K'NEX Dragon's Revenge Thrill Coaster - 578 Parts - Roller Coaster Toy - Ages 7 & Up

My 7 year old son and I built this together. After the first few pages of instructions, he told me "I've got this. I can do this by myself." Well, that was a somewhat optimistic assessment, but after puzzling through the assembly booklet (why are the pictures have to be so small?), we finally got it assembled and working. Once that happens, it's a perpetual motion machine and very satisfying. I agree with the reviews, that having a few extra pieces on hand would be helpful. But, apart from these few criticisms and the reason I was motivated to write this review, was the sheer joy on my boy's face when he saw the little roller coaster car make its first complete loop around the track, latch on to the chain drive for the vertical trip back up to the top and then down and around again . . . and again. Yes, I also thought that there must be a camera in the front of the little car, but for a 7 year old, the animated images on the K'nex app were as good as real. I highly recommend this. A tedious build, but very rewarding and a lot of fun.

This is a pretty cool building set for our first k’nex product! I purchased this for my best friend’s son (11) and it is pretty advanced to build. It took both of us (age 37 and 50) about a total of 3 to 4 hours, with some breaks to get this thing together...my buddy is the smartest guy I know and several times we had to study the diagrams within the instruction book to understand what we were supposed do and where to connect the parts. Some of the instructions seem like you need a degree in engineering to understand...just be patient!

I'm looking for fun non-screen things to do with my kid while under virus house-arrest and at <$10, I jumped at this. I'm not sure why the manufacturer recommends that this product is good for kids starting at 1 year - unless they were curious how many of the tiny parts the kid would ingest (I'd say 300 out of the 400). For my 8 year old, snapping the pieces together caused semi-permanent indentions in his little fingers. But, we had fun putting it together - and then disassembling many parts because we had oriented the little connectors the wrong way You need to be of ninja-level Ikea assemblier skill to not run into this mistake. In the end, we put it together. Kind of fragile and the car mostly made it around the track. Not a bad deal for $10, but set your expectations accordingly.

Assembly is tedious and instructions must be followed exactly so take your time. Was missing one piece for the motor assembly but was still able to make it work. Great toy and good value for the money.

Love K'nex, but after my son and grandson spent a wonderful afternoon putting it together, we found that the motor was broken. We checked our batteries, and they were not the problem. I contacted the company, and they are sending me a replacement motor. Great toy, and great service from K'Nex

This set is great. Its been running continuously for an hour and my son is glued to it. The shaft that holds the gear that cranks the dragons wings was deflecting, so I took some extra K'nex I had to turn it from a cantilevered shaft to having support on both sides of the gear. Made it a lot quieter. I wish K'nex made some of the giant sets they used to.

-Pieces are not compatible with regular Knex. -Had to spay the cart with WD-40 to get it to do a full circuit with pushing it. My son got a roller coaster Knex set from his grandmother for Christmas a year or so ago. Unfortunately it was from a second hand store and was missing some piece. This did not deter my from from building as much as he could and then breaking it down to do it again. He did this over and over for a year so I decided it was time to get him a complete set so that he could build a coaster and also hoped that he could use the pieces from this set to complete his other set. He waiting anxiously for this to come in the mail and when it came he opened it up as quick as he could at which point we discovered that the pieces in this set were tiny and not compatible with the regular Knex. I figured oh well at least he gets to build a coaster that will work. When I came home from work he had been working tirelessly on his coaster and it was now complete. We turned it on and he had pure excitement as it worked its way up the chain to the top. The coaster then proceeded down all the way to the loop at which point it did not have enough momentum to go around the loop. I figured he must had done something wrong when he built it, cause why would they engineer a set that doesn't do a full loop without exterior force. I then took it apart and rebuilt it together with him. Turned it on and again did not complete a full loop. So I then took it apart and did the alternate build. Once again the cart got stuck right before the curve that goes under the track. At this point, I had to take the cart into the garage and sprayed it with some WD-40. Finally the cart did a full circuit over and over again without requiring my son to push it. Have not rebuilt the main build to see if it does a full circuit yet but I will update in the future. Long story short. There is no advertising that the pieces are not compatible with regular Knex so if you want to add these pieces to an existing collection you are out of luck. Second you will probably need to grease up the cart to get it to actually work, do a full circuit, so pick up some WD-40 if you don't already have some.

My friends kids got this from me for Christmas. They were suuuper into it. I ended up going most of it for them. I played with knex growing up and they used to be a lot more sturdy. Now they are smaller and more breakable