I love the look of these things, but I've hesitated because they are so monochromatic. My daughter asked for the Eiffel Tower though and my husband decided to buy it from the Lego shop online. The box says for ages 12 and up so I wasn't too surprised when she glanced at the directions and asked for help. Mostly though it was because the directions were in book format, and the book doesn't stay open very well on it's own. It became a family build. I "read" the directions and pointed out the pieces and she did the building for the most part. In a few places the build gets repetitive because you need 4 of this, or 8 of that. When it got to those points she let me build. When we had trouble snapping sections together we called in my husband to get things just right. On the set we had we were missing 2 square pieces which I was able to retrieve from my own spare parts pile. I think maybe there was a design change because we ended up with leftover L shaped pieces. Not sure. I am a stickler for quality control though so I went online and let Lego know about those 2 pieces.
Sorry for all the words. I just wanted to give you some background. Here's what we ended up with. It's just over a foot tall with the antenna on top and about 4 inches wide at the base. The set has 312 pieces I think which was just about perfect for us. Sells for about $35.00 (which I feel is pricey for the size but that's the way it is.).
