Cracker Jacks have been an American favorite since first introduced in 1896 by F.W. Rueckheim at Chicago’s First World Fair. The classic snack comes in box with a little toy, typically made of paper or plastic, underneath all of the popcorn and peanuts. Admittedly, the snack is not at the top of most grocery lists, but the style of the Cracker Jack box has been a staple of the product that has stood a test against time…until recently. New designs for the snack, as well as the prize inside, were released in stores at the end of April, giving loyal customers an unhappy surprise.

The prize is now a digital code to play an online game.  Much was made in the media in April, but who really tried the new games?  I did.

The new design on the exterior of the iconic box and larger serving bag is completely modern. With slick packaging in a red and white stripes with a very clean and shiny design of the sailor boy and his dog, it fits in effortlessly with other snacks on the market. The most modern of all the new elements, though, is the prize, a smartphone game. You read this right. With each package now comes a code you can scan on your phone (with the corresponding Blippar app).

While this is an interesting idea in concept, swapping out the classic prizes for a game just feels cheap. Rather than something you can play with and keep, you now get a few minutes of fun on your phone that could honestly already be provided by any other gaming app.

The app itself is Blippar, specializing in identifying objects via your smartphone camera and then providing you with more information. The app also works in part with companies and products such as Coke, Cheerios, and Maybelline to provide the consumer with digital experiences relating to the product.

Cracker Jacks offers four different games, each corresponding with an individual sticker. The idea is to “collect them all,” a concept familiar to past Cracker Jack consumers; although those were the many plastic figures, miniature games, and small gadgets, as opposed to four stickers you can use to play mundane games phone games.

The games are titled Dance Cam, Get Carded, Baseball Star, and Dot Dash respectively. None are actual games, with the exception of dot dash, where you use a photo of your face on a dot to race against another dot, which admittedly is not very riveting. With Dance Cam, the app plays music and you record you or a friend dancing on a stadium screen. Baseball Star and Get Carded are almost identical as they both just put your face onto the body of a baseball player and/or mascot. The prizes, to put it simply, are just boring, and not worth going through multiple boxes to “collect.”  How many boxes did I go through to collect these four ?  Fifteen.  It was not a thrilling activity.

The prizes in the paper box have been on decline for a while now. Originally the prizes were toys made of plastic, sometimes even being interactive. A few years ago a switch was made to paper toys such as fact sheets and pencil toppers, not the most exciting thing for a child to get with a snack. The app is just deeper in the negative.

The difference between Cracker Jack using Blippar and other companies that have in the past is that those companies either never offered toys or haven’t in many years. These products weren’t replacing or taking away anything; they were only adding a small bonus. Cracker Jack, on the other hand, has taken all the fun out of offering prizes by replacing them with something artificial.

According to a spokesperson for the product, while Blippar and Cracker Jack are working together on the new prizes, Cracker Jack has left the actual types of games in Blippar’s hands, allowing the company creative freedom to create what they thought would best appeal to today’s youth. It’s beyond me how these games will appeal to children (who will have to borrow a parent’s phone, download the app, and then scan the prize) or teenagers (who won’t make the effort to play the games), to adults (who won’t even open the prize paper).

Frito Lay actually made a Cracker Jack app back in 2013 in which you could play two games with multiple levels, one where you were a batter attempting to hit a baseball, and another which was just a digital remake of the classic ball in the hole games which used to be one of the many prizes in Cracker Jacks. This app captures the Cracker Jack spirit far better in two games than Blippar did in four.

With Blippar prizes, there’s no history, no charisma, no charm.