Great for Kids
Great addition to other gear items. We have the monkey set and dolphin set as well. We love each. You can intermingle each set with each other, as marbles go up we have dolphins below spinning! Of couse, the set alone is quite fun. It takes a little bit to build it; but its great learning and teaches patience! Then the fun begins and boy do kids love marbles! Great fun for our 7 year old boy

Surprised by negative reviews
We have a lot of experience with marble runs in our household. For a plastic run, this is very sturdy! I was really surprised that people complain it's not. The instructions are excellent and offer pictures for each level of construction, both for the section you're building, as well as what the section looks like assembled on the base. The parts bags are labeled with the contents, and each part is labeled with the part number. The box does read 8+, so I wouldn't go by Amazon's recommended age. As it turns out, this was for my 4-year-old marble run maniac, so I put it together. It took 2 hours while constantly relocating my parts-eating 10-month-old throughout the process(the manual states 3-4 hours and probably would take that long if you are a kid or fail to refer to the part numbers when building). That said, I do think it does not lend itself to creating original marble runs due to the number of small parts. While my son loves this, it's not nearly as versatile as the Quercetti models available--but our Quercetti runs fall apart much more easily.

ENGINEER NEEDED FOR THIS ONE!
OH MY GOD!
YOU BETTER BE AN ENGINEER TO PUT THIS TOGETHER!!
UGH!!!

Best present under the tree!
We bought this for our 6 & 8 year old boys. I put it together after they went to sleep - they are still a little young to do the construction - it took about 2 hours. It wasn't hard, but there are just so many pieces that it takes a while.

The kids have been entranced with it! They have spent hours watching it - trying to figure out all the slides, funnel, lifter, etc. They love it when an occasional marble escapes and they get to reintroduce it. Ours came with 10 marbles.

If your child is into things like gears and marbles, this is a fantastic toy - my kids sure love it!

6 or older for flimsiness, not complexity

Raising two young engineers, we snapped this up when we found it on sale. Now that we've made it, I wish we hadn't.

My boys are already all over complicated marble systems like Quadrilla Marble Railway, Twist and Rail, so I wasn't very fazed by the age requirements, however this stuff was a huge disappointment.

The first issue we had was that the manufacture quality is poor, made with flimsy light weight plastic casting, only slightly better than what I might expect from a kids-meal toy. One of the side effect of this is that even when correctly assembled, they fit loosely, and not interlock very firmly. This leads to instability in the structure which makes the upper levels extra challenging.

The second point is the piece design. Where Lego will use color to differentiate similar pieces, these have all the supports the same color, and all the connectors the same color. So in order to find the piece size required you have to sort through the pieces reading small numbers in the plastic.

These two issue combine to make these really difficult to build. In our case it took and hour and half of dedicated parent time for the parent to build, and we had hard time finding jobs that were do-able so the kids could help. Not what we had in mind.

The final point that I have against this, is that despite the fact that the auger is cool, the gears in the package are basically unused in the one design they provide. Of the dozen or so gears included all but about 3 are either riders (spinning but not driving anything) or not even spinning at all.

In short we are sorry that we even purchased these, since it was neither educational, nor particularly fun for the boys, and this is a missed opportunity to find one of the better quality competitors.