Building Sets & Blocks
Buy and sell building sets and blocks in Guatemala.
Ask for a block at a Guatemalan hardware counter and you will be handed the concrete one that goes into a wall, so toy listings do better under the brand name. Building sets run from the chunky Mega Bloks and Duplo a two-year-old can grip to LEGO kits with a numbered instruction book, magnetic tiles that snap together edge to edge, and plain wooden blocks. Some come new and still sealed. Many are pre-owned, a tub that has already built towers for two brothers and still clicks together the way it did on the first day.
Duplo, Mega Bloks and which bricks fit together:
brick size sorts everything else. The big first blocks, Mega Bloks First Builders and LEGO Duplo, are made for hands under three. They look alike but are separate systems. Duplo is designed to take ordinary LEGO bricks on its studs, as long as the LEGO piece has an even number of studs, while big Mega Bloks only lock properly onto their own kind. Standard-size bricks are the next step up: LEGO leads, Mattel makes its Mega sets for Pokémon and Halo fans, and Cobi, Sluban and Mould King make compatible bricks. Magnetic tiles are the other large family. Magna-Tiles, PicassoTiles and Connetix join each other freely, so a mixed box still builds; Magformers use a different shape and do not combine with the others. Push-along toys with a handful of fat pieces sit with baby and toddler toys.
A kit with a manual or a tub of loose bricks:
decides how it gets played with. A boxed set with numbered bags and an instruction book suits a child who likes finishing a model, and it keeps its value only while it can still be built as pictured. A tub of mixed pieces suits free building and is the better buy for a younger child, who will knock the model down within the hour anyway. Standard bricks are marked for three and up, so a home with a crawling baby stays a big-block home for a while. And buy into the system already in the house. A second bucket of the same kind doubles what a child can build; a new system starts from zero.
Mega Bloks bags and what wear does to the price:
a starter bag of big Mega Bloks runs to around Q200 new, and second-hand the gap has little to do with age. Big blocks are close to indestructible, so a used bag loses value on dirt and missing pieces, not on years. Kits work the other way round: a set without its instruction book, or short of the two special pieces the model depends on, is worth far less than one that can be rebuilt from the first bag, even when every brick looks new.
The mark on the studs and the grip of a used brick:
tell you most of what a pre-owned lot really is. Genuine LEGO carries the word LEGO on every stud; other makers stamp their own mark or nothing, Sluban for instance uses M38. Press two bricks together and hold them upside down. Good bricks stay put; tired or cheap ones drop apart. On a kit, count the special parts against the picture on the box, because plain bricks are easy to replace and printed ones are not. Turn big blocks over as well. Grime packs into the hollow undersides; it washes out, but it shows how the box was kept. On magnetic tiles, run a finger along every edge for cracks and shake each tile next to your ear: one that is split or rattles has a loose magnet inside and belongs in the bin, not back in the box.
Naming a box of bricks the way buyers search for it:
put the brand and the system in the title, Duplo, Mega Bloks, LEGO or Magna-Tiles, rather than just blocks, a word that on a general marketplace also pulls up the concrete kind sold for walls. Sort the systems apart before you photograph, spread the pieces on a plain sheet, and say honestly whether clone bricks are mixed in. For a kit, say whether the instructions and the box survive and which pieces are missing; for magnetic tiles, give the count and confirm that none are cracked. A parent driving in from Escuintla or Huehuetenango for a big tub will want a rough piece count and to know whether it comes in its own bucket.