This chapter presents play as a framework for critically examining the convergence of the ‘real’ physical reality of things and their psychological weight. Herein, I stretch psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott’s theory of play (1971), which posits destruction as a central component of creativity, to introduce a materially based exploration of an object. This object, I argue, is particularly well suited to a playful method of examination because this object is constituted of toys. The object at hand? A twentieth-century intelligence test kit called the Stanford-Binet Scales of Intelligence. Herein, I quite literally unpack a test kit to performatively argue for studying it with Winnicott’s theory of play in mind and discuss the process of making an exhibition which puts this multiply decontextualised object on display so that it can be played with, and therein studied, by exhibition visitors.