Wednesday 28 February 2018

Mine It Diamond and Gold review


Mine It from Character Options is a fabulous new concept that takes "blind bag" collectibles to an exciting new level. It also happens to combine two of the Madhouse kids' favourite things : collecting fossils, precious and semi-precious stones and the "archaeological dig" type toys that usually involve scraping replica fossils or skeletons out of a block of plaster of Paris.


The impressive black and silver "diamond" and shiny "gold" packaging in the form of an ingot gives a hint of the extra-special contents that may be hiding inside - you have a one-in-24 chance of finding real gold or a real diamond inside your block. Cue squeals of excitement !


If you're not lucky enough to find the gold and diamonds, you'll discover one of the other six stones hiding inside : Black Line Jasper, Picture Jasper, Rose Crystal, Volcano Rock, Red Onyx or Tiger Eye.


Without further ado, we opened up the boxes. The Diamond pack includes a little plastic hammer, chisel, magnifying glass and plastic-wrapped, diamond-shaped block.


The Gold pack contains the same trio of tools and a yellow ingot-shaped block with Gold engraved on the top.


To keep mess to a minimum, we placed the blocks inside an old ice cream tub to collect the debris. They are much cleaner than the plaster of Paris ones that we've tried in the past though, as the dust from those flies up in the air and sticks to your fingers. With these blocks, it falls straight into the tub and can be easily wiped off fingers.


After lots of careful tapping and scraping, we managed to uncover our treasure. What would it be? Definitely not gold, but which precious stone was it? After looking at the back of the box to compare colours, we decided that this is Rose Crystal.


Time to try the diamond one. This one seemed harder to break than the Gold bar, which crumbled easily, but after a few minutes of scraping, bashing and digging, we managed to get inside.


Well, we're not entirely sure but we think we might have found a diamond, because it doesn't look like any of the others, except for the rose quartz, and it doesn't have any pinky colour at all. We've never seen a rough diamond that hasn't been polished up until it sparkles though, so it's hard to tell. (It would be great to have a picture of raw gold and diamond on the box, as well as some information about the different stones - where they can be found, how they are formed, what properties they are supposed to have. Just a simple sheet of paper in the box shouldn't add much to production costs.) Whether or not it really was, the Madhouse kids are convinced that they found a diamond, they're extremely excited about it and that's all that matters !


It's a great activity for kids to get involved in, with all the excitement of buying a blind bag collectible plus the extra suspense of having to chip away to reach your surprise treasure. It's not as messy as I feared (and much less so than other similar kits using plaster of Paris) and it breaks down quite easily, so even young children can get involved, with supervision - the recommended age on the box is 5+.



If you want to see a live-action vlog of Mine It, I highly recommend heading over to see the talented newbie reviewer Eddie (aka Maximka from Galina's wonderful Chez Maximka blog - make sure you check out her foodie posts too !) at Edgar's Toys & Reviews. This is his first ever review on his new Youtube channel and he's a total natural !

Mine It has an RRP of £4.99 and is available to buy from all leading retailers, as well as at www.character-online.co.uk .



Disclosure : We received the product in order to write an honest review.

9 comments:

  1. You've found the diamond! Yay! Thank you so much for linking up to Eddie's video, and for your kind words! He's on cloud nine. :)

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    1. You're very welcome - he's an absolute star ! :)

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    2. We found a diamond as well. I'm wondering how much it worth. Found a site where they are saying it's low quality diamond not suitable for jewellery but still worth about $50.

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  2. Love goos activities to keep my kids occupied

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  3. I can confirm that is not the diamond my son found 1 today it was the size of the point of a pen (1-2mm) with a certificate of authenticity great fun for kids even though it's so small he's very happy I would send a photo but don't know how good luck digging if you get more in the future

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  4. I don’t even know where to start. I wish I could give this product negative stars. I don’t usually write reviews but this product just deserves me taking time to express my disappointment. I don’t know how they market this product to small children because it is incredibly difficult to break down the brick. Especially with the very cheap and poor quality tools they include in the kit. My daughter gave up shortly as she hurt her finger banging away at the brick and barley making any progress. So I had to step in with real tools to dig out the 1 crappy stone in the brick. It actually took quite a bit of effort and made a huge mess which I was not happy to clean up afterwards. I broke down the whole brick because I couldn’t believe that it only had one gem. But to my amazement, there is in fact only one crappy square stone in the whole brick. If you’re considering this product, stay away please. You would be better off giving that money to someone who needs it and taking your kid to the park and picking up a rock on the ground. It will probably look better and no mess. I’m just so upset at the waste of money, time, and my child getting hurt. Terrible terrible terrible!

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  5. In my mine it gold I found the black line jasper in my mine it gold I got the rose Crystal with all the one you can collect you and the rose Crystal and the red onyx or the picture jasper which I am pretty sure u got the red onyx though just saying

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