When I was about 5, I figured out a way to use the wooden blocks my father had made for me to build marble tracks and houses.

The finished house would have a hole on the top; sometimes two smaller houses would be connected by short pieces of curtain rail. Putting a marble in the top hole would make it follow a complicated path inside the house and/or roll on to the other house. Finally, after much clicking, the marble would emerge from a door at ground level.

Today, in a magazine ad, I stumbled upon a modern equivalent of my old marble track: Cuboro. Here’s a picture of a finished setup. And a movie.

Marvelous but expensive: the basic 54-piece set costs about $140 in Germany, and there are about 10 extension sets with comparable prices. The cubes are handcrafted wood.

Update: Boing Boing picked up the link.