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Comment by smcameron | Hacker News Reader

When I was a kid, we couldn't really afford legos. But one year my brother got a big plastic bucket of Brix Blox[1], a lego clone (but not compatible). They were just as fun as Legos to us. They weren't a kit, just a bucket of bricks to build what you want. I think it might have come with a little pamphlet of suggested designs, but we made spaceships and weird little rocket-boat things and little stormtrooper-ish guys to ride them. It's kind of weird how I can picture those little guys in my mind so perfectly all these years later. Pretty sure I could build one right now exactly as we did then, if I had some brix blox.

Edit: this is the bucket we had: https://www.cutetoyus.com/product_detail.php?c=town%20toy%20...

[1] https://www.retrothing.com/2008/07/brix-blox---leg.html

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As a middle class kid in Spain during the early 80s we didn't have Legos either. Spain was barely starting to enter the international market after the Franco era.

But we had Tente which was amazing. I spent hours and hours building stuff (vehicles, space bases, robots, etc) and making up stories about these things.

See some images here: https://www.google.com/search?q=tente+toy&tbm=isch

Edit:

The sets were fun for like 1 hour, but in the end all the pieces ended up in a huge bucket (actually a big wooden drawer hidden under my bed) and the real fun began.

Tente! Those were amazing too. I had some space and alien sets. I could never remember the name of the company. Thanks!

Did you guys have Meccano?

On the other nice things in childhood front, I was always jealous of a country with Chupa Chups.

Yeah we did have Meccano although I never had a set myself or knew anyone who did.

You didn't have Chupa Chups?

I also remember eating lots of square shaped Sugus although these are not from Spain.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugus

In USA they were only available starting when I was few years old although mostly I remember their product placement in Zool

LOVED Meccano - so cool to be able to build real machines and the screws and parts got a little rusty / rough if you weren't careful with them but damn I loved my Erector sets

Interesting side note: The Chupa Chups logo was designed by Dali in 1969. Check the 'Marketing' section[1].

[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chupa_Chups

You can still buy buckets of Legos. If you're unsure what to get your kids (or somebody else's) give them a bucket of Legos, or something from the City line.

We've been fans of City line. A lot of cheap (under $20) sets that can yield more than one design. This stimulates the creativity and flexibility of kid's mind.

Executing instructions and building discipline develop fairly easily, as long as kid has some mental joy to imagine playing with finished toy.

But taking the next step in combining blocks into 'own' design takes a leap. Once the kid can design, the special sets are just as well can be substituted with the buckets or mixes or blicks from the old sets.

I see Lego (or similar blocks) primarily as imagination fulfilment toys, not much of finished product toys. Meant to be torn and morphed. Instructions are just an invitation!

I found a diving set from the City line that is roughly similar to the Aquanauts that I enjoyed when growing up. Even though I don't have kids of my own, I bought a set and gave it to kids in Kiribati when I went to Christmas Island for Christmas.

https://9gag.com/gag/a6NBXoL

I've often wondered how many people prefer a bucket of bricks to the sets. I never liked the sets. I had a bucket of Lego and a bucket of Ramagon pieces and I had a lot of fun building my own stuff.

yeah. in my day there were sets but after my first (and only) one, i was left disappointed. “you can only build the one thing?” we didn’t have money for it so max value meant bricks, not sets.

Well you can take it apart -- annoys me considerably that my kids just put the suggested model together and put it on a shelf. I'm like "you're doing it wrong!", but they don't want to listen and it's their choice how to play with their toys.

Hah, I have the opposite "problem". I had tens of sets sitting on a shelf that I've built over a decade and my little one has been taking them apart one-by-one. As much time and energy I spent building complicated sets, I rather enjoy seeing how he reuses the pieces and components in new builds.

> “you can only build the one thing?”

No you can build anything you can imagine! You don't have to build it like the front picture or the instruction book. If you even turn the box around you'll often see alternative ideas on the back.

In Brazil, growing up in the 70's and 80's would mean your dream sets were branded Hering-Rasti. I never knew Legos existed until much later. Looking back I can see how hard they were trying to emulate Lego's designs but without the same level of quality.

They were super expensive and I knew it.

Some images: https://www.google.com/search?q=hering+rasti&tbm=isch

If you are in a better position now, then treat yourself to some genuine Lego, I get that the fun factor is similar, but do check out the engineering tolerance on the Lego bricks, it's been sustained over decades :)

Not sure about that. The Chinese-made Legos I’ve looked at have visible flash and sprue marks, which I never ever saw on the Danish-made ones.

Most of my legos growing up were made in Canada by Samsonite under contract from Lego. I don't think Danish made ones ever made it to North America. I wonder if they were very different?

That's a real shame :(

We didn't have anything like Lego at all, but we did have a locally-produced clone of Meccano (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meccano). This was a very pleasurable time sink, especially once you realized that you could just bend the parts into whatever shape you needed for some particular projects.

I remember being on the younger side of 10 we had these hand-me-down blocks from playskool. Melissa and Doug makes them for the current generation.

We got a lot of mileage out of them.

Most of my kits ended up in buckets anyway! More fun to build freeform from scratch

Same here. We had a few buckets of Sears store brand legos, and spend hours and hours playing.

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