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.