The case for buying once and well: why a single solid wooden toy, chosen carefully, costs less per year of play than a drawer full of plastic, and may still be in the family when your child has children of their own.
An heirloom toy is one built to survive both childhood and fashion. In practice that means four things: it is made from a durable material, usually solid hardwood; it can be repaired or have parts replaced rather than thrown away; it needs no batteries, screens or software to work; and its play pattern is timeless, so a child in 2056 will want to play with it for the same reasons a child in 1956 did. A chess set, a croquet set, a set of wooden building blocks, a doll's house: these pass every test. A toy that sings a licensed theme tune passes none of them.
The question parents actually ask is simpler: is it worth spending more? For a small number of toys, the answer is clearly yes. Not because expensive is automatically better, but because a well-made toy with an open-ended play pattern is used for years rather than weeks, can be handed to a younger sibling intact, and carries something no new purchase can: a history. We make toys and games at Jaques and have done since 1795, and we still hear from families using croquet sets and chess sets that are over a century old. That is not a marketing claim. It is the everyday reality of building things properly.
The sticker price of a toy tells you almost nothing. The number that matters is cost per year of genuine use, and on that measure the cheap toy is usually the expensive one.
Consider a plastic electronic toy at £15. Most are played with intensely for a few weeks, then drift to the bottom of the toy box once the novelty (which is doing most of the work) wears off. If it survives a year before the battery compartment corrodes or a speaker fails, it has cost £15 for one year of fading interest. Now consider a solid hardwood toy at £45 that is played with from age two to age seven, passed to a younger sibling for another five years, and then boxed for the grandchildren. Ten years of active use puts it at £4.50 a year. Thirty years across two generations puts it close to £1.50. The "expensive" toy is several times cheaper, and that is before you count the toys you did not buy because the good one kept being chosen.
The honest caveat: this only works if the toy genuinely gets used. A beautiful object that sits on a shelf is decoration, not value. Which is why the next question matters more than price.
Toys fail in two ways: physically and psychologically. An heirloom toy has to survive both, and the toys that do share a recognisable anatomy.
Solid hardwood takes knocks, teething, garden weather and forty years in a loft. When it scratches, it can be sanded; when it dulls, it can be oiled. Hollow plastic and thin MDF veneer cannot say the same: once cracked or chipped, they are finished. Wood also ages well aesthetically. A worn wooden toy looks loved. A worn plastic toy looks broken.
An heirloom toy can lose a part without losing its life. A skittle can be re-turned, a croquet mallet re-handled, a missing chess pawn replaced. Buy-it-for-life toys are almost always toys made of simple, separable components rather than sealed units. If a toy cannot be opened, mended or completed, it has a planned ending.
Every battery compartment is a countdown. Electronics fail long before wood does, and a toy whose appeal depends on lights and sounds is dead the day they stop. There is a developmental argument here too: the more a toy does, the less a child has to. Toys that perform tend to make the child the audience; toys that wait make the child the author.
Key citation
Trawick-Smith, J. et al. TIMPANI Toy Study, Eastern Connecticut State University: simple, open-ended toys such as wooden blocks and construction sets consistently scored highest for sustaining rich, complex play, outperforming electronic and single-purpose toys.
This is the test most buying guides miss. A toy survives psychologically when the play it invites does not date. Building, balancing, racing, strategising, pretending, knocking things down and setting them up again: these are human constants. Chess has been played in recognisable form for centuries; we standardised its pieces with the Staunton design in 1849 and it has not needed updating since. A toy tied to this year's film, by contrast, expires with the sequel. Ask of any toy: would this have made sense to my grandmother, and will it make sense to my grandchild? If yes to both, it can become an heirloom.
Browse solid wooden toys built to be handed down →There is a category of value that never appears on a price tag. A passed-down toy arrives in a child's hands already carrying a story: this was Daddy's chess set, Grandma learned to play croquet with this very mallet, your aunt chipped that skittle in 1989 and cried about it. Children are natural historians of their own families, and an object that connects them to the people they love, including people they never met, does quiet work that no new purchase can.
It changes the adults too. A parent teaching their child on the board they themselves learned on is not just passing on a game; they are repeating a scene from their own childhood from the other side of the table. Families tell us this is the moment the toy stops being a possession and becomes part of the family's furniture of memory. And it subtly teaches children a counter-cultural lesson: that the best things are kept, mended and handed on, not replaced. In an attention economy built on the new, an old wooden toy is a small act of resistance.
Why shared play matters
Hirsh-Pasek, K. & Golinkoff, R. Research on guided play and language development: the richest learning happens in back-and-forth play between child and adult, the exact interaction traditional games are built around.
Much of the conversation about sustainable toys focuses on what a toy is made of and what happens when it is thrown away. The more important question is whether it gets thrown away at all. A toy used for thirty years and never discarded has a smaller footprint than almost any recyclable toy replaced every eighteen months, because the most polluting toy is the next one manufactured. Longevity is the form of sustainability that actually works in a family home.
The toy industry's waste problem is largely a durability problem. Most discarded toys are mixed-material plastic and electronics that cannot be meaningfully recycled, so they go to landfill regardless of intentions. A solid wooden toy sidesteps the whole question: it does not get recycled because it does not get binned. It gets inherited. If you want one rule for greener toy buying, it is this: buy fewer, better, and plan for each toy to have more than one owner.
Not every toy needs to be an heirloom, and a wise toy budget is uneven on purpose. Spend properly on the toys with long lives and open-ended play: wooden blocks and stacking toys, a proper chess or draughts set, classic outdoor games like croquet, skittles and quoits, a doll's house, a good puzzle. These are the toys that will be used across a decade and survive it.
Save on the genuinely consumable: craft materials, chalk, bubbles, paper, party-bag novelties. These are meant to be used up, and there is no shame in buying them cheaply. The mistake is the middle: spending repeatedly on fragile, battery-driven toys that are neither consumable nor durable. That middle category is where most toy money quietly disappears.
A useful habit is to let the big moments fund the heirlooms. Christmas, christenings and milestone birthdays are when grandparents ask what to buy; pointing them at one excellent, lasting thing rather than five forgettable ones turns gift-giving into legacy-building.
See traditional games families have played for generations →Jaques has been making games in Britain since 1795, which makes us the oldest games company in the world and gives us an unusual data set: more than two centuries of watching which toys last and which do not. We invented croquet as a commercial game in 1851 and the Staunton chess set in 1849, and both are still made, and still played, in essentially their original form. We regularly hear from customers using sets bought by their grandparents.
Two hundred years of that teaches you something simple: children do not change nearly as much as toy catalogues do. The toys that survive are the ones that trust the child to bring the imagination, the strategy and the noise. Materials and honest construction do the rest. That is the whole secret of an heirloom toy, and it is available to any family willing to buy once and buy well.
Explore chess sets in the original Staunton pattern →Spend more on toys with open-ended play and long working lives: wooden blocks, a proper chess set, classic outdoor games like croquet and skittles, doll's houses and quality puzzles. These get used across many years and often by more than one child, so the real cost per year is low. Save your money on consumables like craft supplies and on anything battery-powered, which rarely outlasts the batteries' novelty.
Toys hold value when they are solid wood, complete, and tied to a timeless game: chess sets, croquet sets, quality building blocks and well-made traditional games all resell respectably and are often kept rather than sold. Branded plastic and electronic toys lose most of their value almost immediately. The better way to think about it is value in use: a toy played with for fifteen years has repaid its price many times over whatever the resale market says.
Four things: durable material (usually solid hardwood), repairability, independence from batteries and screens, and a play pattern that does not date. Add one more that develops over time: a story. A toy becomes a true heirloom the day a child knows it belonged to someone they love.
Not automatically. Price is only worth paying when it buys durability, repairability and an open-ended play pattern; an expensive electronic toy fails the same way a cheap one does, just more expensively. Research such as the TIMPANI toy study consistently finds that simple, open-ended toys sustain the richest play regardless of price. Judge a toy by what it lets the child do, then pay for the construction quality that lets it keep doing it for decades.
Keep it dry, store it indoors, and clean it with a barely damp cloth rather than soaking it. Light scratches can be sanded gently and the wood refreshed with a child-safe oil or wax once a year. Keep boxes and any spare parts, label the family history inside the lid if you like, and repair small damage early: a re-glued joint today is a toy in your grandchild's hands tomorrow.
Britain's oldest toy maker. Every toy open-ended, wooden, and built for exactly the kind of play the research recommends.