For more than a year, Bandai has been teasing fans with a piece of hardware they can't buy. The Lab Tama is the oversized, kiosk-style Tamagotchi the company has parked at stores and events to promote the Tamagotchi Paradise. It hands out exclusive items — but only if you connect your device in person. Lovely if you live near a participating shop. A tease for everyone else.
On November 7, the tease ends. Tamagotchi Paradise – My Lab Tamagotchi goes on sale in Japan, and it's exactly what the name suggests: a Lab Tama for your own home.
Bandai calls it "a deka tama you can play with at home" — a bigger, oval-bodied member of the Paradise family, built around the Tamagotchi Lab. The pitch is "start your life as a researcher," and the company means it. The Paradise line already casts players as scientists nurturing a newborn planet; My Lab shifts that research onto the characters themselves. There's no feeding, no evolution chart, no breeding. This is a field-research station, and it works perfectly well on its own.
The research loop goes like this:
- Egg hunts gather food across the fields. What you carry and where you search shape which Tamagotchi you meet — more than 150 species can appear, and each one logs into your research record as your researcher rank climbs.
- Over 20 mini-games, including part-time job games, earn Gotchi Points.
- Points buy craft materials, which you combine into original playground equipment and planet decorations.
- A docking simulator takes any three registered characters and previews what their offspring might look like — handy before you breed the real thing.
Then comes the part Paradise owners have been waiting for: the things you make transfer to your device. Bandai lists the compatible models as the original Pink Land, Blue Water, and Purple Sky, plus later releases including Jade Forest, Orange Tropics, and White Glacier.
The practical details: ¥9,900, or roughly US$70. Release is Saturday, November 7, in Japan, for ages six and up. Three AAA batteries are required but not included, and the box contains a research guide alongside the device. Pre-orders are open at Japanese retailers now.
One caveat worth repeating: this is a companion, not a replacement. If you want to raise a pet, that is still the Paradise's job. My Lab is for discovery — meeting characters, cataloguing them, and building things. Think of it as an expansion screen, not a second pet: the two devices play different roles in the same lab.
Western fans got their first proper look at New York Comic Con earlier this month, where the 30th-anniversary panel showed it off. As of this writing, Bandai has not confirmed a release outside Japan. Import shops are already taking pre-orders around the $70 mark, so the wait may be shorter than the official silence suggests.
The timing feels right. My Lab lands just over two weeks before Tamagotchi's 30th anniversary on November 23 — and in a year of recolored shells and fashion collabs, this one is a genuinely new way to play. For anyone who ever envied the kids gathered around a store kiosk, the lab is finally coming home.