Best-selling toys in the UK 2016–2019: the weekly Amazon chart archive

For roughly four years — between 2016 and 2019 — we ran a weekly post on Christmas Countdown rounding up the unofficial top 10 (and later top 20) best-selling toys and games on Amazon UK. 78 weekly charts later, we’ve consolidated the whole archive into one place: every toy that made the UK’s bestseller list across those four years, with our original notes on where it peaked and how many weeks it stayed in the chart.

Think of it as a time capsule. Some of these toys you’ll have forgotten existed (the Fidget Cube? The Fingerlings monkey?), some are still going strong (Dobble, Uno, LEGO advent calendars), and a few are useful for working out which year your now-too-old-for-toys teenager was deep into Fortnite (Hi, 2018). Where products are still available, the links go through to Amazon; if a product has been delisted, the link will land you on Amazon’s homepage with the original product code intact.

How we built this: every toy below appeared at least once in the Amazon UK Toys & Games top 10 (or top 20, for 2019) when we ran our weekly chart post. Within each year, toys are ordered by the highest position they reached, then by how many weeks they stayed in the chart. Prices are the range we observed across all the weeks a toy appeared.

Skip to a year:
2016 ·
2017 (the Fidget Spinner year) ·
2018 (the Fortnite year) ·
2019 (the Harry Potter year) ·
Toys that charted every year ·
FAQ

2016: what the UK was buying

If 2016 had a soundtrack on the family sofa, it was the cackle of Cards Against Humanity and the wet thwack of a Pie Face spinner. Party-style social games swept Amazon UK’s top 10 for almost the whole year, joined by Hasbro’s mouthguard-and-tongue-twister hit Speak Out in the run-up to Christmas. Dobble bedded in as the under-10s’ favourite. By December, Hatchimals were impossible to find on shelves (and barely surfaced in the Amazon weekly tops because stock kept selling out faster than charts could refresh), so what you’ll see below is the year as it actually traded online — heavy on party games, with the inevitable LEGO Star Wars advent calendar muscling in at Christmas.

2017: what the UK was buying

2017 was the year of the Fidget Spinner. For several months the UK Amazon best-seller chart for Toys & Games was almost completely overrun with spinners, fidget cubes and tri-spinner variants — a craze that started in classrooms and spread to every petrol-station counter in the country. Then, just as parents thought it was safe to go back to normal toys, autumn brought the WowWee Fingerlings baby-monkey shortage. Cards Against Humanity spent 38 weeks in our charts — more than any other product across the whole archive — and Dobble kept its grip on the family-game slot. The first L.O.L. Surprise dolls started appearing in the autumn, hinting at the unboxing era to come.

2018: what the UK was buying

By 2018 the Fidget Spinner mania had burnt itself out and the chart returned to a more familiar mix of board games and screen-tie-ins. Hasbro’s Fortnite Monopoly arrived in the autumn and went straight to the top — proof that any toy with the word “Fortnite” on the box was going to sell that Christmas. Nerf Laser Ops and the AI-driven Boxer robot signalled where bigger-ticket gifting was heading. Note: our coverage was lighter this year, so the unique-toy count is smaller than 2017 — but the toys that did chart were the ones that mattered.

2019: what the UK was buying

2019 belonged to LEGO Harry Potter. The Knight Bus and the Harry Potter advent calendar both spent six weeks each at number one in our chart — the first year a single licence (Harry Potter) so thoroughly dominated. Classic family games made a quiet comeback: Uno, Pop Up Pirate and Snazaroo face paint all held long runs in the top 10. And once again, an advent calendar (this time the LEGO City one) cleared everything out of the way in November and December. It’s the year the UK toy chart started to look like a curated Christmas list.

The four toys that charted in every single year (2016–2019)

Out of 249 different products to make the top 10 across our four-year archive, only four toys appeared at least once in every year. These are the constants — the toys parents kept buying year after year regardless of whatever craze was sweeping the playground that month.

Frequently asked questions

What was the best-selling toy in the UK in 2016?

Cards Against Humanity: UK edition was the most-charted toy of 2016, spending 16 weeks in our top 10 between July and December and holding the #1 spot for 14 of them. It was joined at the top of the chart by Hasbro’s Pie Face Game and the Speak Out mouthguard game, both of which became Christmas-party staples that year.

What was the best-selling toy in the UK in 2017?

2017 was completely dominated by the Fidget Spinner craze. Different Fidget Spinner and Fidget Cube knock-off models held the Amazon UK #1 spot for most weeks between April and July 2017 — at least five distinct products that we can identify. Outside the spinner months, Cards Against Humanity returned to the top and held the #1 position for 25 weeks of the year.

What was the best-selling toy in the UK in 2018?

Hasbro’s Fortnite Edition Monopoly was the autumn-2018 standout, going straight to #1 on release. The year’s overall top performers were Cards Against Humanity and Asmodee’s Dobble Card Game — both held the #1 spot during the year. Nerf Laser Ops and the AI-driven Boxer robot also charted strongly in the run-up to Christmas.

What was the best-selling toy in the UK in 2019?

LEGO had the year. The LEGO 75957 Harry Potter Knight Bus and the LEGO 75964 Harry Potter Advent Calendar 2019 each spent six weeks at #1 — the longest single-product run at the top in 2019. Snazaroo face paint, Uno Cards and the LEGO Star Wars Advent Calendar 2019 also held long top-10 runs.

Which toy charted the longest in the UK between 2016 and 2019?

Cards Against Humanity: UK edition. It appeared in the Amazon UK Toys & Games top 10 for 62 of the 74 weekly charts we tracked — 42 of those weeks at #1. Its single longest run at the top was 25 weeks across 2017.

How many toys charted in all four years (2016 to 2019)?

Only four: Cards Against Humanity, Asmodee Dobble, Exploding Kittens and Articulate. Every other toy in our 249-product archive charted in three years or fewer — most appeared for just a handful of weeks before being replaced by the next craze.

Are the toys in this list still available to buy?

Some are — Dobble, Uno, Cards Against Humanity and most LEGO sets are still on Amazon UK. Others (particularly some of the Fidget Spinner ASINs from 2017) have been delisted. Every link above carries the original Amazon product code; if a product is no longer listed, Amazon will usually redirect to a search page for the same or a similar item.

A note on the prices and links

Amazon prices change constantly. The prices shown above are the values we recorded in our weekly posts at the time, expressed as a range across all the weeks each product appeared. Today’s price (if the product is still available) may be different — sometimes very different. Links use our standard Amazon affiliate code; if you buy something through them we earn a small commission at no extra cost to you, which keeps the site running.

This article replaces several dozen weekly archive posts that were starting to look very thin to a 2020s reader. The data was worth keeping; the weekly posts were not.