Welcome to Toca Life: Town – the place where kids rule! In Toca Life: Town we want to show you the world where all the Toca Boca inhabitants live, and let you take part in their everyday life. Go shopping at the store, eat a meal at the restaurant that you’ve cooked yourself, solve some crime at the police station or simply throw the greatest party ever! What you do is pretty much up to you, Toca Life: Town and its inhabitants are here to support you as you play out life scenarios, but YOU set the rules and YOU decide what life should be like!

Real life is full of inspiration for play. With Toca Life: Town we wanted to create an environment that in itself is a sandbox for inspired and creative play. We think improvising with everyday life leads to the most magically playful situations where ordinary objects can take any role and be forever filled with new meaning. We also think these kinds of situations can be multiplied if experienced together with a friend, sibling or parent and have made sure this is supported in this toy. Toca Life: Town is in other words a place where improvising scenes and scenarios is only limited by your own imagination. It is a place where every story is open-ended. It’s quite simply the kind of inviting place where anything is possible and everything is allowed!

How to play
There are various locations to visit in Toca Life: Town – the store, the police station, the restaurant, the park to name a few. You select the location you want to play in on the map screen by clicking on the different buildings.

In the locations there are lots of things to do. You can move around most stuff to setup for different scenarios. You can also move around the characters to act out situations. The characters can be dressed up with the wigs and hats lying around by dragging them onto the characters head. You can also give the characters things to hold on to by dragging them to the hands of the characters. If you find something edible or drinkable you can do this by dragging the item to the mouth of a character.

Some items can be toggled by clicking them, such as putting out and lighting candles and programming on the laptop computer. There are also some things in the environment that can be clicked for different results, like the water taps in the kitchen, or the fridge doors.

The characters are really the stars of Toca Life: Town and if you want more of them in the location you’re in you can press the call button in the bottom right corner to bring in all the other characters. You can then drag them into the location as you wish.

If you give a character an item to hold on to they will bring the item with them even if you go to another location. In fact, everything is saved the way you left it as you leave a location. In case you’d like to reset everything to its initial state there’s a button for this located in the upper right corner of the map screen.

There are lots of things to do in the Town like throwing stuff in the trash, flushing the toilet and taking a shower. Of course we encourage you to explore the different settings around the town on your own, but listed below are some of the cooler things you can do:

Gift wrap birthday presents – This is done by placing an item on the gift wrapping table in the store and, hey presto, you’re ready for the birthday party!

Cook new food dishes – By combining some food items you can create new dishes. It’s as easy as dragging one item onto another. Try combining spaghetti and meat for some Pasta Bolognese, or did anybody say fish tacos?!

Toy capsule machine – Did you see it at the store? The toy capsules are free and contain super cool toys and collectibles. Can you collect them all?
To talk about
With Toca Life: Town we want to supply a tool box that will let you and your child act out as many different situations as possible. You can for example play hide and seek in the park, wash the police car in the police station garage or prepare a family breakfast in the family home. There are many other situations we’ve thought of and we’re sure that there are even more that you will think of yourself. What might be interesting to explore however is the everyday situations that your child isn’t usually in charge of, like getting ready for school or going shopping at the mall. If your children would be the boss of these things, what would happen? A lot of crazy things probably, but you might also find a lot more responsibility than you thought your children were capable of in these situations. What else would you be interested in seeing your kids handling?

Of course, Toca Life: Town isn’t meant to be a training ground for life or anything, but children tend to have questions about everything between heaven and earth and sometimes playing around with life is a valuable process for understanding the world better.

Enjoy your stay!
Mårten Brüggemann, Play Designer