I bought this little guy about 6 months ago. I solved it after about a half hour of intense puzzle-solving, and I felt pretty satisifed with myself. I immediately tried to reassemble it, but only spent about five minutes on it before giving up and pledging to "do it later." Well, 6 months later with this little guy sitting on my desk, I've decided to give it another ago and...well, it's hard to describe how much more difficult it is to put this little puzzle back together than it is to solve it. Solving it isn't even the half of it. It probably doesn't help that I waited half a year between disassembly and reassembly, but this thing is definitely testing my brain. I've worked on it for about 3-4 hours total over the course of a week at work, and I feel like I'm still not close to a solution. So, in short, this thing is definitely worth the few dollars it costs. Although I see a little paint chipping over the piece, it doesn't really have an effect on the durability at all. This little guy is durable, so you could hand it to your kids to have them solve and put back together (which, if they do, you might want to register them in gifted and/or honors classes) with no worry of it breaking. I suppose you could be a little wary of possibly losing one of the four pieces when it's fully disassembled, but that's it. I'm new to the Hanayama puzzle hobby, so I'm not a veteran of the industry or anything, but I can say as an 'of average intelligence' male, this puzzle is incredibly difficult and it will definitely test your aptitude and motor skills. Buy it. Edit: After about 10 hours total of on-and-off attempts, I finally got this sucker put back together. It still blows my mind how difficult it is. If any other Hanayama puzzles are even close to the challenge this little guy is, I'll be buying Hanayama puzzles for a long, long time. What is crazy about this puzzle is I don't feel like it was a waste of time at all (it helps that I only worked on it at work). I was constantly being challenged by it, finding out new ways pieces fit, etc. It was a big learning experience and a huge brain teaser. One co-worker mentioned, "Thanks to that thing, you just prevented getting Alzheimer's disease", which is a homage to how much time I put into this. I suspect other people will have a similar experience.