It's in german and I can't speak to the quality of the english translation which is available
[1] https://media.ccc.de/v/37c3-11993-toniebox_reverse_engineeri...
A more hidden champion is Ankersteine. I have one of their construction kits which is in my family probably since around 1885 and these kits are still produced today.
Lego has these, too, of course, but with Lego you at least have the benefit of being able to infinitely combine these parts to build stuff from them. Playmobil is "dumb" in that regard, you can't combine anything except in those ways in which it was specifically designed to be combined.
The real alternative to Lego in my opinion is Duplo, from the same manufacturer. They have no really small parts at all, so these are really good for outside play. But still infinitely combinable.
[1] https://www.playmobil.com/en-us/content/junior_themepage/jun...
Other than Playmobil and Lego I have not seen toy fischertechnik for years, but I occasionally recognize their non-toy fixings.
Fischer was the most prolific German inventor with 570 patents, who amongst other things invented the plastic wall plug.
https://www.fischertechnik.de/de-de/produkte/industrie-und-h...
There is a „toy“ section for children, but it is to learn about electricity or renewable energy, and I think the real customer of the page are not the depicted children, but the papa with an engineering degree.
https://www.playmobil.com/es-es/
https://www.playmobil.com/fr-fr/
and based on the dropdown at the bottom, quite a lot more countries
My children loved to listen on audio books on CDs (can be rented from libraries or bought for cheap) or on an old 1st gen iPod.
Also what helps: resale value is great, so after the Tonies have had their time and your kids become older... just sell them off.
They licence the songs and then record them in-house and goodness me some of them are disappointing if you are familiar with the real soundtracks. The Moana one has the same two singers doing impressions of every character.
The original box itself was way more expensive than the Toniebox, like double the price, but I think they've made it considerably cheaper when they released the second hardware version of it. And the original box still works until today, continues to be supported by their app and has already been built in a very sturdy way (I've opened it up once to add magnets inside, so the figurines stick on it, which they normally don't do - that's the one thing the Toniebox people got right).
Which is a bummer, as I went looking after your comment - Toniebox is great but I agree it feels overpriced on the content side (perhaps it isn’t, if their competitor couldn’t make the business model work…)
https://old.reddit.com/r/jooki/comments/1eltdcm/muuselabs_ha...
I might build this with my children together.
You might want to check out https://www.hoerbert.com. This is a remarkably well-built, low-tech alternative. It is somewhat primitive, but the company seems willing to indulge customers who are technically inclined.
As an adjacent thought on the Hörbert device:
Since we live very far away from family (transatlantic flight), we decided to have our relatives record themselves reading books for our kids. They shared the audio files over Google Drive, and we could load up the audio files onto the Hörbert device so that our kids could listen to their custom audio books whenever they wanted. It provided a nice way to help the kids feel connected with the grandparents and such. With the Hörbert, all that involved was ejecting the SDK card and amending its contents on a normal computer.