The set of toys I spent the most time playing with was a big bag of wooden blocks my grandfather gave me when I was very small. They are well designed, with a good selection of different shapes, e.g. it has cylinders and arches and thin planks as well as cuboids. They got a lot of use because they're so flexible in combining with other toys, e.g. you can build roads and garages for toy cars, or obstacle courses for rolling marbles. The edges and corners are rounded and the wood tough enough that clean-up was just dropping them back into the bag.
I've since given them to a nephew and I'm happy to see he gets just as much entertainment out of them as I did. Plain wooden blocks can represent almost anything. There are no batteries or moving parts to fail. Mine got a little bit of surface wear but they still work just as well as they did when they were new and small children don't care about perfect appearance. I wouldn't be surprised if they end up getting passed down to another generation and continue to provide the same entertainment. I highly recommend this kind of simple toy for young children.
Same. We had a kids’ play table (low to the ground and rectangular) that we’d prop up with a few blocks under one end to give it a slight incline. We’d spend hours covering the surface with blocks in different positions to simulate a pinball table.
Then we’d take a large marble and use two long triangular blocks as flippers to “play” on it.
100% agree. Box of blocks cannot be beat. My sister and I used the hell out of ours: we built towers, cantilevers, mazes, Rube Goldberg devices, houses for rodents, vehicles, elaborate locks, catapults, you name it. They're still in the same condition as day 1, ready for our children.
Bonus: You can roll a lot more down those long rubber racetracks than just cars.
This Christmas, after putting aside the push car, some books, and a few other little toys from the grandparents, my 1 year old has spent the past 30 minutes chasing a large beach ball one of his siblings brought up from the basement.
I can second the recommendation for magnet tiles, though; everyone in the family seems to enjoy the satisfaction of them clicking together, and finding new ways to build random stuff. The toddler just makes stacks of magnet tiles, which is fine for his development. The 8-12 year olds enjoy building relatively complex structures. Then watching the 1 year old act like Godzilla an destroy it.
Blocks is the top comment (for me); and yours is number two. Timeless classic. Another one could be plasticine clay. These toys afford play, they don't direct, restrict, or guide play. Other good toys like this: box, stick, the woods, paper (especially a big roll of butcher paper), and things to draw with (I find a black, red, blue, yellow and green sufficient).
The best toy my sister and I got is a now long-discontinued product called Omagles. They were brightly colored tubes and panels you connected with plastic clips. They were strong enough to stand and climb on. They even had wheels we could make vehicles out of.
They were so good I bought a used one for my own kid who had a great time with them.
After some Googling, I see that the rights to Omagles were bought and are now sold under the brand Tubelox.
Exact same for me! Just ten minutes ago my son opened his Xmas present, his first box of TubeLox. My expectations and hopes are high but he is currently distracted by the flashier presents.
Can confirm that Magnatiles, specifically, were maybe the best value for the dollar we ever got out of toys for our kids. Idk if the quality has held up but our kids abused the hell out of the things and it took them years to finally break just a couple of them (the largest ones are the most vulnerable). They have incredible range, good for babies but still seeing use as a supporting toy up to their tweens. Kinda pricey but if the quality is still as good as it was years ago (can’t say, the ~3 sets we bought over a couple years held up so well we never bought any more) they’re easily worth it.
We have tons of Lego too but these were far better play-value for the dollar. Not even close. Can’t say if the knockoff brands are as good.
(Can’t vouch for any of the rest of these but those giant magnetic tiles look potentially like a much better investment than dedicated e.g. kitchen playsets, way more versatile)
This was the first toy I expected to see on the list. Can agree that, though they are somewhat expensive, our kids played with them frequently for the better part of a decade and then we passed them along to cousins who completed the decade of play and then some.
We got some fabric bins to store them in, which made cleanup a 2 minute affair if adults helped or 5 minutes if the kids did it alone.
Even kids who can't read yet will somewhat play with them outside of the rules. Except they're fragile, easy to lose, will bring fights and other troubles as they grow up, and cost a ton more money if they really get hooked.
Bonus adult points - how do they work? How is it the tiles always stick to each other no matter the orientation? Easy once you know, but it took me (and friends with physics degrees) a little thinking to get.
Trivial Pursuit was like this too. Our family would chill in the den just randomly asking each other questions from the cards. I'm not sure we ever actually played it using the board game part.
I think so many 90s kids had this same experience. The Rube Goldberg trap was so much fun to build and play with, nobody bothered to even try and learn the game itself!
Am I not loading all of this article? It basically stops for me after saying "magnet toys top the list" with 3 examples of such (well, really 2) for me, with no real investigation into other toys or exploration of why the variants like the Minecraft magnet toy scored much worse in cleanup (I assume it's due to the piece size?). Anything about toys other than magnet blocks?
Another type of toy I've seen fit this bill has been wooden/plastic train tracks (the solid larger pieces type, not flimsy model type, and simple sturdy trains to go on them). It still has the element of customization and playing with what you build but cleanup is "scoop the large pieces into a bucket" (and stepping on them usually isn't painful!)
The confusion was less on the author and more on the submission reaching the top of the front page - it wouldn't have been the first time the issue was my ad blocker or something. Thanks for confirming!
This year the family favorite everyone was fighting to play including the adults was the new litebrite touch https://amzn.to/3MROaJs
Really satisfying to click the buttons and see the super bright lights as a young kid. The games like mirror were easy yet technical which had us all competing for high scores. Definitely well thought out
Everyone appreciated it didn’t involve cleanup of any little plastic pieces like the original litebright
For small(ish) kids there is a certain correlation between play- and clean-up-time. If there was a toy which deviated, it would become blockbuster and there are hardly any such. Electronic screens are popular as nannies because of this.
Personally I choose all types in rotation. One toy of high duration is Play-Doh but afterwards needs a cleaning machine.
It looks like the author examined every toy inspired by Lego, other than Lego itself.
For me the big problem with Lego was not clean up time. For me the big problem with Lego was stepping on them barefoot. How do these other toys compare?
Big problem with modern LEGO for me is that so many modern sets are almost all teensy-tiny pieces, so they look good on the box—the adult-aimed ones have always been like this since they started targeting that market, but now it’s like 95% of all their sets; also, they seem to hate exposed nubs, which is silly if the set is for play.
Larger (like tall 6x2) bricks are uncommon outside buckets, and a lot of larger pieces like dedicated wall-sections or big vehicle nose-bits or car undercarriages are now rare.
The result is that my old sets are a mix of everything from large contoured structural plates down to tiny pieces, but my kids’ bins of legos are like 98% tiny pieces. They use them less than I did, I think because it’s hard to sort through the loose pieces when they’re mostly very small, and with less variety there aren’t as many large pieces to use as jumping-off points to start a build, and making, say, a house-height wall or the front of a space ship is slower than when we had more bricks that could kinda short-hand those pieces and let you skip the middle, if you will, to focus on both the big-picture and fine details. I doubt I’d have liked Lego so much if mine had looked like theirs.
This article is aimed at younger kids, before normal Lego is appropriate. I like Duplo more than magnatiles - slightly harder to clean up I suppose, but that's because they hold together better than magnatiles, which create quite fragile structures.
Yeah, I’ve noticed the classic line showing up on shelves and they seem a ton better, but I don’t recall seeing them several years ago when we were doing lots of Lego-buying. Really limited selection and mostly big, expensive sets too, not many mid-sized ones. But glad to see them releasing sets that seem more focused on play than sitting on a shelf.
We didn't see any of the toys in the article , but had a lot of other magnetic and combinable toys. The big advantage over Lego was building sizeable things with fewer blocks.
Duplo blocs come close, but they are pricey (hard to gift second hand toys) and you can only stack them when the other toys interlock in more interesting ways. For small kids, building an articulating shape the size of their arm with 4 or 5 blocs is really magical.
You can teach a 4~5 yo kid to clean up. Below that it probably comes down to personality/level of awareness, and it's probably a lost cause for 2 year olds and below.
Then you'll want an adult to deal with the body fluids and other nasty stuffs.
PS; what I mean by "teach a 4-5 yo kid" is really spending a lot of time with them rehearsing cleaning and drilling it down. It pays dividends, but you'll be spending months and months, if not years, doing the cleaning with them at a slower pace than if you did it just yourself.
The set of toys I spent the most time playing with was a big bag of wooden blocks my grandfather gave me when I was very small. They are well designed, with a good selection of different shapes, e.g. it has cylinders and arches and thin planks as well as cuboids. They got a lot of use because they're so flexible in combining with other toys, e.g. you can build roads and garages for toy cars, or obstacle courses for rolling marbles. The edges and corners are rounded and the wood tough enough that clean-up was just dropping them back into the bag.
I've since given them to a nephew and I'm happy to see he gets just as much entertainment out of them as I did. Plain wooden blocks can represent almost anything. There are no batteries or moving parts to fail. Mine got a little bit of surface wear but they still work just as well as they did when they were new and small children don't care about perfect appearance. I wouldn't be surprised if they end up getting passed down to another generation and continue to provide the same entertainment. I highly recommend this kind of simple toy for young children.
Same. We had a kids’ play table (low to the ground and rectangular) that we’d prop up with a few blocks under one end to give it a slight incline. We’d spend hours covering the surface with blocks in different positions to simulate a pinball table.
Then we’d take a large marble and use two long triangular blocks as flippers to “play” on it.
Tilting was NOT advised.
100% agree. Box of blocks cannot be beat. My sister and I used the hell out of ours: we built towers, cantilevers, mazes, Rube Goldberg devices, houses for rodents, vehicles, elaborate locks, catapults, you name it. They're still in the same condition as day 1, ready for our children.
Bonus: You can roll a lot more down those long rubber racetracks than just cars.
Bonus 2: Why did these go away? https://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/chubs-baby-wipes-stac...
For a younger kid, a ball is often a good option.
This Christmas, after putting aside the push car, some books, and a few other little toys from the grandparents, my 1 year old has spent the past 30 minutes chasing a large beach ball one of his siblings brought up from the basement.
I can second the recommendation for magnet tiles, though; everyone in the family seems to enjoy the satisfaction of them clicking together, and finding new ways to build random stuff. The toddler just makes stacks of magnet tiles, which is fine for his development. The 8-12 year olds enjoy building relatively complex structures. Then watching the 1 year old act like Godzilla an destroy it.
Blocks is the top comment (for me); and yours is number two. Timeless classic. Another one could be plasticine clay. These toys afford play, they don't direct, restrict, or guide play. Other good toys like this: box, stick, the woods, paper (especially a big roll of butcher paper), and things to draw with (I find a black, red, blue, yellow and green sufficient).
The best toy my sister and I got is a now long-discontinued product called Omagles. They were brightly colored tubes and panels you connected with plastic clips. They were strong enough to stand and climb on. They even had wheels we could make vehicles out of.
They were so good I bought a used one for my own kid who had a great time with them.
After some Googling, I see that the rights to Omagles were bought and are now sold under the brand Tubelox.
Exact same for me! Just ten minutes ago my son opened his Xmas present, his first box of TubeLox. My expectations and hopes are high but he is currently distracted by the flashier presents.
Can confirm that Magnatiles, specifically, were maybe the best value for the dollar we ever got out of toys for our kids. Idk if the quality has held up but our kids abused the hell out of the things and it took them years to finally break just a couple of them (the largest ones are the most vulnerable). They have incredible range, good for babies but still seeing use as a supporting toy up to their tweens. Kinda pricey but if the quality is still as good as it was years ago (can’t say, the ~3 sets we bought over a couple years held up so well we never bought any more) they’re easily worth it.
We have tons of Lego too but these were far better play-value for the dollar. Not even close. Can’t say if the knockoff brands are as good.
(Can’t vouch for any of the rest of these but those giant magnetic tiles look potentially like a much better investment than dedicated e.g. kitchen playsets, way more versatile)
We have bought a bunch of them secondhand. They arrive already scratched up, but who cares.
This was the first toy I expected to see on the list. Can agree that, though they are somewhat expensive, our kids played with them frequently for the better part of a decade and then we passed them along to cousins who completed the decade of play and then some.
We got some fabric bins to store them in, which made cleanup a 2 minute affair if adults helped or 5 minutes if the kids did it alone.
Highly recommend.
FWIW I bought some 2 years ago and the quality is still very high.
As an uncle, is there an opposite version of this list?
Yes. It's starts and ends with Perfection.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfection_(board_game)
Pokemon cards.
Even kids who can't read yet will somewhat play with them outside of the rules. Except they're fragile, easy to lose, will bring fights and other troubles as they grow up, and cost a ton more money if they really get hooked.
If in doubt, buy a musical instrument.
Or paint. Or glitter.
Warning: once glitter enters your home it will never leave. You may have to move.
If you don't like your siblings, how about a drum kit?
Magna tiles are easy to clean up in the they stick to each other sense, but I still find them all over the house.
Magna tiles are my favourite of my kid’s toys.
Bonus adult points - how do they work? How is it the tiles always stick to each other no matter the orientation? Easy once you know, but it took me (and friends with physics degrees) a little thinking to get.
Also, did you see the huge tiles? Wow! I had no idea but my kids would love building forts and rooms
I know! I definitely need those. For the kids, of course.
> The worst toy is one with many pieces that my kids dump on the ground and then play with for only 2 minutes.
One of my favourite toys was Mouse Trap. I never once actually played the game. Building it and setting it off once or twice was plenty.
I agree with some of the sentiment of this blog but I also think it’s discarding a perfectly valid side to toys and play.
Trivial Pursuit was like this too. Our family would chill in the den just randomly asking each other questions from the cards. I'm not sure we ever actually played it using the board game part.
I think so many 90s kids had this same experience. The Rube Goldberg trap was so much fun to build and play with, nobody bothered to even try and learn the game itself!
Am I not loading all of this article? It basically stops for me after saying "magnet toys top the list" with 3 examples of such (well, really 2) for me, with no real investigation into other toys or exploration of why the variants like the Minecraft magnet toy scored much worse in cleanup (I assume it's due to the piece size?). Anything about toys other than magnet blocks?
Another type of toy I've seen fit this bill has been wooden/plastic train tracks (the solid larger pieces type, not flimsy model type, and simple sturdy trains to go on them). It still has the element of customization and playing with what you build but cleanup is "scoop the large pieces into a bucket" (and stepping on them usually isn't painful!)
They're a parent. They probably don't have enough time to write a comprehensive article if this article isn't paying the bills.
The confusion was less on the author and more on the submission reaching the top of the front page - it wouldn't have been the first time the issue was my ad blocker or something. Thanks for confirming!
Parents looking for a quick break on Christmas morning
Minecraft: weak magnets
This year the family favorite everyone was fighting to play including the adults was the new litebrite touch https://amzn.to/3MROaJs
Really satisfying to click the buttons and see the super bright lights as a young kid. The games like mirror were easy yet technical which had us all competing for high scores. Definitely well thought out
Everyone appreciated it didn’t involve cleanup of any little plastic pieces like the original litebright
Also makes it usable for a smaller child! Great rec, thank you
As a former child my favourites were Playmobile, Lego, Duplo, wooden blocks and those little matchbox cars.
For cleaning we just dumped everything into a big box. Repeatability is endless
For small(ish) kids there is a certain correlation between play- and clean-up-time. If there was a toy which deviated, it would become blockbuster and there are hardly any such. Electronic screens are popular as nannies because of this.
Personally I choose all types in rotation. One toy of high duration is Play-Doh but afterwards needs a cleaning machine.
Electronics are popualar also because there's a higher proportion of only child and parents have only so much time to dedicate to child play
It looks like the author examined every toy inspired by Lego, other than Lego itself.
For me the big problem with Lego was not clean up time. For me the big problem with Lego was stepping on them barefoot. How do these other toys compare?
Our problem with modern lego is that the sets are so cool and complex that the kids don’t want to take them apart after they’re built.
The 11yo wants few new sets now because he doesn’t know where he would put them, and declines to swap out his assembled sets.
You can get brick sets that are just a bunch of bricks - look up Creative Brick Box or Creative Vehicle Box
Feels just like Grandma's ole box o bricks
Big problem with modern LEGO for me is that so many modern sets are almost all teensy-tiny pieces, so they look good on the box—the adult-aimed ones have always been like this since they started targeting that market, but now it’s like 95% of all their sets; also, they seem to hate exposed nubs, which is silly if the set is for play.
Larger (like tall 6x2) bricks are uncommon outside buckets, and a lot of larger pieces like dedicated wall-sections or big vehicle nose-bits or car undercarriages are now rare.
The result is that my old sets are a mix of everything from large contoured structural plates down to tiny pieces, but my kids’ bins of legos are like 98% tiny pieces. They use them less than I did, I think because it’s hard to sort through the loose pieces when they’re mostly very small, and with less variety there aren’t as many large pieces to use as jumping-off points to start a build, and making, say, a house-height wall or the front of a space ship is slower than when we had more bricks that could kinda short-hand those pieces and let you skip the middle, if you will, to focus on both the big-picture and fine details. I doubt I’d have liked Lego so much if mine had looked like theirs.
This article is aimed at younger kids, before normal Lego is appropriate. I like Duplo more than magnatiles - slightly harder to clean up I suppose, but that's because they hold together better than magnatiles, which create quite fragile structures.
Buy the ‘classic’ line, the big boxes are great value also.
Yeah, I’ve noticed the classic line showing up on shelves and they seem a ton better, but I don’t recall seeing them several years ago when we were doing lots of Lego-buying. Really limited selection and mostly big, expensive sets too, not many mid-sized ones. But glad to see them releasing sets that seem more focused on play than sitting on a shelf.
We didn't see any of the toys in the article , but had a lot of other magnetic and combinable toys. The big advantage over Lego was building sizeable things with fewer blocks.
Duplo blocs come close, but they are pricey (hard to gift second hand toys) and you can only stack them when the other toys interlock in more interesting ways. For small kids, building an articulating shape the size of their arm with 4 or 5 blocs is really magical.
You heard of Duplo? It’s like Lego but big.
Skill issue. You should try to not step on Lego bricks.
Question from a not-parent: why not teach kids to clean up for themselves?
You can teach a 4~5 yo kid to clean up. Below that it probably comes down to personality/level of awareness, and it's probably a lost cause for 2 year olds and below.
Then you'll want an adult to deal with the body fluids and other nasty stuffs.
PS; what I mean by "teach a 4-5 yo kid" is really spending a lot of time with them rehearsing cleaning and drilling it down. It pays dividends, but you'll be spending months and months, if not years, doing the cleaning with them at a slower pace than if you did it just yourself.
It would have been helpful if I had seen this BEFORE Christmas. lol
tl;dr:
- play-time and clean-up-time are 2 dimensions of toys, and you can use these dimensions when you are considering to buy a toy
- author likes magnetic building toys (???)
- amazon ref links to buy those magnetic building toys
I'm not following the implication/purpose of this post.
I don't get it? Isn't this how "tl;dr" posts work?
I've read it, I've found it a waste of time, so I gave a warning/summary so people coming after me know what to expect?
Am I doing it wrong?
What are you warning us about?
I found the post informative.