I feel safe in stating that many of us played with marbles as children, design marble runs either as a purchased toy or whatever we had to work with. You might have even found yourself watching Jelle’s Marble Runs on ESPN Ocho during the pandemic’s early days when all real sports were shut down. [And yes, I did just watch a complete race as I wrote this post!]
I contributed to Marbolous via Kickstarter and received mine this week. It was a long-time coming, as they struggled with the logistics of producing and shipping the product: the updates were always positive but it took much longer than the initial guesstimates. Unexpectedly, pleasantly, it arrived this week.
Though offered the chance to upgrade, I stayed with the manual version. The product comes with 30 white glass marbles; I purchased an additional 30 moss-green marbles. Each marble is 10mm in diameter.
CAVEAT EMPTOR: this is not for children. The glass top encasing the run is not secured and can be easily removed, and the marbles are small and enticing to children.
The most obvious question is Do I like it? YES, definitely yes. So far I’ve found myself starting the marbles multiple times throughout the day, pressing the starter 30/40/50 times to get most marbles rolling at once. It’s relaxing. It’s enjoyable. It’s a distraction from work. It’s silly. But I’m enjoying it.
