K'nex Has Plants vs Zombies & More! Building Sets are a Great Gift Idea!

Disclosure: Mail4Rosey received product samples to help facilitate the review. All opinions stated are genuine and my own.

My shopping is way behind this year, which is SO unlike me. I'm usually done before Thanksgiving. Ah well, it's okay...but it means I'm still in the market looking for great gift ideas, and if you are too, today I have one to tell you about for the kids!

Plants vs Zombies is a very popular video game.
K'Nex has made a kit inspired by the game,
with a motorized rumble grid that moves the pieces!

My son is a builder... no doubt about it, he's great with putting things together, and he's very creative too. He makes nooks and crannies and secret hiding spaces that little figurines go into, and he gives every single thing he builds a functional (even if its an imaginary function) purpose too. I love to watch him go... and go he did with his new Pirate Seas Plank Walk Building Set (Plants vs. Zombies) by K'Nex.

This is what came with the kit.
It is everything you need but the batteries (2-AA).
If you're buying one of these for a gift, be sure to pick up batteries too. :)

We took this out and organized all of the pieces. The directions were a little confusing for me him, but we finally got it going. I like to build too, but he's honestly got more talent at it than I do. It's going to be interesting to see if he does anything with that skill as he gets older and learns to develop it even more. We do our best to nurture his desire to build and create, and K'nex products are always wonderful for helping to do so.

These are not for building wimps...they require a little time, thought, and patience. You can see here that my son was just a 'wee' bit off and added too many connectors. No worries, we snapped those pieces off and tried again. We are definitely on the right track now, and well on our way to the finish line.

If you need help for any of the K'Nex sets, or if you lose your original
instruction, they have everything you need on the website,
including 3D versions like the one above that you can rotate at will.

Just a little note, if you get tripped up on the bottom of this (or any part, actually) , where the motor goes, there are wonderful directions on the K'Nex website. You can access or download the original instructions if you lost yours, or you can pull up a nifty 3D version like the one above, that allows you to spin, flip, and rotate it at will. We are using the 3D option right now.

Two of the figures are kit exclusives.

The kit is nice too because it comes with the little figure (my son loves little figures, I think most kids do). There is a pea shooter that you can manually make swing peas at the zombies; a Coconut Cannon with shooting action; and a Cabbage-Pult with launching action. There are also 3 zombie figures (Pirate, Pirate Conehead, and Pirate Captain). And of course there is the motorized rumble grid (battery powered) that has an on/off switch and allows the zombies at one end to move towards the plants at the other end, just like in the game. We're about to assemble the swinging feature now for ours...take a look at it in the video below. I think it's going to be pretty awesome.

We're not quite finished with our set, and normally I wouldn't post about something until we were, but it's the weekend (woohooo!!!) and I know a lot of you are going to be shopping tomorrow, so I wanted to get this on your radar. If you have a child who likes Plants vs. Zombies, and who likes to build too, this set is bound to be a big hit.  Plus, by its very nature, it allows for a good amount of family time to take place (if you help or watch your child build), which is always a big win (for parents and for children).

Make a note, if you're picking this up for a gift, to purchase 2 AA batteries as well. They are required to run the motor and are not included.

Recommended for ages 7+ (small parts).

The 70-Model Kit fosters creativity by allowing your child
to choose what he or she wants to build.

One more thing before I close: If you are out shopping this weekend, another item by K'nex that you might want to consider is the 70 model kit that encourages free play. You can make so many different things with the items in this kit. We'll break ours out once the set above is built. Take a look at the video below. This is a surefire kid-pleaser, and it's big (so it'll look nice wrapped and under the tree). :)

You can learn more about K'Nex by visiting their website. You can also follow them on Facebook (where I've seen some pretty great sales listed lately!), YouTube, and/or Twitter.