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Comment by gnicholas | Hacker News Reader

Hmm, apparently I'm the only one who had a not-great experience with these. Our child received the Kiwi level as a gift and thought one of the months was cool (the arcade claw, pictured on the site) but the others were pretty lame. We would have considered continuing the subscription if we could have seen what was coming, but given our mediocre experience during the first stint, we didn't spring for a renewal ($20/mo for Kiwi level, and more for some of the higher levels).

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I looked into these when we went into lockdown, but a lot of the reviews were like yours, the first few are great but a lot of them are really lame. Combined with really opaque pricing for oversees shipping and it just didn't seem worth it. Got my son a load of Lego power functions stuff and he's had many hours of fun from that.

Exactly same experience here, for 2 of their age brackets. Not impressed, like a lot of these "crates".

Would you (or the parent post) care to explain what's boring about them? Not everything can appeal to everyone, after all - that would seem to be an inherent flaw of the crate model. I had a look at their catalogue... A lot of the Eureka crates seem to be sports-related (a table tennis robot and a golf putter for instance), and some of them haven't got any moving parts (the golf putter), which would've certainly made it more attractive to some - but personally, I don't _really_ have a problem with that. From what I could gather, they also explain the design choices behind each kit, which makes it all the more interesting. I'm a bit concerned about the durability, since neither their tiny printing press nor their pendulum clock look like they'll make it for longer than a week, but overall, it seems like a fun thing to do on a rainy afternoon.

The claw was great. The kaleidoscope was meh and the tree was not fun to build or play with. And given that they start you out with the great kit and then get progressively worse, we assumed the trend would continue. For 20 bucks a month you can buy lots of legos or other interactive toys. The kit items were also not especially durable. Legos last decades, Kiwi projects lasted 1-3 months before breaking.

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