Cheatwell Games Engenius Contraptions Bounce Marble Run

We were gifted this product for my kid's Christmas and I needed to write a review to ensure that anyone buying this in the future was aware of what they were instore for.Pros:Made mostly wood / bio-degradable products.Cons:The written instructions are horrific. You absolutely need to watch the QR code videos in order to assemble this thing correctly and cannot rely on the diagrams to complete this. Additionally, the instructions very much assume that you're willing to invest time tweaking and debugging individual steps and trampoline placement in order to make it work - for example, they don't even tell you how to build a standard marble return system step by step. They just say here are some paper straws and pieces of wood and you need to figure it out.TONS of pre-work need to be done in order to get this thing assembled. Yes, its made out of laser cut plywood so you would think that the pieces would fit together fairly easily but, frankly, the tolerances are SO low its incredibly hard to get everything to fit properly and we ended up needing to do a significant amount of sanding (sand paper, files) and crimping to get it built. I'm talking about at least an extra hour you should be prepared to spend.The design seems cool but is, frankly, I'd say is overall pretty poor. See above regarding the tolerance issues which resulted in gears binding up and not turning well without a significant amount of manual correction but also the fact that, even 100% as-written, the instructions and design do not yield a product that matches their "cool" videos they shot of the system in action (namely the heights of the various pieces don't line up properly). If you bother to design something and provide instructions you should at least ensure that the directions yield a product that functions. A well designed product should function reasonably well as expected and advertised without a metric ton of individual fixing and tweaks.Lastly, the product is supposed to come with 4 sheets of laser cut plywood and instead mine only came with 3. This resulted in us not being able to make as many trampolines (2) instead of the advertised 7. I consider myself lucky that the sheet missing didn't include any critical pieces for the assembly of the main systems but again this was another disappointment when building this product.Overall, I think it is an interesting concept and we got a lot of the individual pieces working (eventually) but unless you love brain teasers, agonizing over tolerances less than 1 millimeter, and really want to to spend your time feeling like you're back in shop/woodworking class I'd look for a different product to purchase.

Despite carefully following the video and printed instructions the gears would not turn freely. could not face taking apart and sanding things down so will not get finished. Not up to the quality of e.g. timberkits wooden kits.

The other Cheatwell kits go together perfectly. This one is utter crap. The gears don’t turn freely despite numerous assembly attempts and careful following of the videos. Save your sanity and your money and don’t buy.