Category: Plastic Building Kits

Plastic building kits are construction sets designed for children that primarily utilize plastic components. These kits consist of various interlocking pieces, connectors, panels, and accessories that allow children to build and create a wide range of structures, vehicles, and other imaginative designs.

Plastic building kits are known for their versatility, durability, and ease of use. The pieces are often designed to fit together securely, enabling children to construct stable and sturdy creations. These kits usually come with a variety of shapes, sizes, and colors, allowing for endless possibilities and encouraging children to think creatively and problem-solve while constructing their designs.

Many plastic building kits also incorporate specialized parts such as wheels, hinges, and gears, adding an extra level of functionality and enabling children to create movable and interactive models. Some kits may even include motorized components that bring the creations to life with spinning gears or moving parts.

These kits are popular among children of various age groups and provide numerous educational benefits. They promote fine motor skills, hand-eye coordination, spatial awareness, and logical thinking. Additionally, plastic building kits foster creativity, imagination, and cognitive development as children design and build their own unique structures and scenarios.

Overall, plastic building kits offer a stimulating and engaging way for children to explore construction, design, and engineering concepts while having fun and unleashing their creativity.

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Clics Cook With Kitchen

Some Clics sets, like this cook with kitchen set, have human figurines. These figurines share many pieces with the basic Clics details, and look more blocky and silly than, for example, Lego figures. This small set has some basic pieces and stickers, and a cook figurine with accessories.

ClicsToys, a Belgian company established in 2001, operates its very own factory located in Kempen, where they craft the popular Clics building blocks. These building sets mostly have square pieces, all sharing identical form and shape. What sets Clics apart is their ability to connect smoothly at the edges, allowing flexible joint movements.

Using these plastic squares, the creative possibilities are endless, even though Clics sets usually offer relatively few extra pieces and accessories. Some sets may include wheels and decorative panels, but few extra items. The true strength of Clics lies in the generous number of pieces in their sets, allowing you to make even biggest creations with ease. The pieces of Clics are too big to swallow and easy to hold, so they are safe, but some connections can be too tricky to younger kids. So the most sets are recommended for children who are 3 years old or older. However, these sets will be interesting even for the 10-years-olds.

The fundamental building blocks in Clics are square, which naturally leads to the cubic or brick-like structures. However, the great advantage of these blocks is the ability to connect them at various angles, making diverse shapes. Careful assembly can even give you triangular or sloping figures. Nevertheless, the most robust and tough structures in Clics are cube-shaped. Additionally, you can create flat mosaics by combining pieces of different colors.

Clics Cook With Kitchen
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Guidecraft IO Blocks Minis

Guidecraft IO Blocks Minis are very similar to Gakken New Blocks and its clones. They have pieces of similar shapes, even if they are smaller than both Gakken and “big” Guidecraft pieces. However, it is not a “Gakken clone”, because some pieces are unique, and you can’t find them in the actual Gakken sets. Even if this set was, in fact, inspired by Gakken, this is not necessarily a bad thing. Many countries released their own waffle blocks over the years, often with their own unique tweaks, and this only added variety to the market.

Gakken is probably one of the most popular “waffle” blocks. The Gakken Blocks sets have many different forms and shapes of the blocks. There are arched blocks, blocks with different numbers of pegs on different sides, and figurines. There are also some pieces that can work like the rails for the Gakken trains. Those same pieces are just as thick as any other Gakken block, and you can use them in many ways, not just for building rails.
Gakken are Japanese sets, and Japanese Amazon has a bigger choice of them. But the shipping may be long and expensive. In countries that are far from Japan, finding these sets can be more tricky, but there are plenty of sets that have pieces of the same shapes.
Original Gakken Blocks sets appeared in Japan in the 1960s. Their original purpose was education and helping children develop imagination and fine motor skills. Gakken quickly became popular in Japan, and they are one of the oldest “waffle” blocks that are still around. There are many sets that try to repeat the Gakken concept, but not all of them have this high quality. Another similar set brand is Danish Plus Plus, but in Plus Plus all the pieces have the same shape.

Guidecraft IO Blocks Minis
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Pythagoras Mouse House

A house we made for the favourite plush mice from openwork Pythagoras pieces. There is a door on the other side, but the brown mouse tries to crawl through the wall.

Pythagoras, Tiko, and Tako are vintage building sets. They have big panels of different colors and shapes, that connect by the edges. Each piece has sockets and balls that can snap together, connecting the pieces. You can also connect the pieces of different shapes, as long as their sides match. This connection is strong enough to hold even the biggest structures together.

Because of the sockets’ form, Pythagoras and Tiko panels can form both flat surfaces and 3D shapes. The flexible joint connection means that you can connect the pieces at different angles. The bigger panels are huge – they are a few inches long, so kids can create toy hats or items to hold, and not just toys. They are sturdy enough to wear and to play with. There also are smaller pieces that can help connect the bigger pannels together or make smaller crafts. The pieces of this set have all kinds of shapes – there are different triangles, rectangles, squares, pentagons, and so on, all in different colors.

Sadly, Amazon seemingly has no sets exactly like Tiko and Pythagoras, but some very similar concepts also are interesting enough.

Pythagoras Mouse House
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Zoob 500-Piece Set

Zoob 500-piece set is a classic Zoob set in all possible ways. It has those typical Zoob pieces with balls and sockets, but no extra pieces. This is a great set if you are interested in Zoob building. It’s more than enough for big and complex crafts.

Back in 1997, inventor Michael Grey introduced Zoob, a toy inspired by the science of motion and organism development. Zoob represents an acronym for Zoology, Ontology, Ontogeny, and Botany. Each set has rod-like pieces with joint balls and sockets on their ends. Each of these balls has small bumps on its surface, so the joints can both move and stay in a certain position if you need them to.

This innovative toy features a ball and socket connection system, mimicking the natural movement and design found in people, animals, and machines. With just five basic shapes, Zoob offers 20 different ways to connect them together.

Zoob building sets have won awards because they’re different from regular building blocks. They use plastic pieces that snap together, like gears and joints, to build all kinds of objects, limited only by your imagination. After you build something with Zoob, you can actually play with it – the pieces were designed to move after being assembled, so you can have fun with the toys you create.

Zoobs are great for helping children improve their fine motor skills. The pieces are small enough to easily manipulate and put them together. But they’re not too tiny like some other toys, so it’s easier for kids who find small objects tricky.

Zoob 500-Piece Set
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Rainbow Toyfrog Interlocking Gears

These interlocking gears by Rainbow Toyfrog are a version of a popular type of building set. The gears in this one are not rotating on top of some structure – they are the basic building blocks of the set. The gears connect if you interlock the pins, or if you stack them. With these simple connections, you can build different shapes and mosaics. This set includes 100 pieces in 10 different colors.

All the gears have the same shape and size, the only difference is the color. However, there are still many possibilities to build, especially if you have many pieces. The gears can also interlock if you connect them at an angle. Sadly, the possibilities to build a moving toy are very limited, because the gears can’t really move once they connect. The only movement these gears are capable of after assembly is slight rotation, and it’s only possible if you connect them axis-to-axis. There are also no extra pieces or decorations, so the gears are the only things you have to work with.

The gears themselves are rather big, they are safe for the small children to play with. They also can hold together even in a very big craft without falling apart.

Rainbow Toyfrog Interlocking Gears
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Guidecraft IO Blocks

Guidecraft IO Blocks are very similar to Gakken New Blocks and its clones. They have pieces of similar shapes. However, it is not a “Gakken clone”, because some pieces are unique, and you can’t find them in the actual Gakken sets. Even if this set was, in fact, inspired by Gakken, this is not necessarily a bad thing. Many countries released their own waffle blocks over the years, often with their own unique tweaks, and this only added variety to the market.

Gakken is probably one of the most popular “waffle” blocks. The Gakken Blocks sets have many different forms and shapes of the blocks. There are arched blocks, blocks with different numbers of pegs on different sides, and figurines. There are also some pieces that can work like the rails for the Gakken trains. Those same pieces are just as thick as any other Gakken block, and you can use them in many ways, not just for building rails.
Gakken are Japanese sets, and Japanese Amazon has a bigger choice of them. But the shipping may be long and expensive. In countries that are far from Japan, finding these sets can be more tricky, but there are plenty of sets that have pieces of the same shapes.
Original Gakken Blocks sets were invented in Japan in the 1960s. Their original purpose was education and helping children develop imagination and fine motor skills. Gakken quickly became popular in Japan, and they are one of the oldest “waffle” blocks that are still around. There are many sets that try to repeat the Gakken concept, but not all of them have this high quality. Another similar set brand is Danish Plus Plus, but in Plus Plus all the pieces have the same shape.

Guidecraft IO Blocks
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Gakken Samurai

Samurai made from the Japanese waffle blocks (Gakken). Gakken brand has a set with tools: a screwdriver, a hammer, bolts, nuts and nails – Tool Set. Kids can use the tools together with the parts of the set. We liked this option; the children found several suitable bolts and nuts in the toy arsenal and attached them to crafts to make eyes and ears. It turned out, of course, not as nice as the original, which has larges caps and nice color (silver), but it was interesting all the same.

Unlike Plus Plus waffle blocks, Gakken blocks have pieces of many different shapes. They have round and curved pieces, long beams and H-like pieces. The empty spaces inside the blocks also can have different sizes and shapes, so you can stack inside different pieces in different positions. All this allows even more building possibilities than the waffle blocks sets with similar pieces. However, some pieces have less connection opgtions, because they don’t have pegs on the sides, or have only one hole.

Japanese waffle blocks (Gakken) appeared in Tokyo back in 1946 when it became an important component of Japan’s post-war efforts to rebuild the nation. Back then, it became incredible important to properly raise a new generation that will be able to create a better future.

The founder and educator, Hideto Furuoka, created first Gakken waffle buidling blocks. He later told that his inspiration was traditional Japanese wooden houses. There he saw an idea of flat blocks people can took apart and rebuild again when they need to. So he decided to create a toy which repeats this principle. Children can connect these Japanese waffle building blocks, stack them, lay them, plug, or tuck blocks in different orientations, for example, horizontally, vertically, and diagonally.

Gakken Samurai
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