Hape Wooden Quadrilla Marble Run Challenger Construction with Instruction| 147-PIECE STEM Educational Learning Toys for Kids

The kids love them. They'll spend hours designing and constructing various runs. It's a fun way to teach various concepts of logic and engineering, hand-eye coordination and balance. They love the satisfaction of successfully making an especially tall or long run. The plastic snap-together sets completely miss the value of developing these skills. This is the set to get!

Best toy ever. Seriously, we absolutely love it. High quality wooden pieces, endless possibilities: my son just got it for his 3rd birthday, and has been happily watching marbles roll for almost a week now. He's still too young to figure out the construction part, but in the meantime, I've been having an absolute ball building marble runs. Seriously, this is the most fun I've had playing with him.Now, to address the issues - yes, it DOES fall over if you hit it. I was hoping that my rather well-coordinated toddler was not going to have this happen a lot, but it does, and it IS indeed annoying. We have a low-tech solution, however: duct tape. I had a roll of the "pretty" red one, and it doesn't even clash with the blocks. Right now we have a tall tower strategically taped to our coffee table for stability. You can also tape bunches of blocks together to make modules, so that even if it falls over, it's quickly reconstructed.We did not get any of the marble trays, because they were out of stock on Amazon when I ordered, but we have another low tech solution - paper plates. Use thicker ones with a higher rim, so that marbles don't hop out. I keep the tape and the paper plates right in the box with the blocks.Now, our only problem is that the marbles are also VERY popular with the cats... I've ordered more marbles, because after a week, we are missing about half of the original 50.

Really nice package. Only concern is that it is a bit easy to knock over once you have it set up. Takes a while to set up properly. But, my grandsons have a great time playing with it!

We are so happy with this purchase. My kids (9, 6, 4) really wanted a marble run but I was hesitant to purchase a huge set of plastic pieces so this wood set was very appealing. I read many reviews about this set being unstable for younger children but we have not found it to be a problem. We've found the stability of this set to be similar to building with magnetic tiles. Yes, it will fall over if you bump into it, but it's very steady on it's own and easy to build onto and play with. There are many options to build basic constructions with this set, but it also allows for more complicated builds, which has been great for my 9 year old. This is a very quality item.

Nice, but not for younger children. Gets knocked over very easy. Also the teeter totter part doesn't work. You have to move it yourself. The marbles aren't heavy enough to do it.

Bought this marble race for our grandkids for Christmas 2021 - started putting it together a week or so ago with the idea of lightly gluing it together on a small platform. I am really disappointed in the marble race- both parts of the race that the marble swirls around can't be used because the marble doesn't continue to roll- in fact it actually comes to a stop in that portion of the race. I am so disappointed- this looked really cool and was really excited for out grandkids to be able to play with it - but the whole unit is worthless without those portions of the race working correctly! This was an expensive race - it's too bad that the quality isn't better!

My 4 yr old granddaughter loved this!

This was the hit of Christmas day for my 3 boys (twin 5 year olds and a 2 year old). They absolutely love it. The quality of this toy is very high. Watching the marbles run is mesmerizing. Any type of standard small marble seems to work just fine.While I know assembling this product in different configurations together with your kids is part of the fun for many people, my boys do not yet have the attention span or patience for such an activity- they just want to play with the final product. For that reason I wood-glued the entire marble run together prior to Christmas with Elmers Wood Glue Max from Home Depot which worked great so far - made it thru Christmas day after being knocked over several times and turned upside down once without any breaks. I just used a tiny amount of glue on the four corners of each block to attach them, and while it seems strong so far, I get the sense I still may be able to break the bonds in the future when the boys are older and more inclined to build different configurations. Expensive, but worth the investment in my opinion.