BDAY-BUNDLE The Rainbow Universe

The Rainbow Universe

CONNETIX Rainbow Starter Pack + GRAPAT Mandala Rainbow Mushrooms

Ages 3+

Here's something we've watched happen in a hundred living rooms.

A child builds a beautiful Connetix house with walls, roof, a window and maybe a door. They stand back, beaming with pride. And then they look at it and there's nothing inside or around it.

So they knock it down and build another one.

CONNETIX is extraordinary at making structures. The Rainbow Starter Pack (the ideal first set) gives a child everything they need to build up, out and around: rooms, towers, castles, garages, whole cities in translucent colour.

But structure is only ever half of a world. A house that nobody lives in gets built and demolished in the same afternoon.

The Grapat Mandala Rainbow Mushrooms are the ones that move in.

Thirty-six small wooden mushrooms in rainbow colours, and they are, deliberately, nothing. They have no function, no character, no instructions. Which is exactly why they can be anything. Inside a Connetix build, they become people, furniture, food on a table, trees in a courtyard, treasure in a vault, fires, flowers, mushrooms, stars; basically anything your child can dream up.

The structure gets a purpose, and instead of it getting knocked down, it gets lived in.

Why together?

Because building and storytelling are two different kinds of play, and most children only ever get given one of them.

Connetix engages the engineer: symmetry, geometry, structural logic, "will this hold?" 

Grapat engages the storyteller: who lives here, what happens next, arranging and rearranging and quietly making things beautiful.

Neither is better. A child who has both will play for hours, whereas a child with only one plays for twenty minutes, because when the building is done, there's still something to do.

And there's a third thing the mandala pieces do that nothing else in this lineup does. Left alone with them, children arrange. Circles, spirals, patterns radiating outward — the mandala impulse, which appears in children across every culture with no adult ever having taught it. It's slow, absorbed, deeply calm play. The kind that quiets a room.

This is the bundle for the family just beginning. Two toys, two entirely different ways of thinking, and enough between them to fill a childhood's worth of afternoons.

In the box:

• CONNETIX Rainbow Starter Pack — magnetic tiles
• GRAPAT Mandala Rainbow Mushrooms — 36 wooden pieces

One of seven limited bundles created for our 7th birthday. Available now till 30 July, while stocks last.