> I highly recommend this kind of simple toy for young children.

As a parent I very much agree. And for grown-up children too.

On my desk I have a small tin containing small wooden blocks and planks, arches, etc. I get lots of play value from them - when my thinking is blocked, or if I just want to fool around and not think at all. I'm in my mid fifties.

And over at my climbing club's off-grid climbing hut we have a big box of over-sized, home made jenga blocks. Pretty-much everyone plays with them: not only jenga, but also just building structures or giant domino runs or whatever.

We all need to play sometimes.

Wooden blocks were great.

At one point way back then, my dad made something in the workshop that improved them tremendously: Wooden boards.

These were small, thin, very flat boards of oak -- about 3/16" thick and 3/4" wide. Their lengths varied in 2" increments, and the length of each board was written on it.

With boards added in, the blocks got a lot more interesting. Fastening was still limited to gravity, but things like cantilevers started happening.

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...

I had such blocks as well. For a recent take on this, I can recommend Kapla, typically come in a large (a couple 100s) box of skinny rectangular cuboids. I had fun doing, ahem, preliminary testing, before gifting them to my niece.

I have a love of wooden blocks.

I’ve seen some sets that are blocks with random flat surfaces but still balanced.

However, I notice that many antique block sets seem far superior to newer sets.

(I’m sure someone must make an amazing new set, I see some suggestions in the comments).

Having made some wooden block sets from scratch, what I am always amazed about with a good set is balance / size of pieces, coupled with variety and quantity. The balance being a vitally important part that seems to be overlooked in “bad” sets.

Allow me to introduce my favourite toy from my childhood that I have been lucky enough to be able to buy for my son recently: https://www.reddit.com/r/auckland/comments/eymcks/do_you_kno...

It’s called the Humdinger set. Made by an eccentric guy in NZ with no online presence beyond resultantly keeping an email address.

Stumbled across him randomly at a market when we visited last and had to triple take - “is this THE Humdinger” type thing. My mum confirmed it was the real deal, so we bought it on the spot.

Son loves it. Connectable wooden stuff ftw

Interesting that you mention it. Now I recall we also had wooden blocks, they were rectangular. I played with them a lot to build simple things. Kind of before I transitioned into LEGO. But those wooden blocks really were great - simple, durable and one could do quite a lot with them. I think I also built houses for my cat back then. Quite amazing how wood is so dominating - price-wise nothing beats it. And LEGO is now so expensive that I wouldn't buy it due to that outrageous prices alone.

You might like https://www.matador.at/

Same here, my kids favourite toy was a set of wooden blocks their grandfather made from just simple 2" by 2" stock and sanded them. Cubes of different sizes they could build anything out of.

And because they were just untreated wood, they could be painted and decorated etc.

Are you referring to the "Builder DI-1"[0] from the USSR? I had it in my childhood, too.

[0] https://postimg.cc/phNBBTtS

Similar story for me but the blocks were just a few scraps of construction wood. Infinite possibilities even with a few short blocks of 2x4 and angle cut pieces.

Plus, wooden blocks look a lot nicer than plastic stuff. I try to avoid plastic items because they inevitably ruin a room’s aesthetic.

I did my first programming with those wooden blocks.

I would build structures deliberately designed to gradually self destruct through a long sequence of actions. A cylinder rolls down a ramp and displaces a support that tips a tower that hits a lever that tips another ramp… endless fun.

I used to use these and a big table to simulate Stalingrad and other WWII battles. Popsicle sticks laid together as half-destroyed floorboards, and of course I had a lot of army guys to position around.

We just aged out of this as our youngest child is now 11, but I can affirm that magnatiles are fantastic and fun - and that is coming from someone who lionizes legos and considers them the ne plus ultra of toys for children.

That being said ...

We got a lot of mileage - many good years of use from male and female children - out of "Snap Circuits":

https://elenco.com/

A very, very cool building ecosystem with easy to build and understand recipes - we built a working FM radio, for instance. Not at all fussy or fragile.

My children are not particularly "STEMy" but they all enjoyed breaking out the "circuit kit".

> Idk if the quality has held up

I can vouch for the quality of modern magnatiles

The problem now is that there are a zillion knock-offs sold everywhere, both retail shops and online. We don’t buy them, but the kids get them as gifts. They all have something different, from the magnet positioning to the outer dimensions, presumably to try to dodge some patents. These become the weak point in bigger builds or throw off the dimensions in ways that add up and cause early collapse.

I’ve been quietly removing the gifted knock offs and replacing them with real ones because it makes the experience less frustrating.

We’re starting to have the same problem with LEGO now

Magnatiles are great for adults who want to play with their kids too.

The most fun my kid had was playing make believe games with me. Like I'd say "you're lost in a forest and you see a cabin up ahead and a trail that goes past it. What do you do"? And we'd go from there. Zero dollar cost and unlimited hours of fun until they grow up enough and don't want to play anymore.

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.

I would be worried that they break, the magnets fall out and the kids stick it in some orifice

Can I suggest putting a strand of Christmas lights inside the completed structure? They get a little diffused and look really cool.

For bonus points, get pics of your kids' faces lit by only that light.

Boom: next year's card.

I recently bought a XXL set for my almost 2yr old daughter... I don't get the hype. I think that the magnets are just not strong enough, so the structures that I was able to build are always super weak and would collapse if you just look at them from a funny angle...

Yup our kids still play with MagnaTiles.

We actually mainly bought the knock offs cuz they were 1/3 the price. Can’t quite tell much of a difference but maybe we just got lucky.

We have bought a bunch of them secondhand. They arrive already scratched up, but who cares.

FWIW I bought some 2 years ago and the quality is still very high.

For all the toys my kids received until they hit 3+, they probably got the most enjoyment out of cardboard boxes.

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).

Parents who are analyzing the problem like you would do well going straight to the iPad with unlimited access to YouTube.

You can get an old iPad cheap and your kid will spend every waking second on it till they're old enough to drive. Or even longer!

Dolls, cars, and balls weren't even mentioned...

My brother bought a hand-held console. You can have thousands of games (NES, SNES, Gameboy, even Amiga and ScummVM), and there is just no need for a replay value. It can be new every day. It's not for young kids, but starting with age 6 or 7, I would day it lasts several years. Using the same metric it scores at least 12 or 13.

Lego "classic" sets still exist luckily.

They are just too expensive nowadays.

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.

1800s black powder revolver replica + starter kit of stuff. Noisy, messy, fraught with peril and danger, a little less expensive and much less cumbersome than a 1980s 3-wheeler. For ~$500 you can be the coolest uncle ever and if the parents take it the kid will resent that for life.

If in doubt, buy a musical instrument.

Or paint. Or glitter.

A cooking kit.

Usually cake baking of some kind. The kids will get bored after the initial mess making part, but will be expecting a yummy treat at the end, so the parent has to see the whole thing through, _and_ clean up the mess.

For an added bonus, the kid then eats the sugary treat, and they have that to deal with.

Aren't the choices straightforward, or looking specific product links?

Generally:

- Robots with lights that make nonstop loud noises without helping with household chores

- Glue

- Glitter

- Finger paint

- Bass guitar, drum kit, or trombone

- Baking cookbooks

- Things worse than IKEA flat packs with zillions of tiny, fragile pieces like laser-cut wood models

Don’t forget noisy. Have you considered an Otamatone?

If you don't like your siblings, how about a drum kit?

Anything that makes noise; squeaky toys, fart sound generators, lazer guns, etc

Any sort of goo or slime.

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 actually played mouse trap but my kid and their cousins do nothing with the game and love to just setup the trap. That game from the 80s has become a favorite toy of the gen alpha crowd when visiting the grandparents.

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!

Yes! K’NEX [1] is based on spatial geometry. You connect plastic rods of different lengths into star-shaped connectors. This creates a "skeleton" or wireframe structure. It is much better than LEGO for building large-scale, open-air structures like roller coasters, Ferris wheels, and bridges. It is superior for kinetic builds. Interestingly, K’NEX has released "K’NEX Bricks" in the past that are compatible with LEGO studs, and some modern K’NEX sets include brick-compatible parts.

[1] https://www.basicfun.com/knex/

I still think of Capsela a lot. That's my weird pick. Weird spheres that had gears and motors and things. It wasn't fancy, I didn't do that many incredible things with it (vs my LEGOs) but wow, still hits as a very special kind of toy, just because it was the only one that actually did things.

Also, did you see the huge tiles? Wow! I had no idea but my kids would love building forts and rooms

Ehrm, I beg to differ. My 4 year old daughter has recently also started loving to draw. But, she pretty much refuses to let go of her masterpieces, at least we conviced her to store them in a shoebox, so they're not spread all over the house. And the pencils... Well, I've been picking up an awful lot of pencils from all over the house.

So I'm not sure I agree with the "lowest clean up time", even though I'm really glad she's picked this up as a "hobby".

I had the same experience, loved my cardboard bricks. My kid never connected with them the same though even though my kid is big on building toys. Now they mostly just take up space, should probably give them away.

We found the Minecraft magnet tiles the same as the author did. Looked good, not much play, not much fun, basically a dud. Generic blocks seem better.

The Minecraft blocks have some strength but not much so you can easily take them apart. But they are very sharp. Way worse than Lego to step on.

Yeah, my husband told me after I published that I missed the iPad as as the clear #1.

I can't convince my wife to let my kids keep the big cardboard box, even though they love it!

Cardboard box demolition ideas for kids [1] I like where this video is going, letting kids explore the structural capabilities of different geometries.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABHhzIJ18gQ

Cardboard box is a good one.

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.

There is also Quadro Toys. I have a couple of the large sets and have built a series of houses, climbing toys, and now a "castle" with a slide for my daughter.

Great recommendation. I'm definitely getting that for my son next birthday

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.

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.

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.

Those Minecraft blocks or the cheap Chinese knockoffs are sharper than a blade and a real pain.

Skill issue. You should try to not step on Lego bricks.

You heard of Duplo? It’s like Lego but big.

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

I also loved Playmobil. But they were so much better in the 80s, early 90s, when all the figures were exactly the same, except by the colors, so it meant they were all flexible to be dressed up as anything you wanted.

Nowadays each playmobil doll is extremely personalized which removes the flexibility to dress them as anything and limits the imagination and originality. Such a pity. No wonder Playmobil almost went bankrupt recently.

First time parent? Just kidding.

My experience as a parent, and the conventional wisdom of parents I've known, including my own, is that there's no predicting the influence of a given toy on a kid's development[0]. My hunch is that toys are better if they give the kid more agency to make up their own play and games without supervision, and many of the toys mentioned in the article are of that ilk. That could be because I still like toys, to this day, with that kind of built-in agency.

Also, growing up in a emotionally stable family culture that values curiosity and learning is probably a huge deal.

[0] Excluding cellphones and the Internet, which are their own discussion of course.

LLMs are perfect for smart and curious kids who ask so many questions they annoy adults like I did. Smart kids can teach themselves many things using them

Also makes it usable for a smaller child! Great rec, thank you

They're a parent. They probably don't have enough time to write a comprehensive article if this article isn't paying the bills.

Minecraft: weak magnets

Connetix and magnatiles are pretty much fully compatible. Connetix is the only knock off I found that is higher quality than the original (and has great marble run)

The way it used to be, is if they come back with fasteners and nails attached after playing in the grass it's worth mentioning to the pediatrician on the next visit.

Magnetix?

Author here, I don't think I did affiliate market links.

First I’m seeing them, but that means very little. Every preschool we used had the normal magnet tiles though so I’m familiar with the concept.

Fair to question this. Most things are fake and… lame.

just encountered these in a local public library a week ago. toddlers loved them.

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.

Low cleanup time is even more important for kids doing it than grownups.

I annoy my wife by sorting magnet tiles away color type AND color. I do it as fast as possible with mock sorting algorithms. She shoves them back into the box.

Ah. So they are federated with minimal compatibility issues. There may be a lesson here.

On the bright side, you have 365 days advance notice!

Board books. Adult reads, let the child turn the pages.

Simple kinetic toys, of the sort where you put a ball in a hole and it pops out somewhere else. Same pleasure as a marble run, without the choking hazard.

Adult mimicry toys, like play kitchen, doctors bag, etc. With the right setup and creative inspiration they can learn to putter about inventing simple tasks and executing them.

These little wooden shaker eggs went over quite well with my 18mo nephew:

https://www.amazon.com/HABA-Musical-Eggs-Acoustic-Germany/dp...

He's also enjoying the Mega Bloks someone got him though he's mostly just sticking them together and throwing them.

Literally something to bang, like a toy hammer.

Or take them to a library that has toys, see what they play with, and then go buy that.

That's what the magnatiles are for. The toy they really want is a rocket ship, so instead we give them a cheap little tool to imagine it with.

Filling in creeper holes and cutting down floating trees left by my children is a never ending job though.

Sorry for the confusion on this. There's a weird thing that happens when a post is put in the second chance pool (https://news.ycombinator.com/pool, explained here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308) then get lobbed onto the front page nearly 7 days after it was submitted. It can be getting lots of upvotes and a good discussion, then suddenly it "expires" and loses its ranking and disappears, which means the discussion ends prematurely and people who may have found it interesting may not see it. So I've tried to rescue it by creating a fresh copy of the post, and moving the comments to it. I've now restored the karma score to it too to make it less confusing. There's no way to do this that avoids some form of confusion to some people but at least this way the post gets its deserved amount of time on the front page and full opportunity for the discussion to play out.

For some reason comments were moved from the original post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46315583

I'm not following the implication/purpose of this post.