LEGO Duplo

Duplo plays in a different league: it is the LEGO for ages 1 to 5, with pieces at twice the scale. Here the buyer is not a collector — it is a family with a birthday coming up — and the typical mistake is the opposite of the one in the rest of the range: paying extra for a retired set when the current lineup covers the same thing.

Our advice is pragmatic: in Duplo it almost never pays to chase discontinued sets, with two exceptions. The trains with motors (cycles lasting years and strong family demand) and the licensed sets with characters really do disappear when they disappear. For everything else: buy the current equivalent, which also includes the latest improvements in variety and safety. Spend the money you save on pieces, not on markups.

One more note for giving well: age matters more than the lineup. Animal and vehicle packs work from very early on; sets with figures and "scenes" shine from two or three years old; and the move up to regular LEGO comes sooner than the box suggests — an enthusiastic four-year-old builder already gets along fine with the standard pieces of simple sets. The expensive mistake is not buying the wrong Duplo, it is buying it too late in the age window: better a touch early than a gift that is outgrown in three months. And if you still want to hunt down a specific Duplo set that is leaving, the grid below sorts the theme by how urgent its date really is, with the current price of each box alongside.