At 20 months you’re still a bit early, but some of the games for younger ones make a nice transition from ‘playing with blocks’ to puzzle solving. Plus they go up through the ages nicely - our oldest is 7 and there are plenty of good ones for him.
Also they serve as a good gateway drug to board games…
This is the one I had (or if I'm wrong, another SKU or something, because this is extremely familiar): https://web.archive.org/web/20230413054933if_/https://i.pini...
I'll specifically point out the letter keys that are half red, showing musical sounds (do re mi, etc.). Definitely not random.
When my kid was around 20 months old, she got really into Brio. This kit gave us hundreds of hours of entertainment- she’s seven now and still plays with it:
https://www.brio.us/products/all-products/railway/classic-ra...
It’s a well made wooden train set. It was great for helping with her fine motor skills, taught us a lot about working together and was genuinely a lot of fun…even for her old dad.
(I realized how widespread these parts are online after my toddlers got a Duplo-Brio gift that was purchased from an online shop but was obviously printed.)
And they still do educational laptops: https://www.vtech.co.uk/brands/brand_page/electronic_learnin...
We've had their walker as well, the buttons definitely weren't random on that.
My oldest son (8 now) got a toy laptop when he was around that age, and he learned shapes, counting, and letters with it. It's looks really beat up now, but it still works and it wasn't too annoying or stupid.
In general I don't think electronic toys for toddlers are a good idea. But those two things from Vtech turned out to be allright.
So far for toys targeted at toddlers, we've been extremely happy with the lovevery toys.
Maybe you don't have a use for them, because your kid will happily look at a picture book while you fold the laundry, but not all kids are like that. One of my kids wants almost constant attention and won't let me get any housework done, so I've really learned to appreciate the few annoying toys that are interesting enough to keep him engaged for a few minutes.
But yes point taken, although at that point, I think some of the better tv shows (like numberblocks) might be better than those toys with callback function.
I don't get why anyone would think those toys are good. It doesn't teach anything, pressing a button will result in completely different sound randomly so there's not even a cause and effect relationship between an action from the toddler and the light/sound coming out of the toy.
That said, coming back to this article, we did get some metal toy cars for our son and he happily makes vroom sounds while moving them around (he has learned that from the older kids in our apartment building). So at least imagination influenced by seeing other kids hasn't completely disappeared.