Smigy (Forum The Shopping Mall)

Smigy at Forum is the one to pick if your child would rather run a shop than a slide. Its role-play corner has a supermarket stocked with convincing produce and a checkout that really scans what you put through it, a doctor and dentist station with coats small enough to wear, and a kitchen with cooking sets. In one corner stands a cow to be milked, real water into a bottle, and a calf to feed with what you collect.

The physical play is built around a giant ball pit with an interactive wall: you fire balls at the screen to play the games running on it, which holds attention long after an ordinary pit has stopped being interesting. Slides run down into the pit, and a trampoline is hidden inside the structure, findable only by climbing in.

Babies are properly provided for rather than tolerated, and under-ones go in free — you pay only for the adult going in with them, so a baby and a four-year-old can come on the same afternoon. Socks are required for everyone. Give the role-play corners longer than you expect: children who bolt for the ball pit on arrival often spend the back half of the session behind the supermarket counter. It is on the basement level of the Orchard Road mall, a few minutes from Orchard station.