Inducted Toys

Sand

Inducted Year: 2021 Sand may be the most universal toy in the world. From a geologist’s perspective, sand is a dry, gritty material consisting of small, loose pieces of rock, soil, minerals, and gemstones. […]

Risk

Inducted Year: 2021 The French filmmaker Albert Lamorisse designed a board game with simple rules but complex interactions, La Conquête du Monde (The Conquest of the World) in 1957. Purchasing the rights, Parker Brothers […]

American Girl Dolls

Inducted Year: 2021 Following a visit to historic Williamsburg, Virginia, and a Christmas shopping trip for her nieces, educator and newscaster Pleasant Rowland developed and launched a line of 18-inch dolls representing an era […]

Rubber Duck

  Inducted Year: 2013 Rubber toys first appeared in the late 1800s, when manufacturers made use of Charles Goodyear’s process for rendering rubber into malleable material. The first rubber ducks didn’t even float: they were […]

Chess

Inducted Year: 2013 Chess is one of the world’s oldest games. Its roots lie in an ancient Indian war game called chaturanga, in which pawns represent different types of fighting men that spread through […]

Teddy Bear

  Inducted Year: 1998 In 1902, on an unsuccessful hunting trip, President Theodore Roosevelt refused to shoot a bear that expedition trackers had caught and tied to a tree. The incident struck a chord with […]

Scrabble

  Inducted Year: 2004 During the Great Depression, architect Alfred M. Butts had time on his hands and play on his mind. He devised a game of 100 lettered tiles used to form words on […]

Dollhouse

  Inducted Year: 2011 The first dollhouses developed to display the miniature possessions of very wealthy Europeans in the late 1500s. These diminutive “baby houses,” as they were known, consisted of cabinets divided into compartments […]

Dominoes

  Inducted Year: 2012 Dominoes, cousins of playing cards, originated in China in the 1300s and represent one of the oldest tools for game play. From professional domino game competition to setting them up and […]