Toys and Games

[Rob Houghton]

Funny this thread has been revived because only last week I was reminiscing with my sister about the old toys we used to have as children. I was especially pleased to remember the name of this one...



...where you have to repeatedly flick your marble up and bring down your four cars in their respective lanes before your opponent. I think I was only about five myself when I got this, but I see the suggested age goes up to 14. Can you imagine the average 14 year old today enjoying this?

Wow! memories! I bought this from a charity jumble sale sometime in the late 1970's (my neighbour often held sales in her house, or in the local church hall for cancer charities). I loved it, and played it a lot! Simpler times!

[Stephen]

Does anyone else remember Puzzletown?



It was very American orientated (I didn't even know what a town plaza was), but I used to play with this particular set for hours on end, making all kinds of weird and wonderful layouts.

[Darrell71]

Can you imagine the average 14 year old today enjoying this?

I'm 16, and still love to play games like these from time to time. As do most of my friends.

[Anita Bensoussane]

I never had any Puzzletown sets, Stephen, but I like the look of them as they're cheerful and chunky. My sister and I used to build houses out of Lego, arrange our farm and zoo animals in "fields" around them and then make our little toy cars drive around the "roads" - i.e. around any spaces that were left between the buildings and fields. Toys that can be set up in different ways provide hours (and years!) of fun.

[Machupicchu14]

Can you imagine the average 14 year old today enjoying this?

I'm 16, and still love to play games like these from time to time. As do most of my friends.

Same! I still play with my playmobil and dolls. This is something I will never grow old of doing. And since I was 4 playmobil have been my favourite toys ever. And this fascination and pastime shared by many people around the world, both young and old!

[Rob Houghton]

I never had any Puzzletown sets, Stephen, but I like the look of them as they're cheerful and chunky. My sister and I used to build houses out of Lego, arrange our farm and zoo animals in "fields" around them and then make our little toy cars drive around the "roads" - i.e. around any spaces that were left between the buildings and fields. Toys that can be set up in different ways provide hours (and years!) of fun.

I never had any Puzzletown sets either - but I did have plenty of Lego, which was probably my favourite toy between the ages of about 4 and 9, as well as Meccano. I also had Play Mobil but only a few figures. Lego was definitely my 'thing'. My favourite was a house set which was built on two square boards. The walls of the house were hinged so the boards would swing apart and you could open the house. It was the first lego set I had with the miniature Lego figures, which are now standard. Up until that time I'd only had the larger lego figures which had to be made from lego bricks.



Old-style Lego figures - I had a set just like this one. It was great because the 'hair' could be removed and fitted on different figures heads!

[Fiona1986]

I had, and in fact still have, a lot of lego. Some I inherited from older cousins others were bought for me. I liked the soldiers/pirates stuff the most.

[Courtenay]

Ooh, Lego! My sister and I had pirate ships (our favourite), knights and Robin Hood, and a few spaceships and other things.

[Rob Houghton]

I would have loved the castle sets and pirates etc, but unfortunately none of them were about when I was into Lego as a kid.

[Courtenay]

Too bad, Rob. Lego was going through a real heyday in the mid-late 1980s and early '90s when we were playing with it — there were lots of different themes and it was all heaps of fun. Nowadays it all seems to be based on film tie-ins (Star Wars and the like), or else that ghastly pink and purple heavily simplified "Friends" range that's supposed to be for girls. When I was little, all kinds of Lego were for girls or boys or whoever wanted to play with them!

[Daisy]

We got a lego set for my elder son when it first came out in the mid to late 60s - he was given it for Christmas and we couldn't wait until he had gone to bed, to have a go ourselves! Just plain bricks then, no figures or any of the great additions there have been since.

[Anita Bensoussane]

As a child, did anyone else feel envious of a toy which belonged to someone else? When I was at infant school in the 1970s, there was a boy who regularly used to bring in his wind-up Fisher-Price Music Box Record Player and play it outside at playtime. The fact that it could play quite a few different tunes seemed like magic to me and I found the colours of the records and the sturdiness of the box appealing. I don't know whether it was that record player that gave the boy his love of music, but later on in secondary school he became an accomplished violinist and I remember him playing Rimsky-Korsakov's Flight of the Bumblebee on the school stage in an assembly. Here's a link to a YouTube video showing the Fisher-Price Music Box Record Player:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uF64du0B2H0" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Fiona1986]

I was deeply envious of my friend's collection of Sylvanian Families and of her array of Barbie clothing and accessories! I had plenty of Barbie stuff myself, just hers always seemed better. I remember particularly liking a towel/dress for after Barbie took a bath or shower that had little straps and a stud fastener, and a picnic table...

[Courtenay]

As a child, did anyone else feel envious of a toy which belonged to someone else? When I was at infant school in the 1970s, there was a boy who regularly used to bring in his wind-up Fisher-Price Music Box Record Player and play it outside at playtime. The fact that it could play quite a few different tunes seemed like magic to me and I found the colours of the records and the sturdiness of the box appealing. I don't know whether it was that record player that gave the boy his love of music, but later on in secondary school he became an accomplished violinist and I remember him playing Rimsky-Korsakov's Flight of the Bumblebee on the school stage in an assembly. Here's a link to a YouTube video showing the Fisher-Price Music Box Record Player:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uF64du0B2H0" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Aww, that's so cute! We had something similar when I was little, a Tomy toy train with colourful plastic records that slotted into the top of it and played nursery rhymes as the train ran along the floor (it was battery powered). I've just found a video of it, but the sound quality is awful (either it's distorted somehow or the "Alouette" record is horribly out of tune ). It's definitely the same sort of train as the one we had (I'm sure the box for ours was different, though), but I can assure you the music sounded much nicer than that in real life!

I can't remember anyone whose toys I was jealous of when I was little, at least off the top of my head — all right, I was a little jealous of my sister for having a bigger Lego pirate ship than mine, but we shared them anyway, so that was OK. And I was also a bit jealous of my cousin for having near-complete sets of the Noddy books and Beatrix Potter books. But I've finally, in just the last year, got complete sets of both for myself (only 30 years down the track, but it's never too late).

[Anita Bensoussane]

The Tomy train looks fun, Courtenay.

I was deeply envious of my friend's collection of Sylvanian Families...

Oh yes, some of the Sylvanian Families sets are exquisite. They weren't around when I was a child, but I've seen them in shops as an adult and I was particularly fond of a traditional-style caravan set I once saw in Hamleys.