The usual stuff, Lego, Star Wars action figures, GI Joe. Board games were pretty popular in our house too.
I got Smash Up Derby for Christmas one year. Never tired of it!
What is this? I’ve heard it mentioned by many Americans over the years, but never actually seen anything with that name.[/quote]
Abbreviated plural of Lego bricks or Lego pieces. Not necessarily official.
My father always bought me motorcycles and go carts and stuff like that. I had a big box of legoSSS as well. I built model cars and airplanes and read books. No board games in out house and folks didn’t play cards.
Mostly, I had too many fucking goddamn chores and I was too tired to actually go out and socialize with others in the rural community where we lived. Yea-Haw!
Atari 2600
Planet of the Apes dolls - damn, I wish I still had those today
Shrinky Dinks!
Paint By Numbers (did anyone ever actually finish one of those things?)
Those plastic rockets you had to fill half full of water and then use a cheap airpump to fill up with pressurized air.
Airplane models - until I was 11 (we moved to the US where we could get firecrackers…)
Kiddie microscope and chemistry set
Most of the following is stuff my parents picked up at garage sales:
Spirograph
Star Wars cards
Rubik’s Cube
Slime
Risk, Monopoly, Mastermind, Boggle, Trouble, Sorry!, Payday, The Game Of Life, Mousetrap, Hungry Hungry Hippos…
Mechano - God that was fun, until dad got sick of stepping on little bolts everywhere.
As a young kid, I had an Etch-a-Sketch, a Lite-Brite, a rubber molding kit to make worms and lizards and stuff (neat, gross stuff), and a cap gun.
Yeah, explosives were my favorite – cap guns of both types, and later, in my early teens, firecrackers, and improvised versions. We used to split the red paper tape caps and take out the powder too, and we cut the heads off matches, and opened up many hundreds of .22 bullets and fireworks, and mixed all this stuff together with fireplace crystals and purloined red-dot shotgun shell reloading powder. We ended up with a couple quarts. Then we made various devices, added waterproof rocket fuse, and tested them out in abandoned fields. My friend made a tiny cannon too, and we fired it at his house. Put a chink in the cinder block.
BB and pellet guns were fun too.
And model rocketry, yes. 
These bad boys, standing at two feet tall, called Shogun Warriors:
The middle guy fired missles, the one on the far right threw hatchets and the guy on the far left could shoot his fist.
I would set up my Star Wars action figures on blocks or put them inside Lincoln Log houses and then have the Shogun Warriors wipe them out.
I was a brilliant child prodigy and was able to turn anything into a toy. I had all sorts of toys imagineable from real toys to home-made toys. Back in the good ol’ days kids could spend hours playing with home-made toys but nowadays I see kids with expensive electronic things.
My gramma told me that my cuz and I once hid in the closet with scissors and cut the hair off ALL the Barbie dolls because the Barbies needed dates.
I do recall pictures of us as 4-5 year olds with our Barbies. Kinda like the barbie on the left like this, except some were bald, too: 
I recall good times by building stuff out of the empty tissue paper rolls. Also my cousins and I built our own WWF ring with pens/chopsticks and rubber bands for the ropes. He had all the cool real wrestling figures and I used our she-male Barbies and a GI Joe figure to fight Hulk Hogan and Randy Savage.
I played a lot with my cousin’s toys, he got REAL toys cuz his parents spoiled him. He had all the Star Wars, GI Joe, WWF, etc stuff. I had buttons, yarn, stickers, egg cartons, etc.
Good times, good times.
What is this? I’ve heard it mentioned by many Americans over the years, but never actually seen anything with that name.[/quote]
Abbreviated plural of Lego bricks or Lego pieces. Not necessarily official.[/quote]
As Ned Flanders would say, “Yes indeedly doodly”.
[quote=“Hobbes”]
kate.lin: Can you enlighten those of us who don’t recognize your bottom-most picture there? They appear to be either bottle-caps or poker/casino chips, but I can’t tell which. Either way it looks like you had an adventurous childhood, although I suppose drinking and gambling are probably not suitable for the younger children 
[/quote]
I almost missed your question.
It is made of paper and it is usually printed with popular characters in cartoon.
It is indeed a card game, though.
My grandfather had a wood shop so I would design swords and stuff and we would build them together. Then I would have sword fights with the neighborhood kids. We used metal trash can lids for shields.
I also had a lot of stuff between my brother and myself.
Action figures- Star Wars,He-Man,Gi Joe, and Transformers.
Creative stuff- Capsules, Legos, Old school erector set, Etch-a-sketch, lite-Brite, mold making thing to make insects. Spiral pattern thing that made cool designs, paints, crayons etc… I spent a lot of my childhood working in my grandma’s art studio.
Games - Memory, Crossfire, mousetrap, hungry hungry hippos, Chutes and ladders, candyland, Connect four, battleship, sorry, Pop o matic Trouble, Operation, Rockem Sockem Robots handed down to me from my uncle.
Outside stuff - Scooby Doo Fishing pole, BB Gun that I got when I was 8, Go Carts and Four Wheelers when I would go camping with my cousins, Freestyle Bike, First skateboard was a 2x4 with old roller skates on the bottom. Super Soaker Waterguns, Slip and Slide, Small kiddie pool, swing set, a variety of snow sleds and tubes because I lived near a huge sledding hill.
Greatest toy in the world which inspired my brother and I to build a wooden ramp, set a gasoline fire in the street and jump it with our Schwinn Stingrays
Had one of these made out of a tow truck tire and heavy rope
It was attached to this;
My second gun
I actually broke more windows and destroyed more property with my Louisville Slugger and stolen golf balls.
Every once in a while I’d be severely beaten. I guess that was kind of like having a toy.
Oh! And I had GI Joes.
My mom saved everything from our childhood: boxes and boxes of stacking cups and blocks and paintings from infancy, soldiers, cowboys and indians, knights and castles, monopoly, stratego, risk, memory, pick-up-sticks, barrels of monkeys, etc. Lately they’ve been trying to unload the stuff on their children before they die. 
When they flew out to my brother’s house a few weeks ago, for a family reunion, she brought a huge case of matchbox cars for the three kids (now adults) to divy up, which we did, sitting around the pile, taking turns selecting one at a time, each of us eyeing the other’s piles with envy when a cool car was snatched up by a brother. But we did it, we split the loot three ways and I brought my haul back to Taiwan.
This morning I passed my pile on to the next generation and my girl was thrilled. When I left for work this morning she was happily building roads and bridges and garages for her cars to drive on, and of course ramps for them to fly down. Maybe mom was right after all.
Honda XR75
I got this beauty for my 11th Birthday and loved it for years. It was a four stroke, so not fast off the line, but had enormous grunt up hill and gave me many a cheap thrill. The neighbor’s kids were jealous as hell and once filled my tank up with sawdust to my dismay, but I ran it until I was too big for it and then sold it on. I haven’t had another fun bike since, but I believe those early days and riding experience are the reason I have never had an accident whilst riding in Taiwan. I can certainly recommend buying a bike for your kids before they are big enough to afford something mad and dangerous with no experience to guide them. My mum’s reasoning behind getting me that bike was that I would no doubt grow out of bikes before I was old enough to do serious damage…Yeah, right! But seriously I rode off road all the time on that bike, through forest and on trails, so I was never really going flat out and if I ever came off it was always a woomfy landing. Don’t try this in Taiwan!
Tente - the cooler version of lego’s (now defunct 
) They had an aircraft carrier with real lifts that went up and down.
W. Brittans Soldiers: One complete platoon of Germans, British & US soldiers complete with crew-served weapons.
Tool box: Full set of real adult tools, including adzes, drills, and a 2 man saw. Unfortunately all hand powered - so you had to enlist the help of friends for major projects.
Seagull Outboard Motor: This one got me in the most trouble actually. Something to do with trips across harbor to get people to buy us beer, and stealing the other clubs flag…dead slow so we usually got caught.
Erector Set: When combined with tool box was deadly.
Lots of lego, books.
Slinky, playdough, gameboy, super famicom, my little pony.
The barbies that were around and had all limbs attached were forever naked for some reason.
viewmaster 
scratch n sniff stickers
silly putty
sea monkeys
puzzles
microscope
klutz books
plastic lanyard braiding
Months of summer camp spent braiding plastic rope.
playmobil figures
creepy crawlers
These were the best. SO much fun. I spent countless hours baking up monsters and bugs. Burnt myself a few times too.
polly pocket
Sylvanian Families
Tamagotchi
People were completely obsessed with these in 6-7th grade. Now that I look back on it, it was probably one of the stupidest crazes ever. An electronic egg?
melody harp
[quote=“Sinister Tiddlywinks”]VOLTRON
V O L T R O N[/quote]
The original 5 Lion one, right? Mine was made of die cast metal. I loved having Voltron destroy all the Transformers I had. And then they’d both gang up on the few poor little GI Joe vehicles and personell I had.
and the stupidest craze is back (one, thankfully I did not partake in), along with a big thread bump