Customer Reviews

Haba Coliseum

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

We received this as a gift for our 4 year old, child of an architect, who can almost build this himself. The exceptional quality blocks are perfectly crafted, smooth, with no finish to make them slippery (or toxic). The finished Coliseum looks beautiful, and we love to leave it put together to enjoy, which heightens the educational aspects of learning about and appreciating great works of antiquity. At first we thought there were pieces missing, but it was only that we built is incorrectly; there's a subtle design aspect that may be missed on the first try, as there are no instructions. Unlike with many toys, we've never had a piece missing in a HABA set or game. Part of the challenge, although simple enough, is building the structure with only the aid of the picture on the box and without instructions. Now we have many of these HABA building sets and highly recommend them. The games are of the same high quality.

Me and my friend bought this for a project and we spraypainted it... We let it dry in the garage and then her dad ran over it with his car... But it didnt break!! Very durable

I bought this set for my kids when we were studying the Roman Empire as just like an extra thing to fill some time. I didn't realize that they would enjoy it so much. It gives my kids some quiet, concentration time when trying to build the coliseum. They also use it to build other structures which is good for fostering some creativity. All of the blocks are good quality, uniform in size with no rough edges. This is a great set if you or your children like to play with blocks.

This was bought for a school project. It was GREAT!!. It was small, but large enough to handle. We glued it together and onto a foam board for easy kid transportation. I highly recommend this...especially for school projects. It was fun to build. The ONLY part that was dissappointing was we were missing 6 parts (out of 117), but instead of returning, we changed a few things around. Otherwise it was great!

I used this with my 8th grade Latin students, who were able to quickly put the set together without much difficulty. This was made more impressive by the fact that our set did not come with instructions on how to assemble the Coliseum!

The blocks in the set are very good quality and it looks nice when it is assembled.

We love our Haba block sets. We have the standard set and the ball track construction set. We got this fully expecting that the blocks would fit right in with the rest of our Haba blocks, but unfortunately they are not only smaller, but at a size where they can NEVER line up (you can get close if you stack them in sets of fours, but the lines are still off). Imagine the frustration of buying a new LEGO set only to find that they changed the size of the pegs on top, making it incompatible with the rest of your LEGO sets. It's not quite that bad but pretty close.

In other words, this is awesome as a stand-alone toy and if you just want to build variants on the coliseum. But they need to label it differently so people won't make the same mistake we did.

The Haba Coliseum is very sturdy, is fun to build, and looks pretty cool when completed. It is not difficult to put together. My 8 year old nephew and I put this together in a relatively short time. If you're looking for a real challenge for an 8 year old this might not be it. But you can make the experience educational by sharing aspects of the Roman Empire, stressing the importance of preserving remnants of antiquity, introducing archeology, the geography of locating where the coliseum is in the world etc. Also it's a good prop for imaginary play activities, so it can be very fun. I'm happy with it. My nephew likes it. He gets pretty creative with it. The Haba Pyramid is a little more challenging to build because of the inner foundations that are required to keep the levels of the pyramid intact. Ultimately, though it's a good building experience, but the bulk of our time is spent on imaginary play that comes afterwards. There are good discussions that naturally come from building both the coliseum and the pyramid.