Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I bought this at a local store thinking it would be a great activity for when I babysit my little niece. I got her all worked up about digging for treasure, pointing out all the big, colorful gemstones displayed on the box. Then I opened the box and the disappointment started. First, let's note that the box is slightly larger than a cereal box, which makes for a nice shock when the little square lump of sand/rock/whatever that stuff is slides out, and it's roughly the size of one of my niece's little juice boxes. Not only is this a spectacular waste of packaging, but it's completely misleading. Worse yet, you'll notice that the mallet included in the kit is displayed on the packaging to scale, yet the gemstones that appear on the packaging are exponentially larger than the little molecules (uh, I mean gems) that are actually embedded in the little sand clump. The only nice thing in this kit is the poster it comes with, which features nice pictures of the rocks you're supposed to be digging out, and some information about rocks and minerals. Of course, this is just another way of setting you up for a let down, because if your kit is anything like the one I bought, you'll get 3 of the same orange rocks, severely cutting short the variety you may have been hoping for. In my case, my little niece was psyched about the purple rock she saw on the poster, and kept chipping away at that sand clump in vane, as there was no purple rock, only 3 orange ones, and 8 other kinds of rocks that she didn't give a rip about. Not that it matters, as they were all so ridiculously tiny that we promptly lost several of them and gave up on our plans for me to drill holes in the remaining rocks to string them onto a necklace for my niece to wear to school the next day. My recommendation: Instead of buying this kit, change your $15 into 60 quarters, mix the coins into your child's sandbox and hand that kid a shovel. Your child will have a much better treasure dig and have more to show for it when she's done.