Buy the top 12 toys this Christmas at best prices
Get the best available prices for any of the official top 12 toys that the Toy Retailers Association published as being the most popular for Christmas 2011.
2012 London Toy Fair sees debut of Gander Kids
Gander Kids, the precocious new distributor will be making their debut at 2012′s London Toy Fair and bringing with them a whole range of award winning products from the US.
The UK bases toy and play furniture distributor are the exclusive distributors for P’kolino, and have enjoyed a fantastic first year, attracting such stockists as Amazon, John Lewis and Firebox during this time.
Their product ranges have also been featured on television on BBC1 as well as the Disney Junior Channel , and also a number of national interiors and parenting magazines.
Riding the wave of the ‘slow toy’ movement, the new kids on the block will be exhibiting the P’kolino range of award winning wooden puzzles and eco-friendly Arts and Crafts on stand G136 at the London Olympia Toy Fair.
The range features;
Crayons and pencils which are coloured with food dye and angular shaped so
they won’t roll away;
A stylish wall mounted Safari elephant easel, which releases the valuable floor
space taken up by traditional easels; and Silly Soft modular toddler seating that’s part furniture, part toy.
Also available will be the award-winning Multi Solution Puzzles, which were quickly snapped up by the London Design Museum and have proved popular with independent stores.
Gander Kids founder Maxine Lewis said: “We have gone from zero to 100mph in the space of one year.” 2012 will see us launching a number of new products and the LondonToy Fair will be a great opportunity for us as a small business to reach a wider audience.”
Deadstone Valley launch at Olympia Toy Fair 24th-26th Jan 2012
Grossmans, the company who brought us chrome scooters, scoobies, pogo sticks and alien eggs have introduced their latest sure fire hit. The must have product for 2012 is Deadstone Valley. This is not a game for the squeamish, as it involves creating corpses and then burying them on an interactive website.
This is the resting place for those tortured souls who have nowhere else to go, literally. You collect different characters and their coffins, then log onto the brilliant interactive website to create your own character, your own tombstones, and then bury them with epitaphs that you have created.
There are literally thousands of unburied bodies to inter using the codes from the Deadstone Valley collectable packs. On line you can visit all the graves and HGL expect to create the largest cemetery in the world with over 100 thousand burials in the first year alone!
Gory? Maybe – but market research shows that kids love it. The range launches with a collection of twelve characters which will be extended through the year
Come along to stand E39 at the London Toy Fair, Olympia from 24th-26th Jan and see the entire collection and meet the man behind the hottest toy products of the last decade.
Toys that children will keep playing with
It is not always easy to get your children what they want. Many of them want the latest toy every time there is a new craze, and you know that they will discard it within months, weeks or even days. You can be made to feel guilty if you don’t provide your children with what they want, even if you know you can’t really afford it and they don’t really need it.
When you want to delight your children by giving them a great gift, it is worth considering getting them something that they are less likely to discard in the near future. If a toy is based entirely on a television show or a movie, then it is more likely that it won’t have much impact in a month’s time. There is probably another toy that will be of more, long term, interest.
Perhaps an educational game would be a good choice. While you might get the immediate reaction that you seek, if they do play it they could still be playing it in month’s time, or even longer. Traditional toys can also be good. If it was popular when you were a child and is still for sale, then it is something that they could play with for years, and you could get a chance to relive your youth.
Whatever the occasion, remember that there is nothing to say that a single big present is better than many small presents. A lot of the fun comes from the anticipation and the unwrapping.
Ninjago Spinners from Lego
Old-fashioned Lego bricks just aren’t exciting enough for today’s kids, which is why the successful toy company is always coming up with new ways to make their products more fun for 21st century children. Their latest assault on the lucrative toy market is the “Ninjago Spinners”, Lego characters that can actually fight each other with Lego weapons. Children control one member of the two teams, either the Ninjas or the evil Skeleton Army, in a bid to become a master in the art of Spinjitzu.
If that all sounds like nonsense to adults, to kids it is the latest playground obsession. As well as the game and the figures themselves, players can also collect character cards and weapons to help them become better players.
The game starts when two players from the opposing sides place their characters on the Ninjago Spinner and choose a weapon for them to fight with. The Spinner, as the name suggests, spins the two pieces towards each other and the winner is the last man standing.
Whoever wins each round doesn’t just get the glory, though; they also get to take their opponents character and weapon to add to their own army. Although the rules of Ninjago Spinners are very clear in stating that once a contest has been finished, all pieces should be handed back to their original owner!
Should both pieces fall off their Spinner at the same time, the game is a tie and both players can try again. On the other hand if both survive the initial spin, both players simply try again with their original pieces.
Each contest lasts for a previously agreed number of rounds, or when one contestant has managed to take all their opponents’ figures and weapons. The battle cards that come with each character can add more detail to the contest, although at the beginning younger children may want to just concentrate on operating the Ninjago Spinner itself, before making the game more complex.