The paper compares the value of ingenious handmade toys and ingenious machine-made assembled toys. The methods used are focus group discussions with 39 teachers and 115 students, respectively, and workshops with 131 students in four case schools in Kurukshetra, Haryana state, India. The results show that play value in terms of stories, movement, and action is more in ingenious handmade than ingenious machine-made toys. This has implications for creating guidelines for schools in selecting appropriate play-based resources for classrooms that can be easily arranged with locally available material in schools, aligning with the goals of the National Education Policy 2020.