I love being pleasantly surprised by experiences at CES. Each year, something new catches my eye and makes me think: “Yup, I’ll buy that.”
This year, it’s the turn of the Nex Playground, the wonderfully small family-first gaming console that makes it wonderfully easy to play active, motion-capture-based games.
Nex Playground is ridiculously good fun
I’m buying one
Nex Playground first launched back in 2023 and has grown considerably since that time. It even outsold all Xbox hardware in November 2025, with the company shipping more than 650,000 units across the entire year.
Spending some time with the Nex Playground immediately makes it clear why. Nex has nailed the key features across the board, starting with one of the most important: ease of use.
It’s bonkers easy to start using the Nex Playground; you plug it in via HDMI, fire it up, and start navigating games. The Nex Playground unit has a small motion tracking camera on the front that captures up to four different players, and there is no need to use any controllers, Joy-Con, or Wii-style additions, or anything else.
In fact, the lack of hardware is another aspect of what makes the Nex Playground immediately appealing. You don’t need to spend time charging controllers or making sure the dock is working, and so on. It’s plug-and-play all the way, and you go from unboxing to playing within minutes. The motion capture camera picks up your movements without requiring a prop, and it does so with excellent accuracy (though it does vary between games).
There were some props to use at the Nex Playground demo, such as a hockey stick and a foam baseball bat, but again, they’re not required.
Out of the box, there are five games to choose from: Whack a Mole, Party Fowl, Fruit Ninja, Starri, and Go Keeper. Fruit Ninja is the only game from an external developer; the Nex Playground team has worked on all of the games available. But, of course, five games isn’t many, so you’ll definitely want to sign up for the game subscription, which unlocks more than 50 additional games, costing $49 for three months and $89 for the full year.
They’re not super deep and meaningful games you’ll have a profound emotional attachment to (though if you feel that way about Starri or Homerun Heroes, that’s all good). There is a strong focus on sports games as they’re already movement-focused and interactive, and the Nex Playground’s audience skews younger. But there is a massive amount of fun to be had at all ages, as I experienced with my colleagues at CES 2026.
With that in mind, Nex is also pushing out a few games designed for the older audience in 2026, announcing a partnership with the NBA, and others to come later. So there really is something for everyone in this tiny, cute gaming box.
Nex Playground goes online
With built-in privacy and security connection
Something long-term Nex Playground owners have requested is online connectivity, and Nex has listened. It’s added a new Playdate mode that brings online gaming to the Nex Playground; so far, so normal.
But what I really like about its approach is that your Nex Playground connects directly to another console rather than using a general server or matchmaking approach. It means you can match your console directly and cut out any potential unwanted connections, and as it requires parental consent, it puts the onus on security and privacy around your children’s gaming online.
And that’s something we can all get behind, and something I’d like to see more of.
MakeUseOf’s Best of CES 2026: Headphones, rollable laptops, and multi-screen smartphones
It’s a bumper year for shiny new tech at this year’s edition of CES.
Did I mention that I want one of these?
I think I’ve finally found my new favorite gaming console
I game way less than I did a few years back. My Steam Replay 2025 showed I’d played a paltry eight games over the whole year, and two of those were demos.
Part of the reason for this is that I tend to play games with my kids on the Switch, where we can all get involved and have some family fun, so the Nex Playground is an obvious choice to add to our gaming rotation.
The motion capture works surprisingly well, given that you can have four players in most games, and I found it responsive in most of the games I tried. There was the odd moment it struggled with people walking behind me, but that’s to be expected at a busy tech show like CES 2026.
All in all, I’m suitably impressed with the Nex Playground, and can’t wait for it to finally make it to the UK in 2026 (you can buy it stateside already!).
