Dora's Magical Castle did not hold a magical spell over my child!

My daughter enjoys Dora the Explorer quite a bit.  But, she fluctuates dramatically.  She will love playing with items from Dora for days on end and then drop them like a hot potato.   The magical castle she thought was pretty awesome and played with it non-stop for a few days, but then she backed off of it pretty quickly and did not seem to go back to the castle.

The Product
 
This is a plastic castle with the front looking really sharp with pretty colors purple and orange.  The back, when you look at it has basically 7 rooms.  The back is open for fun play and you have a top room or turret where the princess can look over the royal home land.  The next level has

The castle is about 33 inches long by about 9 inches wide and about 21 inches high.  These measurements are just rough measurements and not exact.  It is fairly lightweight and easy to move around, for the most part. 

When you first take this out of the infuriating packaging with all of the little plastic coated wires, etc., you have to put the pieces together.  You have to put the levels together and install the floors to the base unit.  Picking it up, if you carefully pick it up by the top turrets, you should be ok to move it around briefly.  But, don’t plan on a long carry doing this, it will likely pop apart.

There is a magic wand that Queen Mami and Princess Dora can use for magical things to happen with the furniture and the house.  For example, in the dining room, when there are no guests and the table “leaves” are put away, if you suddenly need to serve a wonderful dinner, you just put the magic wand to the special star on the table and viola….the table leaves and a meal appear for your guests.

There are a few fun little magical things with the castle.  But, my daughter enjoyed them roughly 15 times a piece and found that it wasn’t that terrific.  One of the secret passageways seemed to get a little stuck more often than not.  Maybe I didn’t get the castle put together well enough, who knows.

The castle itself is made of a stronger plastic, but it is still “bendable”.  If you push on items or pull on them, the plastic does have a bit of give to it.  Of course, you want to be careful with it, especially if it is cold, as it could crack easily.  The plastic is nicely rounded and has soft edges so that little ones can play with it without worries.  Make sure if you do pick this up that you check it over.  Manufacturing could have made a mistake or forgotten a piece and you certainly don’t want your little one to get cut.

Overall Impressions
 
The castle took me roughly 30 minutes to pull apart from the box and to put together.  Every so often it slips apart on me, but it’s easily snapped back into place.  The rooms are nice for kids to play and the hidden magic places and items in the castle are nice, for a while.

The castle did not hold my daughter’s attention for very long.  But, others that have this item have stated their children adore it and play with it for about an hour every couple of days.  It leads to creative play and a sense of fun with the magical items that are in the castle and that look of “how did this work” when they first start playing with it is fun to watch.

I think if you have a chance to pick this up for a younger child, I would say 3 years old or so, you likely will have a child that will play for a long time.  I think the older children 5 and up will be tired of this quickly and you will be looking for a nice family to donate this to or sell it in a garage sale.  It’s a cute castle, but the novelty wears off with the older children really quickly.

~Thanks for spending time with me today!~