BUKI BU220 - Marble Runs

Good product. My nephew loved it!

Loved this marble run. All the pieces are pretty solid plastic and you have enough variety to build some interesting tracks.The instructions for it are basically just pictures you refer to when building. It comes with a leaflet with Easy, Medium & Hard tracks to build. It's pretty easy for an adult to follow but young children will struggle. Our boys 3&6 years loved putting the marbles down the tracks we built but struggled making tracks. Our eldest could make a small one on his own. If your looking at independent play 6+ Years at least. Otherwise supervision needed.The marble lift is pretty cool according to my boys. Although you do need at least 2 marbles at the bottom of it to pick one up. If there is just one it won't pick it up. As there are plenty of marbles supplied it's not a problem. It also has indents in its base so you can fit marble track pieces to it and raise it higher. Only down side is it take Size C batteries which aren't supplied and it's not something everyone keeps in stock.We actually found that this set was compatible with a set we already had by Marbulous. In fact the pieces appear identical. This is huge plus as we have been able to build some pretty impressive runs with so many pieces available to us.We have already had hours of fun with this set and am sure will have many more.

Not for a first-time marble run builder! We have had several different marble run sets over the years and this is by far the most challenging build, even for an adult. Brilliant mechanism design, marbles really flow nicely. Agree with another reviewer that the lift is slow, releasing one marble every 5 seconds or so, but I think it keeps your interest nicely at this pace, particularly with the switch piece that diverts consecutive marbles in different directions - you have time to watch one marble get quite far before another starts its amazing course!

Buki - PM851 - Maxi marble runsThe set.There are over 90 plus marbles pieces in the set.Building.There are lots of tubes and risers so you can make quite complicate3d marble runs. The kids played with this four many hours and I think that got more play value out of it than their PlayStation. we all joined in and it is great fun thinking up ideas to build the marble run.Once you have created your marble run you use the marble lift (battery operated) to load them and watch them go down your marble run.Play value.This is excellent as you have to plan how you want the marbles to run and then build the run using the parts. It’s a bit like plastic plumbing but great fun.Robustness.Although all plastic it is well made and has taken a lot of abuse from our kids. They play with it most days and have friends around and are now timing their runs to ass who can produce the fastest run. I think it is simple but creative and the kids love it.Overall.A game and kit that keeps lasting interest and is great fun. This one is a winner.

We own a couple of marble run sets and also a couple of the roller-coaster style ones too. As the illustrations seems to show that both sorts are included in the one box, as well as a lot of other unique pieces, I was quite excited to get this set to test. On the whole it hasn’t disappointed, though there is a minor caveat, which I’ll describe later.The set has been designed to be compatible with a standard marble run design, that is available fairly ubiquitously in most toy retailers. If you already own a standard set from other manufacturers, then you should have no problem getting these to mate up. My disappointment came when coming to try and join up some Quercetti Sky Rail, to the rail pieces included, only to discover that they are made to a slightly different ‘gauge’. Annoyingly the clips on the rails, that fit into the connectors have the same dimensions, it’s just that the rails are too different to join up. It shouldn’t be too difficult for someone with a modicum of technical ability to devise a work around; my little boy wouldn’t agree to me setting about the rails with a craft knife however.The pieces are all of a high quality, tough plastic and held together well when building the included design. As far as quality goes, I could find no gripe here.The number of special pieces is very good, in a set of this size. Off the top of my head, there is one alternating track splitter; two cups that catch falling balls and tip them into two of three baskets; a few sections of marble rail and connectors – enough for a full loop and a half; five sections of track that look like they are compatible with Hubelino – a type of marble run that attaches to double size plastic building bricks (Duplo and the like) – on this last count I will try and find out if this is true and amend the review appropriately as we no longer have any bricks that size. The biggest single piece is the marble return lift, which is 56cm tall and returns marbles at a rate of about one a second. This last feature is fairly remarkable, considering how reasonably priced the entire set is.I think that this is a great stand-alone set or a nice addition to an existing collection.