Toys with the highest play-time and lowest clean-up-time

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.

I like the look of those massive tiles that you can use to build structures. That would have been very fun to have.

I gifted my 6 year old nephew a cheap hand held analog radio (and a few other things to be fair). He loved it. I guess, it must be fascinating for a child to turn a wheel and then different music and voices are coming out of it. Also it has a frequency scale that's controlled by the wheel which I assume is good for training a technical perspective on controlled action and reaction. The antenna has to be pointed in the right direction. Maybe this gets him interested in why that is. Certainly no clean-up-time at all and play-time probably also decent.

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)

Two things come to mind. There's a relatively cheap bumblebee rider with casters at target. Our boy has grown with this thing from the moment he could sit upright and push. Now that he's older he rips around the house on it and drifts.

Second is something to climb on. We have a product called the nugget with nevernudes (accident protection) and he's tumbled and built shops/forts out of it for years now.

Lego Duplo is the best. It is a great creative toy at least from 2 to 10. Especially when you have it from early on and it is just "part of the furniture".

It's much easier to collect from the ground than Lego.

Newer Lego stuff also has so many tiny parts.

I feel like this list says a lot more about what the author wants her kids to be interested in than a real survey of the whole toy market. There are a few stuffed animals that get tons of love, and the magnet blocks were a hit for a couple months but then they got old. This is going to trigger a deluge of unsolicited admonition, but the television and the Nintendo switch have by far the highest entertainment value per dollar spent.

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.

What a strange world we're in when the top comment on a post about toys is about how LLMs are good...

These are all good toys, my middle elementary kid really likes magnatiles.

That said, I still think Lego runs the board. My 40yo Lego is still in use, I still get pleasure out of it and my kid gets even more. My kid and I just finished team building the UCS millennium falcon and now we're having a blast playing with it. Soon it'll start being scavenged for other projects. I've never seen another toy equal Lego in replayability or in the vast array of ways it can be used. As a crusty old coot I complain about the seemingly single use pieces in new Lego sets and then watch as my kid uses them in new and creative ways in MOCs. No other toy we have has the same staying power and much to my wife's chagrin it's the yardstick by which I measure every other toy.

There were only two toys I never got tired of -- legos, and computers. Both encourage open-ended creativity. (I had older lego house sets which were quite flexible. Modern lego pieces seem more specialized.) Unfortunately, so many pieces took several minutes to clean up, so I would just leave them spread out across my bedroom floor for months at a time. These days when I want to play with legos I put a bedsheet down first.

Also, I read another article from the author and subscribed just based on how concisely she expresses her ideas. She just gets her point across, then quits. I love it.

As an uncle, is there an opposite version of this list?

> 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.

Mousetrap the board game is the opposite: Hard to setup, almost zero playtime, very hard to put back in the box.

Repeat twice a day because the kids love the idea of the game!

If you can classify Minecraft as a toy, it has zero clean-up time

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.

I’m surprised no one mentions Knex. By far my childhood favorite, and for me, far more creative opportunity when comparing to something like lego.

The toy with the most longevity from my childhood were those cardboard bricks. Could be used for anything from forts, towers, hamster mazes, throwable weapons...

Not the quickest toy to clean up, but still fun since it's a building activity of its own, stacking them against a wall or something.

I was expecting to see a tablet/phone in the top place: repeatability = 5, length of play = 5, clean up ease = 5.

I know it's bad to give a kid a tablet, but the scoring used in the article is that bad it didn't award any points for how good it is for a child...

Useful! It would be amazing if the catalogue was much bigger

> Maybe I feel the satisfaction of clicking them together as I clean them up. Cleaning becomes a little like playing.

My preschooler daughter got Magna Tiles for Christmas and she's cleaning them up herself, which is a first for her.

I'm surprised the Minecraft blocks feel less strong - Magna Tiles seem to be using standard AlNiCo magnets and I expected, given the price, that the Minecraft ones would be using neodymium magnets, but apparently they're not and this weakness comes from magnets being only at the corners.

I vote the cardboard box, especially if it is a large appliance box, Unfortunately you can't really give someone a large cardboard box, but oh boy are they fun.

I can't recommend enough ordering a $10 collapsible ball pen. My son understood even at age 2 that some toys needed to be played with in his play pen, and it means I can let him play with toys with hundreds of pieces and then scoop them all up at once.

Something I like about Lego is that there are some small changes to available pieces, that result in large changes to play style.

Large flat bases to build on, or not.

Wheels, or not.

Little characters, or not.

Train tracks, or not.

Etc.

If you don't make all basic context-defining options available all the time, it keeps lego play fresh and fun.

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.

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?

The best toys are the ones that your children love to play with. There isn't a formal method for finding it. The rule of thumb is don't buy noisy toys nor toys that have parts small enough to get lost under the car seats on first play.

After my daughter turned 4, the ‘toy’ with the most play time and lowest clean up time was a good pad of blank paper and colouring pencils. The bonus is that it takes up little room and is therefore highly portable. Furthermore, if you forget it, you can replace it easily and cheaply!

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.

Can confirm that Magna-tiles score high on replayability and are way easier to clean up than Legos. My kids are teens now, but were the right age when these came out.

Lincoln Logs and Tinker Toys for a greener more affordable option.

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

Couldn't help but think: #1 is probably an ipad, and lego is probably last place because of that one time a parent stepped on one barefoot.

but the toys in the article actually seem nice.

> I score my toys across 3 dimensions

What about kid’s development? The whole point (okay, not while but the biggest) of a game is learning something.

Another overlooked characteristic of a toy, especially a toy that takes up space, is "doneness".

Lots of free-play toys that my own kids use (4 and 7) can unconditionally be defended as still in use. They haven't been touched in an hour, but an ask to put it away is met with "I'm still playing with that". So: nothing gets put away until a parent pulls authority and overrules the kid's declaration that the game is still going. Understandably, the kids find this unfair and sort of demeaning.

A board game is different in so far as it has an ending. The kids never try to weasel out of putting Hungy Hungry Hippo or chess pieces or whatever back into a box.

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

I never liked these sorts of construction toys, or legos. I'd rank any of my old action figures higher on the 3 dimensions. Sometimes some stuffed animals joined in the play. And of course as I got older, video games.

When our kids were little we got them a wire bead rollercoaster, something like: https://www.ebay.com/itm/304637213979

It's one piece. Cleanup is picking it up and putting it where you want it. For playability, that thing kept each of our kids occupied for an unreasonable portion of their toddler-hood. We then passed it on to friends, and it did the same for their kids. They kept it, and gave it back to our kids when they had kids, and it's still delivering joy.

Something I'm wondering. My kids are grown now. When they were little, we got a toy with connecting magnetic pieces, don't remember the name. The magnets broke out of the brittle plastic easily and it was actually a pretty low quality toy although the concept was cool.

There was also some kind of recall or warning about the possibility of kids ingesting the magnets. That's about all I remember. Of course you never know as a parent whether the latest safety threat is serious or over-hyped. The claimed threat was that the magnets would click together in your intestines and wreak havoc.

I wonder what the present conventional wisdom is on those magnets.

We have some magnet tiles that have tubes and ramps for building marble mazes with - they are probably the most popular toy in the house. The thing about magnet tiles is there are several brands but they’re incompatible so it’s best to buy multiple sets from a single brand.

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!)

Has anyone had experienced with the giant magnet tiles? This article seems like suspicious affiliate marketing which places are beloved product that everybody has beside one that looks kind of similar.

When I read the title the first thing that came to my mind were Magna Tiles. Glad they made it on the list.

It's the only toy in the house that lasted the test of time from she 4-8 (and counting). Also I love tidying up Magna tiles, even that is fun!

My oldest kid got a small sample of Clixco and was surprisingly entertained even with a limited set of possibilities they offered. They're great fidget toys as well.

A phone would get perfect score in all of OP's metrics, so I feel there is some stuff missing to identify really good toys.

Your mileage may vary…

As soon as I got first Minecraft block to my 5yo, the magnatiles were almost forgotten. And she never played Minecraft in her life, but saw the movie and some YouTube vids. The fact that the tiles have an image and purpose is a huge benefit, because she creates better stories with them.

But I got it only after i got kiddo to cleanup her toys from the floor regularly.

To me, game consoles were toys. Maybe they are a lot more now but the SNES and N64 felt like toys. The pc felt like a toy too.

I am very likely to be a father in the future. I am happy I have all my old consoles because it helps a bit with introducing kids to technology without them having access to all of it.

Soccer outside was fun too, there was a field nearby our house.

My parents literally just gave my daughter the alphabet puzzle for Christmas that was linked in the article as a terrible clean up vs play-time. I might send them this link!

Question from a not-parent: why not teach kids to clean up for themselves?

It would have been helpful if I had seen this BEFORE Christmas. lol

I really wish people would declare ages when talking about kid toys. Anywho, any banger toy recommendation for a 1yo?

can confirm. we just got the kids those giant magna-tiles. they’ve played with nothing else today.