To ask for your ideas for my niece and nephew

[ArtesianWater]

I don't have children of my own but have a nephew and niece who live nearby. I have always kept a couple of toyboxes at my house so they have things play with when they come over and have noticed lately that the things they have enjoyed playing with for ages seem a bit too young for my nephew.

My niece is going on six and still likes a lot of the things, plus she is very vocal about her likes and dislikes so is easy to choose things for! My nephew is going on 11 and it's him I'd like to have some new things for. Can anyone help with suggestions? He likes complicated Lego and console games like Minecraft but those aren't easy to have at my house. I already have some colouring / drawing things and science boxes but those seem a bit young too. He'll start secondary school this year and seems to be at a real in-between child and teen stage. I want him to still want to come over and don't want to baby him, but also don't want to take away his childhood fun iyswim. Any ideas would be very welcome.

A Rubik's cube. Some top trumps cards. UNO.

Have a look at the science museum shop online. Lots of cool stuff and they group by age. Remote control things generally go well.

Cant you ask him?

I heard amazon now do a toy catalogue like the old Argos catalogue-give them one of them and ask them to circle all the stuff they like the look of.

A large tub of mixed Lego is easy to keep. As he likes Lego just have one of those.
Or a tub of K'nex or Meccano.

We’ve just got a retro game stick off TikTok shop. You just plug it into a HDMI socket on the TV and has all the old games like sonic, paper boy, Tetris etc on it.

Would you have space for a magnetic dartboard? Or would he be interested in something like an airfix model that he can do a bit of each time he comes?

I could but I prefer it to be a surprise. Also he's fairly shy at the moment and I don't think he would ask for anything. We even had a hard time getting Christmas ideas out of him.

Mixed lego, board games or jenga if you're happy to play with him, and yes to the retro games - I got DS a little handheld thing (Nintendo gameboy lookalike) when he was around that age that cost £20 and had about 600 old style games like pacman, Mario, DonkeyKong on it and could be played handheld or on the TV. He loved it.

The game stick is a great idea - can anyone link please?

I think his dad (my brother) would like that too!

What about board games / card games? Qwirkle is a really good one (a bit like a cross between Scrabble and a sudoku puzzle), Labrynth, Dobble, Uno. Another good one is the Genius Cube (think they do other versions too) which can be played against another player or as a solitaire type game.

Thanks for all these ideas. I've got an amazon basket running!

I know he likes Uno so I've put that in. The Genius Cube sounds good too. He loves a Rubik's Cube but I don't think would be interested in another one as he's 'done it' now.

*Genius square not Genius cube.
https://amzn.eu/d/67tCih1

Thank you @StripyHorse that's what I found and it looks just his kind of thing.

@ArtesianWater this is the one we have. We did end up with a couple of different ones due to some getting stuck in the Christmas post. One on Amazon we returned, the software wasn’t as good, and another one off TikTok shop that was same software as this but needed batteries for the controller. This is the only rechargeable one we could find.

https://vm.tiktok.com/ZNHEBxaQTff5m-KNLRn/