Toys & Games
Buy and sell toys and games in Guatemala.
Two gift dates set the rhythm of the toy year in Guatemala: Día del Niño on 1 October and Christmas Eve less than three months later. In between, new toys from the shops and pre-owned ones passed on by families sit side by side, from LEGO sets and Pokémon cards to the wooden spinning tops and cup-and-ball toys still made by hand in Totonicapán. What a used toy is worth comes down to four plain questions: is it complete, is it clean, does it work, and is it genuine. Ask all four before you agree a price.
Four tests for a used toy, one for each corner of the toy box:
complete, clean, working and genuine, and each branch leans on a different one. In puzzles and board games completeness is everything, since one lost piece or card can leave a box unplayable. Cleanliness comes first in baby and toddler toys and plush toys, which have spent years in small hands, mouths and beds. Whether it works decides anything in vehicles and RC. Genuine is the question in trading card games and among the fashion dolls, where a fake copies the box well and the product badly. The bikes and scooters in outdoor play are judged like any machine, on brakes, bearings and rust.
The wooden toys of Totonicapán:
are still made by hand in the department that has long been the country’s main centre for wooden and glazed-clay toys. A spinning top is a cone of hardwood that turns on a nail point, wound with a waxed cord; the cup-and-ball toy, a cup on a stick with a ball tied to it on a string, belongs as much to the workshops of Antigua. Clay whistles shaped like birds and owl-shaped money boxes come from the same benches. All are painted with aniline dyes, which keeps them cheap and means the colour rubs off with play, as it is meant to. A top meant for spinning needs its point set dead centre and straight, in wood with no split running along the grain. A glazed whistle is for an older child or a shelf, because it does not survive a granite floor.
Why a boxed LEGO set outprices a tub of loose bricks:
LEGO in Guatemala runs from about Q130 for a small box to well over Q1,000 for the large licensed sets, and a used set keeps much of that only while it can be rebuilt exactly as sold. A tub of mixed bricks is worth far less and is priced by weight rather than by set, because sorting it back into models is left to the buyer. White and grey bricks that sat near a window turn yellow, and no cleaning brings them back, so look at them in daylight.
Inside the battery compartment of a used toy:
is where most electronic toys fail. Batteries left in for months leak, and the white or green crust they leave on the contacts can finish a toy for good, so unscrew the cover before anything else. Ask to see an RC car run with its own remote and charger. On plush, read the care tag: one with a voice box or lights can only be surface-washed, so a musty smell stays. Compare a valuable Pokémon or Yu-Gi-Oh! card with one you know is real; fakes tend to be glossier and thinner, with blurred text and a card back that is slightly the wrong colour. A genuine Barbie carries the Mattel mark moulded into the back of the head or the lower back. For a puzzle, ask when it was last put together and whether every piece was there.
Toys listed in the weeks before Día del Niño:
meet the most buyers, and November does the same as families start thinking about Christmas Eve. Say what age the toy suits and how old your child was when it was put away. Count a puzzle or a board game and write the number in the listing, so a parent in Santa Cruz del Quiché can tell whether the trip is worth making; give a LEGO set its number and say which minifigures are there. Test anything electronic with fresh batteries before you photograph it, and say that you did. The families with most to pass on are the ones whose youngest has just turned ten, and a box sorted by age, with the piece count written on each lid, goes faster in late September than the same box in February.