & Characters

This is the part that gets a bit confusing. As far as I know there are three different games (maybe more by now?). Spyro's Adventure which is the one that came with our game system, Swap Force and Giants.

When you go shopping for more Skylanders than what comes in the starter pack, they are labeled with one of the three games. One day we bought a Giants Skylander (before we had the swap force game) and found that it wouldn't work. Looking into it a bit we realized something. The giants character had orange on the bottom while the Spyro's Adventure characters were green! I then was thinking you had to have a different set of character figures for each Skylanders game and was quite annoyed.

Then for my son's birthday he got the Swap Force game. The kids decided to try the "Giants" piece on it and we were quite surprised (and happy) that it worked! So here's what we found.

Spyro's Adventure: only green bottoms aka, Spyro's Adventure characters work for this game.
Swap Force and Giants; blue green and orange bottoms can be used for these games.

We had finally figured it out! Here's a little video about the Swap Force. You can switch the tops and bottoms of the characters to make new ones which is pretty fun!