Lasting durability for girls and boys ages 8 and up, it’s the learning toy children (and savvy adults) return to over and over again! My son really loves using the Lifter, which surprised me somewhat as I thought he would be annoyed at having to manually operate it each time. He enjoys seeing how the lifting mechanism works. The instructions for the included projects are pretty clear, but for some of the more involved setups, it can be difficult to tell where to attach the balconies, since they are transparent and harder to see on the busy diagrams. It’s fun but too inconsistent. You’ll be better off with something else unless you’re looking to complete the set. This GraviTrax expansion also has by far the least amount of stuff in the box with no bonus parts beyond the trampoline itself. My first thought about the set was that it is amazing. Building the included designs was fairly straightforward and didn’t require a lot of thinking, but building your own sets, both simple and sophisticated, really got our mental juices flowing. It was so much fun to watch the marbles go and make changes to our runs over time.

The Mixer accessory provides a random element. Marbles that reach the Mixer, from multiple directions, swirl down the vortex center and are redirected to one of three directions below. This one is great when it works well but getting to that point is highly frustrating, even for adults, and younger kids will almost certainly give up on it before the fun can start.The Lifter expansion, as might be obvious from the name, lifts marbles vertically to three different levels depending on how many pieces you use to build it. It needs to be manually operated each time by a button and can send marbles in different directions at the top. What’s in the Box? The one expansion I would advise avoiding is the Trampoline. Scoring just 18/40 in our challenge, it was inconsistent, hard to use, and included the least amount of bonus pieces which made it poor value for money. While it looks cool and is probably the most fun to watch when it actually works, it’s just not worth your money in my opinion unless you’re looking for a complete set of all the expansions. As I got older, I still loved my marble game—I still have it—but longed for something more involved, interesting, and customizable. I got my kids one of those plastic marble run sets that you can put together yourself, but it wasn’t terribly satisfying for me, as it was difficult to build anything complicated. Recently, though, I had a chance to try out the GraviTrax PRO set, an improvement on the basic GraviTrax set that GeekMom Sophie reviewed for us previously. GraviTrax PRO

Despite its enthusiasm, the Scoop is remarkably consistent and worked perfectly every time we tried it.The Lifter worked perfectly every time we used it, although you need to remember to operate it manually, unlike most of the other expansions featured here. The base tiles have some hexes marked in green, making it easier to correctly place pieces according to the included plans. The base tiles being cardboard, though, means that they could easily wear out with a lot of play, with the constant insertion/removal of pillars and tiles. They’re sturdy cardboard, but they are still cardboard. If you’re using GraviTrax on the floor, stepping on it wrong might bend or dent the base tiles, too, making them less useful. As it simply carries a marble along in the same direction it came from with no level shifts, this is one of the easiest GraviTrax expansions to incorporate. Ravensburger sent my ten-year-old son and me six of the latest GraviTrax expansions to try out. We rated them over four different features as follows: