Lego has designed a set that can't be taken apart
brickset.com
brickset.com
If anybody who understands German langauge is up for some great irony from a charismatic toy professional on this topic, you should have a look.
WARNING: You will waste some hours on this.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V9OKWm_x2RI&t=1504s
The story is pretty well known on the german internet.
More info (in german, but deepl/google do pretty decent job at translating): https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Panke#Kontroverse_mit_L...
The same goes for something like Lego, just because people commonly call similar plastic bricks "lego" doesn't mean that they'll get away with it if they open a store to sell those bricks.
Well, LMGTFY has been a thing for as long as I can remember, but it's not a new search engine, it's just a way to snarkily direct people asking questions to Google for their answers. It's also not critical of the Google brand (and although the URL doesn't have the Google name in it, the website title does), so who knows if Google would find more issue with it if it was.
That ship sailed years ago.
Maybe someone ought to tell Google.
But the 'store' isn't like your offbrand Google is it? It's actually probably closer to LMGTFY. They sell Legos and other blocks... and when you buy the other blocks they aren't actually called Legos.
Uh-huh.
IP law is the cudgel of choice when a company doesn't like what an individual is doing. It's loosey-goosey enough that they can always stir up a somewhat plausible complaint, and they only need a somewhat plausible complaint plus money to make a small person's life a living hell.
Understanding the mechanism does not make it good or right.
Lego is already close to losing their trademark, they can’t let anything like this slide without risking their IP.
So yes, the metaphor in the parent is faulty in that small detail when it picks up the metaphor created in the grandparent to better explain what is going on.
Only one company can hold that trademark, Lego currently holds it, so if his trademark claim had succeeded, Lego would have lost theirs.
can you give any citation for that? Because i can find zero sources for that claim. Sources for the conflict around the logo design are ample, see his filing for the logo (1) and the one from the corporation (2). I can find no filing for your claim about the name in the official database and no media reports supporting it anywhere, only that in 2013, years before the first conflict with the corporation, his brand was already established as "Held der Steine".(3)
1: https://register.dpma.de/DPMAregister/marke/register/3020182... 2: https://register.dpma.de/DPMAregister/marke/registerHABM?AKZ... 3: https://www.welt.de/regionales/frankfurt/article121164920/Ve...
> if his trademark claim had succeeded, Lego would have lost theirs.
no. The marks would be seen as reasonably different. As others have noted the corporations ability to sue in similar cases might be reduced if they create a history of tolerating such "reasonably different" marks, but they would not have lost their design trademark, especially because theirs is a 3D design mark and his was word+logo mark and they are filed for different things. I personally think his mark would have had little to no effect on theirs and he might have had an actual chance of winning in court, albeit a phyrric victory. He cancelled his filing and filed the same name with a different image.
For the whole "invalidating of design patents" there is a far more interesting case that has nothing to do with him: Delta Sport Handelskontor GmbH vs LEGO A/S where the former tried to have EU design patent 001664368-0006 invalidated so they can print and sell the exact same plastic piece under the PLAYTIVE® brand on the market. They lost in court during appeal.
Lego has a design mark for the silhouette of a 4x2 or 2x2 brick for clothing.
Held der Steine tried to obtain a design mark for the silhouette of a 2x2 brick for clothing for his merchandise.
That’s an obvious conflict.
Lego actually won that case for clothing and merchandise. Only for actual bricks they lost it.
He tried to get a trademark on merchandise for his line of clothing, which conflicted with that.
It would probably be like, if a company uses an apple symbol with their company name on a logo. There are by the way many apple juice producers which use an apple symbol in their logos...
[citation needed]
Other trademark owners aren't asshats like this about their marks and haven't lost them, have they?
Yes you need to enforce your trademark. But not against reviews of your very products, even if those reviews make their authors money through YT ads.
[Add.: and not in this way. I've read up a bit more, and they had a "valid" problem in that he used "LEGO" to refer to plastic brick systems in general. They do need to enforce that so the term doesn't become generic. But they could've just sent a message or letter first.]
(The "using LEGO as generic label" one was a separate instance and did cause the guy to remake a bunch of videos.)
This is a myth
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/11/trademark-law-does-not...
The real answer is 'it depends,' there is no pat hard and fast answer about the obligation to enforce a trademark. Also it becomes more ambiguous because trademark cancellation proceedings are quite expensive in terms of time and legal fees. You can do a lot of naughty things and get away with it if the prospect of fighting you in a cancellation proceeding becomes too daunting and expensive. The possible workaround is to get a declaratory judgment invalidating the trademark but that is not necessarily something achievable in most situations.
See:
On top of my disappointment, they criticized me for having written "Legos" and told me that their products should be called Lego bricks or Lego toys... great way to give an elementary-aged boy a poor impression of Lego's customer relations.
Seems like this may have been a thing only in the US?
It never results in what the big brand wants, some have even gone bankrupt on the wake of it.
Over all it’s more a capitalism thing though. Companies simply become inherently evil entities when they reach a certain size, and on the odd chance they don’t that is not the norm.
We’ve sort of solved it here in Denmark, by having co-operative ownerships where the profits all go back into the companies, which tends to keep their investor based competition in check, but there is no competition to Lego.
Now i really want an AT-AT set!
Edit: oops the price tag.
Edit: And that looks a good deal more complicated than what I grew up with, wow!
> Edit: oops the price tag.
That's a fairly good summary of the state of LEGO. Add what some call slipping quality or simply cheaping out, while the competition is rapidly catching up in quality for lego-compatible brick models (and in some ways surpassing LEGO), and you have a perfect storm.
This article has a good photo illustrating what we’re talking about.
But then of course other brands took their place, pretty much immediately.
>> Edit: oops the price tag.
> That's a fairly good summary of the state of LEGO.
And it's been the state of LEGO since I was young enough to wait excitedly for the print catalog/magazine to show up so that I could lust over a bunch of Technic and UCS kits my family couldn't possibly afford.
Personally, I'd say it undermines my trust in a few ways. The broadest is undue weight: if some kinds of opinions are being paid for and others aren't, we're going to hear more of the paid-for opinions. But it also creates more direct incentives to a) say what might be rewarded, and b) once on the gravy train, say what one's sponsors like to keep getting rewarded. And worst, I think, is that money distorts cognition. As Sinclair wrote, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
So for me, any conflict of interest like that undermines the offered opinion. It's somewhere between hard and impossible to know how much influence is involved.
So he's now selling lego and he's selling stuff from the competition. But he has no more access to the partner exclusive stuff (like lego bags). The only thing you can actually say is that he went all-in on bashing the stuff lego does wrong. I mean, he's living from PR and selling stuff.
And this isn't low profit margin. Lego has gotten the Chinese to raid several of these guys (Lepin) and it didn't slow them at all.
The real gauntlet just got thrown down recently. Remember the UCS Millenium Falcon? Well a MOC builder made a UCS but with an interior model of the Falcon as well. Guess where you can buy that? Well, NOT Lego, and I think that's a problem in Lego management.
With the internet there should be FAR MORE Lego-provided sets. Sure, have the Harry Potters and Star Wars sets. But we are talking about a company that (granted to very good tolerances) is charging a LOT for very cheap plastic. They should be exploiting far more of the long tail.
Why can't I buy from Lego a complete set of old-school Classic Space? Or Castle? Why do sets go "out of print"?
They are leaving money on the table, and the Chinese/Malaysian/etc companies will happily fill the void.
From what I can tell, the fake Lego industry has already structured itself into a somewhat legal resistant form. The base legos are manufactured by one set of companies, which they can do 100% legally.
Those companies sell the blocks to the companies that produce the knockoff sets. If you raid those companies, well fine they lose some stock and they just setup somewhere else with the exact same sourcing.
I accidentally bought a Chinese knock-off set, and it was surprisingly good. The brick quality was totally comparable to Lego. The part that was lacking was the build methodology -- it was damn near impossible to build successfully the way the instructions said. But there's more variety in the knock-off sets, more accessories like lighting and such, they cost half as much (and probably still have a ridiculous margin). Lego should be worried, and they should step up their game. Becoming known for collectibility seems to be their strategy right now, but it is going to make people like me look elsewhere.
How much does good documentation and designing models costs? You can’t just copy pieces of plastic.
I have a Creality 3D printer. The hardware itself was good. But the tinkering needed to get it working was a lot. All the useful help came from the community. The official support is useless and every time I contacted them they are incapable of telling me if something is in spec, out of spec, or even point me to documentation.
Imagine giving a child a physical toy that you need to consult the internet for instructions because the included ones are incomplete or wrong. Maybe you have a piece missing and the instructions are wrong.
Even if Lego is charging too much, they may have head room. When they feel they are being threatened, they can lower prices and still have the best kits and we’d all flock back.
I agree. This is probably the most difficult part by a good margin for the Chinese companies to effectively copy. The documentation itself was surprisingly good (they basically copied the style of the Lego books), what they don't have are people who are the equal of the 'lego master model builder'. Someone who really knows how to engineer the model both for the final result as well as the process to make it.
Injection moulds have a finite life, so parts go out of print. Unfortunately their tendency to use set-specific parts causes this to make sets go out of print.
(Obviously they could make another mould, but that commits them to a whole print run to make it economically viable.)
On the other hand, they quote "one moulding machine working for an hour almost equals one LEGO star destroyer", which does explain why they're so expensive.
Lego now has infinitely more models than when I grew up, and they seemingly increase the catalog every year, so this is a very strange criticism. They have Marvel stuff, Friends, Harry Potter, Star Wars, Simpsons, etc etc etc. The number of sets is truly bewildering. Obviously they can't produce everything forever.
Also, they are not selling "cheap plastic" anymore than Netflix is selling "cheap electrons". The plastic bricks are just the medium, the product is the design, the Lego brand, the licensed brand (if any), the whole experience.
One thing they seem to have lost over the years is the flexibility of the kits: I remember many kits having instructions for several alternate models, encouraging you much more to take things apart again after building. Newer kits are mostly a single model and that limits the fun that you end up having with them. The invitation to tinker seems gone.
This is why we can’t have good things sigh
One fun fact about the instructions, I recently learned from a Lego designer that the reason they use many different colours on the inside of most models is to make it easier to see what's going on while you're building. That explanation never occurred to me, but maybe it's obvious.
I noticed this after buying a crapton of legos on craigslist for, um, my new kid! I do have a new kid, but anyway, the colors vary far too much now.
Charitably, the colors probably subtly act like antialising does in rasterization, so it might make a blocky model seem more organic. But I think the business of selling more sets is also a sneaky reason.
Nowadays there are so many custom pieces and people don’t really rebuild much anyway, so they don’t even need to discourage what you describe using colours.
Unlike digital copies, molds have a limited lifespan. Making a one-off piece for a set needs to be done in the tens of thousands (or more) or not at all.
Meanwhile, if I understand, they have a program to assemble parts lists and instructions for one offs.
If you really care about the little bricks, you should also watch other channels to get a more rounded picture.
Definitely watch his channel (https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=held+der+steine top result), also observe he gets quoted quite a bit and has collaborations with other people interested in similar things.
I loved legos as a kid and would spend hours building stuff. Now the kits seem more like models to be assembled and put on display and not touched rather than “a paint brush of blocks” where I can use my imagination. It lost my interest. My attention is now on software where I feel I can build anything. I liken it to my lego experience as a child.
I don’t necessarily think there’s a right or wrong thing here. It’s interesting to note how our mind changes as we age and grow older. The ”do anything” mentality get displaced with something else. This would make for an interesting PhD topic. :)
I found another quote from a related article that captured this feeling.
“It’s like a blast to the past, straight to our childhoods,” said Deason, 40, who lives in Connellsville, Pa. “It took me by surprise, but it makes sense: Life is so structured. But with Lego, you can do anything.”
Deason has a few million Lego pieces, which she organizes by type and color. The Star Wars and Architecture sets, she says, are the most popular among adults, who almost always look for the instruction manuals.
“The younger kids come in and it’s all about their imaginations — playing pretend, building zombie towns,” she said. “But at some point that gets lost. The adults seem to value the final finished project. That’s where they get their satisfaction.”If anyone knows of LEGO alternatives that are high quality I’d love to know.
This isn't true at all. You can still buy a box full of bricks. You can even go online and purchase single bricks if you have a specific build in mind. Even the model kits are still just a box full of bricks--Lego abhors creating unique blocks unless they can be used in other sets.
The reason a lot of adults gravitate toward the finished kits is the same reason adults stop picking up cool sticks outside: We just lose our imagination.
Its always my favorite thing to see how some of the semi-unique pieces get re-used. I put together Anakin's Podracer recently and part of the decorative elements on the engine part were the Lego LOTR Orc Swords!
And the lightposts used paint rollers as part of their design.
ANY Lego set you buy lets you arrange the bricks how you want. If you want different parts you can buy different sets.
Why are people saying Lego should be responsible for this? Take your model and drop it on the floor. Start building.
I've heard this again and again, and I believe it used to be true. But is it still really the case? My daughters have been gifted a number of Lego sets in the past few years that are simply full of very one-off looking pieces that are hard to use for much else, with very few standard bricks.
I don't doubt that the molds can be repurposed for some other sets potentially, but as an example look at this set that we have and see if you really think it's "just a box full of bricks".
https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/anna-elsa-s-frozen-playgr...
What bugs me about sets like that is there's very little ability to build something completely different with it, which to me is what Lego used to be about. The most fun I had as a kid (and what my kids seem to enjoy most) is just building random things from a pile of bricks (which is why I buy them the generic brick packs rather than the sets like above).
I wonder how much the ratio of specialty to generic pieces differs between the lego junior sets like the one you linked vs sets intended for older children.
A small number of components (the curved edge just above the keyboard, for instance, or the roller handle) seemed purpose-made for this model, but, like 99% of the pieces were totally generic. And this is in a set with more than 2000 pieces with lots of very intricate mechanics (there's a roller, a carriage, air pistons, and a ratchet/escapement mechanism that moves the carriage), but virtually all of it was made up of standard bricks, rods, connectors and generic components. I was super impressed. Even the keys are just Lego disks with stickers on them. The spacebar is just regular Lego with a smooth surface.
I feel like people have been making this complaint against Lego forever, and it's always "when I was kid, we just got a box of bricks and let our creativity take over!". The harsh truth is that Lego didn't change. We just grew up.
Reviewing the bricklink entry for the typewriter, the only noticeable new items are the painted key tiles for the typwriter. Painting is a great way to give new life to old tiles. I see some new color options as well, but nothing "new"
https://www.bricklink.com/v2/catalog/catalogitem.page?S=2132...
6259 "Broadside's Brig" https://brickset.com/sets/6259-1/Broadside-s-Brig
6267 "Lagoon Lock-up" https://brickset.com/sets/6267-1/Lagoon-Lock-Up
6265 "Sabre Island" https://brickset.com/sets/6265-1/Sabre-Island
Combining these 3 on a big baseplate can give you something completely new and interesting that still belongs to the Pirate theme. The bulk of the parts are white and yellow-coloured bricks for walls and architectural elements.
My set had the letters printed on the top pieces of the keys; did you have to put stickers on them seperately? If so, then that's a major setback in quality: I really dislike Lego sets with many stickers as the stickers always loosen over time.
I think things have actually swung too far in the other direction now with their main-line sets. As much as 25% of the part count typically consists of tiny 1x1 or 2x1 plates and tiles, or 1x1 cheese wedges. There are often many cases where they will use more smaller bricks rather than a more structurally-sound brick - 1x3 bricks and the corner L-shaped bricks in particular.
In your example, the ice-looking things can be repurposed. The slide could be anything from an emergency exit from a secret lair to a thing for kids to play on a beach. Plenty of stories if you think a little. The snow flake could be a sign for an ice cream shop or anything decorative in a fancy home, or an exotic rock on another planet. The other bricks look fairly standard. I’m pleased that the chest hasn’t changed, I quite liked it ~30 years ago.
First off I don't think the existence of large, expensive adult-targeted "display model" kits doesn't really detract from what is happening in the kids sets.
On the kids sets, Lego is doing a lot more licensed sets than in the past, and these inevitably have more custom pieces. But I think adults really over-estimate the negative impact this has on reuse and creativity. The first thing the kid in me thinks when I see that kit you listed is "How can I build a ramp at the end of that slide?" "How can I extend the slide at the top to make them go faster?". Sometimes pieces having having a purpose can prompt ideas and creativity. Sure those big ice blocks will only every be used for ice/glass, but there are lots of things you can build with ice/glass especially when playing with Frozen characters. Many of the custom pieces in licensed sets are just flourishes (like that snowflake or ice-flame) which are fun things you can add to your model, and 80-90's kits definitely had those as well. I think the biggest obstacle to reuse on that kit is just that it is a small kit - it really needs to be combined with other kits do do interesting things (and for which reason I don't think they should have included those large ice blocks in this particular kit, as that just exacerbates that problem - they would be fine in a larger kit). And again, I remember getting bored with small kits received as a kid after a few days of play (visiting grandparents), and looking forward to getting home and combining some of the cool new pieces with the Legos I already had.
In other words, the licensed kits are the equivalent of the castle and pirate kits we had as kids, with the exact same complaints. I think those complaints were overblown then and they still are now.
Check this out: https://www.newelementary.com/2017/10/pdc-parts-festival-day...
But once you hit the ~$30+ sets, you see more and more creativity with the generic pieces. I would assume that the cheaper sets need to look good but have fewer pieces, so they reach for bigger pieces to fill in the gaps.
$100+ sets are mind-blowing in how fun they are to assemble and to see the level of creativity the designer(s) used to create the set. I got the recently released Mario question block cube. And I can't get over how fun it was to assemble.
I think the summary is: to really get to the "reusablility" there's a tipping point in those price ranges I listed above. If you buy a bunch of little sets or one big set, you'll hit that point.
The baseplate is custom and the most egregious example of what you are talking about, of course. The slope at the front with the swirl on it is also custom. There's a round tile with a snowflake on it, that appears in two other sets. The giant snowflake on top, about two dozen other winter-themed sets. The slide also appears in only a couple of dozen pieces, but this basically all pieces that include a playground or similar. The slide is functional for play so it can't be trivially made of smaller pieces without compromising that. There also an ornamental swirly translucent smoke-like piece that only appears in a handful of sets, again, all winter themed.
That's it, the rest of the pieces in the kit appear in literally hundreds of other sets.
I think my concern is more nuanced - if you're a kid and you only get sets like this one, when you get past the "let's build what's on the box" stage and they end up as just a pile of bricks, the number of more generically-useful pieces is low compared to all the specialty pieces. I think in an ideal situation, you have lots of generic pieces and a selection of custom (like the typewriter mentioned in another post), but these sets seem to be the opposite with lots of quirky custom pieces and few generic pieces good for general building.
I'm sure as another poster pointed out that this is a result of "gift-priced" sets, and trying to have something impressive while keeping the part count low. And for my kids it doesn't matter as I've bought them plenty of "just a bunch of brick" sets to go with all these specialty parts. But if you're a kid whose parents aren't willing to drop a lot of $$$ on Lego (which have always been on the pricey side), then you're more likely to end up with a collection made only from the $10-25 kits with an over-emphasis on specialty pieces.
When I was a kid (in the 80s), I remember getting lots of Lego sets along these lines:
https://brickset.com/sets/6375-2/Exxon-Gas-Station
Notice the cars - they are very blocky and do not look much like real cars because they're almost entirely made out of generic bricks. The gas pumps and roof and such are mostly just regular pieces, possibly with stickers or screen-printing. Compare it to something like this:
https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/fire-rescue-police-chase-...
Yes, there's still generic pieces in there, but my eye sees a lot more specialty pieces like the hoods, car roofs, fenders, motorcycle, etc. IMHO, the 80s set offers more potential for rebuilding into other things, but maybe I'm wrong and it is just nostalgia or something like that.
I agree with you on the blocky -ness of the cars. I wonder how the distribution of sizes changed. As the complexity of the design goes up you need different distribution of sizes, smaller for more detail and larger for bigger structures. I always had a good balance of blocks, never too many of one size and never running out of others.
true for the most part, but there was a time where that was not true, we had part of the 90's where unique pieces ran wild. thankfully, they've moved back to more generic pieces, but the bioncle years were crazy.
This just isn't true. When you are a kid, lots of sticks seem different: When you are an adult, you've seen lots and lots of sticks and they cease to become interesting. This is the same reason we don't find a lot of joy in children's learning toys. We should be moving on.
Some folks find out they like putting things together, even if there isn't much imagination going on: Cue lego kits, puzzles, cross stitch, home improvement, and so on.
Adult imagination looks different from children's imagination, in part because adults have knowledge and experience that children lack, which is why sometimes an imaginative child won't necessarily be creative in their daydreams. Adults are more likely to put it into things like parenting or making dinner or trying to stretch money to cover everything and still get gifts.
Adults are out there making artwork. Creating new software. Creating music and movies and designing buildings and public spaces and stadiums and playing sports. All of these things require imagination and creativity.
The mid-size bricks seems less used now compared to the sets I got as a kid 30 years ago. When I pick out Lego sets for my daughter it's often based on the type of bricks included, and sometimes we just get classic brick sets. Building using the 1 - 4 stud piece, especially the flat ones, get boring pretty quickly.
At least that was my understanding in the mid-90s, when I worked in the toy industry.
I'm still conflicted about it. Though I can't deny the creativity on display at any LUG or brickcon, I greatly miss the simplicity. I own too much Lego and I've given up trying to rationally organize loose peices.
Do you have an example of a one of those pieces?
I haven't had a Lego set in decades, but I do recall feeling that the ratio of fiddly pieces vs "foundational" pieces getting out of whack towards the end of my time with them. When my kids get old enough I suppose I'm going to have to get them one of those "classic" sets, because I'm not sure they'll be able to get enough by just collecting regular sets.
https://www.amazon.com/LEGO-Legendary-Mountain-Awesome-Build...
https://www.amazon.com/LEGO-Creator-Adventure-Building-Creat...
https://www.amazon.com/LEGO-Champions-McLaren-Building-Piece...
And stuff like that isn't new. I remember I had a "castle" set that had these wall-with-window pieces [1], which were kind of similar. You could still use them creatively. Also that waterfall set has a lot of pieces that would be good for building stuff like spaceships or planes.
[1] https://www.bricklink.com/v2/catalog/catalogitem.page?P=4444...
EDIT: I see someone made a reference to 'This Island Earth' elsethread, so now I've got to pick one of the two
Can't imagine what the attraction is of having the same boring thing as everybody else.
This really changed once they started including Technics pieces as structural parts of builds, rather than as a totally separate product line. Most things I've built in recent years are far more robust than what I built as a kid.
Plus the lego stores have pieces sorted in buckets like a candy shop, you buy a container and fill it up with whatever you want. I've never used it, but the website lets you choose from 1400 different bricks https://www.lego.com/en-us/page/static/pick-a-brick
The Sets will sometimes have a unique piece or two, but outside of the mini figs it is way rarer than you might think. And as others pointed out if it's unique now it doesn't mean they won't find a way to reuse it later.
We also have several bins of generic legos of all shapes & sizes for the kids. They occasionally get technic sets, too, as gifts.
These are not at odds with each other, Lego is successfully marketing to two demographics that are complimentary to one another. It's a good strategy. What's not a good strategy is their really lackluster pace of creating new sets, or the speed with with they take old ones out of production so they become a thousand bucks on the secondary market.
Now I've got 2 boys and I buy tons of lego's for the three of us. We're trying to get mom involved and bought her the Parisian Restaurant (10243). We still use the 20 year old ground plates from my childhood. You can rejuvenate most lego in a dishwasher (put them in a washer net)
I still think it's great fun. I do focus a little more on the manuals then when I was younger. But most builds inevitably get destroyed and the bricks re-used for our ever evolving lego land.
Pirate Roller Coaster (31084) is inexpensive if you want coaster parts for your DIY city.
As an adult, I've purchased a couple of sets and had a great time putting it together. Following the instructions, I can see more easily see how different combinations of bricks, when put together, makes a certain shape. I wish I had something similar growing up.
Some kids can be given a paint brush and develop enough interest by themselves to become an expert. Most kids need guidance. Whether its a coloring book or more formal instruction, having concrete and achievable goals is how most people stay interested in learning a skill. For people who do not have any artistic skills, it's not realistic to ask them to just pick up some paint and a canvas, and just "use your imagination". IMO, what Legos is doing is the right thing for most people.
For the people who can be motivated to learn in a vacuum, they have a valuable gift.
If our generation will be remembered for one thing, it will be our iron-fist clenched around our childhood culture. Our children will have toys, yes, too many to count, but they will be 50 year old references to things kids only see the regurgitation of. New stories? Bleh, give them GhostBusters 19 in 2035, screw it.
I did buy a lot of Star Wars sets for my kids but it's not the same when you skip the design step.
I disagree, I think plenty of adults still have that mentality, but for them Legos is not the place to fulfill it. As a kid, Legos are one of the most approachable medium to manifest your imagination. But they are also very limited. As an adult, with more skills, knowledge, and money you might get into wood or metalworking or software instead, where you have significantly more freedom.
An AFOL might be looking for something more nostalgic or meditative (e.g. rock gardens, bonsai?), and so they approach it differently.
An AFOL would likely tell you that it's actually "Adult Fan Of Lego"
Yeah, I feel like the giant, expensive Star Wars sets are for adults that don't intend to take their creations apart, and are actually concerned about keeping them whole while moving between apartments, condos, or homes. In that regard, I think this is kind of a feature for them.
Most parents are going to buy smaller sets throughout the year for their kids, budget permitting.
I don't agree that only adults take enjoyment in the final product. It's just that adults and children are interested in different things and have different household decision making circumstances. As an adult, you wouldn't buy a zombie town lego set that consists of random pieces haphazardly thrown together even considering the prospect of build-anything flexibility nostalgia, and as a child, you typically don't have the means to buy architecture sets on an impulse, nor the inclination to stare at a complex lego project with few flexible components.
I actually find it interesting in a positive sense that it is possible to design something that cannot be taken apart in Lego.
That's how that whole "kit" malarkey has seemed to me ever since it started. What's the fricking use of a Millennium Falcon, or a motorized excavator for that matter, when it's full of bespoke pieces that only really work for that particular end product? The whole idea totally sucks, IMO.
When I was a kid, "kits" didn't exist; there were only generic pieces, and I think that's the way it still ought to be.
Yeah, yeah, get off my lawn.
On the one hand that's a minor quibbling little problem there, "I have to use tools on this one part when disassembling it", and then the dearth of such problems during their run is an amazing testament to their engineering process. That they have fans that can catch this issue and explain it so well is another testament to the standards they've maintained.
Can we call "lego instructions" an example of software design? I think we must. Programs designed to run on meat CPUs of unknown specs.
Ikea gets a 4-star rating, sometimes 4.5.
Words? Immediately dock 1 star.
If using a manifest ("part A, B, E used in this step"), which is necessary because not everything is as distinct as Lego bricks, and you don't provide a scale printout so I can sort the M6x10's from M6x12's, dock a point. Another point if you don't label the diagram with callouts and expect me to visually discern two similar parts by their 10pixel wide render.
Using fasteners of very similar geometry (see above) for no discernible reason, dock a point.
Low print quality of diagram with the toner chipping off? Insta fail.
Now, as far as I've seen, this is limited to kits that are designed to use their apps for play. Those apps are really cool though, so I am willing to look at it benevolently (all the more complicated steps give you an optional assembly video for that step which makes it nicer for smaller kids).
The app for the Duplo train is really surprising. It lets you mirror your custom track setup in the app and then play games with it while controlling the train.
Being an excited kid I might have missed it on the first page of instructions for that assembly but I sure was annoyed when I saw it.
So I am also doubting my childhood memories now. Maybe they were always consistent, and I was just in a hurry?
We should appreciate the incredible joy given to the world by such phrases as "Make sure the knob is well before screwing. Do not unclockwise the tread backwards."
One of my favorites is the mystery part. It's clearly the same finish and stamping line as the rest of the thing, but it doesn't seem to have a functional use anywhere in the product. it's not a spare... is it an optional bracket for a different thing? did it fall out of the inside of something? is it just included in my particular package accidentally?
Of course occasionally you get really lucky and its an Interociter.
Oh, this thing? I use it to make hot chocolate.
* https://www.ikea.com/us/en/assembly_instructions/malm-storag... Page 9, step 3
Yeah, ikea doesn't do the 1:1 (or at least I haven't seen it) but they tend to use unmistakable parts. Like each of the metric cylinder head machine screws are different enough in aspect ratio it's easy (for me) to tell them apart. But I'm good at flatpack assembly (likely due to lego obsession growing up). I can see how that might be confusing for some.
Contrast that with the Anderson door I build last month. Didn't have any scale indication, really small diagrams, lots of nearly interchangeable fasteners, and way too wordy.
https://youtu.be/5_FCKzhN_dY?t=334
They make instructions in the style you described that are thoroughly ridiculous and hired people to follow them.
So in this category of software, the vendor / product name has to be a four-capitals acronym? LEGO, IKEA...
That's interesting to me, because "replayability" has always been one of the core considerations in game design, but with a Legacy product, locked-in choices and permanent consequences are one of the selling points.
Impermanence is a tonic to cure obsession.
You could also design the game so that the destroyed cards are intended to be replaced with new editions.
I feel like those are on opposing ends of a spectrum: one the one end you have games like chess, go or even Magic the Gathering that are infinitely replayable but have little to no story.
On the other end you have story driven games (Gloomhaven or even Descent) that can be played only once because the second time through does not offer too much new content.
Somewhat tangential to that are roleplaying and wargame campaigns where new "content" is introduced constantly by the GM or, even better, as a consequence of player interactions.
I feel like there is still some niche for some kind of game that randomly/procedurally generates new content (maps, stats, scenarios) each week that players then print out and use for a session.
[/rambling ... it's time for the weekend]
There is a really cool Legacy-type game as well (I'm struggling to remember the name, Arcana I think?) where in the Legacy version you basically go through a campaign and develop a character that you can then use as another character to play as in the base game.
You put "replayability" in contrast to "legacy" but honestly we played that game more times (15) than a lot of traditional board games.
You hit the nail on the head. The unfortunate truth is the vast majority of board games get played <5 times, often no more than once or even zero times! There's a long tail of games that get played way more than 5 times but the median has got to be down there. So the legacy games are less radical than they appear. If they're replacing one of those games in the very large bucket of quickly dropped games then they have no downside in terms of loss of replayability. And as you said, they incentivize replayability for my groups at least by essentially forcing someone to say "ok, when are we gonna play again?" because a lot of their value prop comes from the continuity.
With Lego, my expectation is to be able to take things apart, build Model B or create something new. This breaks the design principle and doesn’t do a good job of advertising it’s going to do so.
In that environment, it's probably a lot more acceptable to sell a game that a group will "only" play 15-20 times until the campaign is completed.
On one level it bothers me because you should be able to replay stuff, but at the same time it's the experience rather than the game board and there's a lot of ways to spend more than 10 bucks on an hour's entertainment.
SponsorBlock is also available for YouTube Vanced on Android and I couldn't recommend it enough.
It’s pretty non-obvious feature until you know about it.
Pretty terrible experience.
A reviewer will see this immediately. Someone screwed up. They should hire an intern to simulate that and run a check in their modelling software.
For example, the 1x3 sloped pieces in some of the newer sets are super fragile near the edge. Similar pieces from many years ago survived.
It's unclear whether the modern set designs are putting new strains on weaker points or if the material quality is worse, but either way the result is a doubt about the longevity of the pieces
The worst were those grey pieces with clips on both ends and a 150-degree bend in the middle. So easy to break.
The few other brick manufacturers that design their own sets are clearly inferior in set design. Even Mega has a long way to go.
But you are right a factor to consider.
Lego will send you replacements if you ask them, but that's a pain. Especially since something is deeply broken with my LEGO ID and I can't get into their stupid website.
It's not enough to make me stop buying the sets, but it kills the fun when my kid works hard on a set and can't finish it because of a manufacturing error.
I’m constantly impressed that they just always all the pieces.
What I have found is that sometimes there is 1 piece stuck in the bag after I have dumped it out. So I keep the bags until I’m finished building the set.
That's one thing I don't much care for in the modern sets. Sure the results look more realistic, but it means that half the pieces are now custom made for the particular set, and often have very little use in a general context. It seems that they've moved from a general building system to more of a per set focused approach.
I don't see what all the fuss is about, it doesn't seem either/or to me. The days of off the shelf models having enough general purpose 2x4 or whatever bricks to build totally arbitrary large structures have been gone for at least 30 years, but nothing really seems to be stopping mixing and matching and getting basic blocks for the backbone of a collection. They've just added the existence of $TEXAS display pieces with unique stuff.
I even accidentally got some pieces stuck together in ways that required screwdrivers or pliers to get them out. No big deal!
I would agree though that some specialized pieces are fine. My memories from the early 90s were probably the best balance from my time using Legos. By the mid-late 90s the castle and pirate sets did start moving into imho overly specialized pieces which then lead to the 2000s nadir.
There are also a lot more colors and shades than there used to be, so it is a little harder to make substantial custom constructions that don't look like rainbows.
I do not believe this is true. There are Lego enthusiasts that thoroughly review every new set and are careful to point out the introduction of new pieces and new building techniques. The number of new pieces per set is very low, and even then the pieces are typically well received for the number of new build techniques they may open up.
Then lego seriously addressed this problem and since then have made a large effort to avoid having unique parts in sets. And they were incentivised to do so, because the more unique parts you have, the more money it is going to cost you. Reusing parts is just simply a lot cheaper.
Now there still often are unique parts in a lot of sets, but they are usually unique only in colour or printing.
For example, the current set with the record for the number of unique parts is the Diagon Alley set.
Here is the list of unique parts in the set: https://brickset.com/inventories/75978-1/unique
The thing you will note is that even though there are a lot of parts that only appear in this set, I wouldn't say that these parts are not useful generally. They are mostly just bits of custom lego characters, which you would happily use in any context, or a custom colour for a generally applicable part.
And just looking at others on the site:
https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/lamborghini-sian-fkp-37-4... https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/ford-mustang-shelby-gt500... https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/monster-jam-megalodon-421...
through all of this, there has never been one single piece missing, ever. which is kind of mind blowing.
What usually happens when a piece is "missing" is, we used the piece incorrectly in another spot - this takes some detective work some kind, but it always turns up, there's the piece! none ever missing, ever.
once the things are built and our 7 year old takes complete charge of them, then we lose pieces like crazy.
A bigger issue is the reliability. some pieces have been broken in the bag, specifically longer flat plates. other pieces literally crumbled upon assembly, specifically low-grade sloping pieces near the edge. doubt these pieces will last as long as the pieces from 10 years ago
Much later I decided to rearrange the letters near the bottom of the first stage and I got 4 spare S pieces from the missing pieces website Lego has.
A 1x1 in the middle of a large plate though can be a challenge though. While the remover tool works for e.g. 1x2s, 1x1s don't quite have enough surface area, so the tool often slips off.
2x plates I find tend not to give as much trouble, if only because they require more force to have been pushed together perfectly flush in the first place.
(My context is teaching Lego professionally to middle-school children for a few summers. You get given all sorts of fun things to take apart, and having a pocket knife around isn't a good idea. My other takeaway from that experience is that the LabView-based Mindstorms software is/was total shit.)
Beside using a knife, the only trick I've found to work for these is to stack longer 1x plates on either side of the pair, which give you more leverage on the center pair, while themselves being easier to take apart.
This:
I've got a 42043, Mercedes-Benz Arocs 3245[1] here which allowed me to reproduce this. If you look on page 322 (step #59) of the instructions at [1] it requires the same 4l axel to attach the bucket to its boom, and is held in place by a "bush" piece[2].
That one's trivial to take apart "correctly", but I just tried (without cheating!) by tightly showing the 4l axel in and gently prying it out with a sewing needle.
It took around 10-15 seconds, there's a tiny bit of external visible damage the size of the sewing needle head on the piece the 4l goes into, but I being careful.
Otherwise it's no worse for wear. I also tried it with a wooden toothpick, but the gap is too small for that.
I'd put that into the "annoying" category, rather than Lego having produced a "display-only" set. For comparison on the Arocs I had to spend 5-10 minutes gently trying to get a gear into the engine once with a chopstick without disassembling the whole front of the car after it fell off.
1. https://www.lego.com/en-us/service/buildinginstructions/4204...
2. https://www.toypro.com/en/product/968/technic-bush/light-blu...
It's still pretty notable that it requires a sewing needle to disassemble fully instead of just hands or a brick separator as previous sets did.
I then used the "bush" piece to hold onto the axle from the other side, so you have to pull it out of that piece to get the axle out. It's not the exact same piece that's holding onto the 4l axle in the article, but from experience they've got about the same hold on the axle, so the difference won't matter.
Yes it's annoying. I'm just pointing out that it's far short of the "can't be taken apart" claim in the article.
I'd be willing to bet that it can be taken apart conventionally. You can probably push the orange piece a bit from the other side.
Of course it will run right into the frame on the other side, but even Lego doesn't make components with micrometer precision, there's usually a bit of give in the plastic. If you can get some play in it of even a half a millimeter it'll be sufficient to do this with a toothpick instead of a sewing needle.
If this had shown up in one of the smaller kid-focused kits which are building playgrounds, yes, that'd be a problem.
But there is a small monitory of people who absolutely do break up sets to add to their brick collection in order to build custom models.
When it comes to attaching the body to the underframe, axles are inserted into holes in the side and, while they do not mate with an axle hole inside the body, they cannot be removed without putting the mechanised beast on its side, shaking it, and hoping for the best.
That is definitely what is called a "blind pin" in machining, with a tighter interference fit, and they are usually avoided in components meant to be serviceable, since removing them requires drilling them out.
It seems amusingly ironic that with the increase in the difficulty of disassembling consumer products, Lego also follows suit.
[0] https://www.bricklink.com/v2/catalog/catalogitem.page?id=674...
That gray axle sleeve has a stop about halfway through so you can't push an axle all the way through. It's meant to join two axles.
You could omit the green sleeve as it is completely smooth on the inside. That will give you better access to the dark gray axle, but the sleeve is probably there to provide structural support to the frame.
They might do a small update where they replace the "4 axle with stop" with a "5 axle with stop" and put a bushing on the outside to provide support between the stop and the frame. Provided, of course, that there's a brick's width of room where that assembly goes.
Edit: I just looked up the instructions for 75313 and found the section with the assembly. The assembly is the "hip" joint, where the leg connects with the main body. The assembly is connected so that the offending axles are parallel to the ground. The dark gray axle points inward and it looks like, at least on the front legs, it's too close to another frame to extend the pin so that it sits outside the frame.
https://www.lego.com/cdn/product-assets/product.bi.core.pdf/...
On Firefox (desktop) with uBlock Origin and a Pihole, it was a pleasant read. The site loaded quickly, and it worked nicely with a system dark theme and in reader mode.
There are no obvious gaps where sponsored content would be inserted. The header and sidebar look complete yet unobtrusive. It looks like a well-made page that should cooperate nicely with a mobile browser. I'm sorry to hear your experience was so bad!
CaDA
Q-Bricks
XingBao
Mould King
Wange
Cobi
Winner
Sembo
bloxbox
ZHE GAO
Panlos
Klemos
Ausini
MunichBricks
BlueBrixx
Unico
| singular | plural
nom | legum | legi
voc | lege | legos
gen | legi | legorum
dat/abl | lego | legosBut multiple lego bricks are just lego
Why exactly can't the parts shown be taken apart by reversing the action?
Could someone explain it for someone who have never played Lego other than simple bricks.
- being a known brand,
- having a good reputation,
- superb quality of its parts and
- exclusive sets.
[0] Except for things you need the brick separators to fix, those configurations have always existed. I have noticed there's more of those being called for in sets lately. eg: 2x 2x1 flat plates together, it's very hard to impossible to separate those without tools.
EDIT: the current two child comments are of parts in that diagram, great. No judgement, I just wonder what type my son is going to be :-)
And then you get amazing synergies when people who play differently combine their efforts.
Which is one of the reasons I'll admit I cried during the first Lego movie ending. They nailed that aspect.
Tip: Just kind of relax into the goofiness and have fun, but make sure you watch the entire movie if you start
I've turned into a Lego Shelf person. I like to buy the architecture kits. I put them on the shelf in my office, but every so often when I get frustrated and no one is watching I will take one and smash it to bits on the floor like a child. It's great because it lets me vent, and it gives my future self the gift of building a Lego set. Really, it's an act of self-care.
I've never sold a kit and I don't intend to ever do it.
We look at a pile of bricks and see whatever it's supposed to be.
An 8 year old looks at it and sees whatever pops into their head.
My friend and I wanted to start a Beer, Brats, and Bricks night, but right when that was gonna materialize, the plague struct. I should hit them back up. I still have buckets on buckets.
Sindoni Italian sausage is world-class. Aldi has a good selection of brats. And my family is from Western NY so we get Salen's hotdogs occasionally. I forget the name but there's a really good kielbasa at the grocery too.
Keeping it on topic… when is Lego releasing a Chicago dog? :)
Either sounds good.
He doesn't get to sample the beer, of course.
If you're in stores often you catch the 50 piece standard piece sets for $10 or whatever. Lego stuff lasts generations.
My son is 5, and recently graduated from Duplos to classic Legos, he started with this set:
https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/lego-medium-creative-bric...
It's basically a box of hundreds of colorful plates and bricks. There are a few wheels and eyes, too, but it's mostly just bricks. We make bulldozers and airplanes and robots and houses and all manner of things! Yes, there are studs instead of smooth tiles on top of the engine compartment, and yes, there are about 7 shades of yellow, cream, and orange making up the dozer, and no, the tracks aren't functional, but it slides fine. Mom might need to ask to know that the pink 1x1 brick sticking out the top is the bulldozer's TURBO BOOSTER MODE BUTTON, or she might guess that because she knows our son.
He's received a few sets once we let family and friends know that he's using legos now. He got this Ninjago set:
https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/tournament-of-elements-71...
which focuses the design on a bunch of stickers and printed parts and custom weapons made to look like a show he's never seen. He does love all the little Lego people, they have fun adventures, but he built it once, took it apart, and now most of the parts end up in the bottom of the brick box unused. Another typical one is this monster truck:
https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/monster-truck-31101
https://www.lego.com/cdn/cs/set/assets/bltd6f7b204e1e11893/3...
Kudos to Lego for the cool Technik functional rubber suspension design, my son loves that and has rebuilt it on other vehicles! And kudos for the 3-in-1 design that reuses a lot of the custom pieces for a truck, a dragster, and a small car. But look at all the rounded tiles and cheese wedges and smooth surfaces. It's possible to build things that aren't one of the intended three things, but it takes a lot more planning. Like the random horns and staffs from the Ninjago set, he doesn't use these studless tiles much either. You can't click anything into the bed of the truck; it's supposed to be a truck, what's up with that! There's almost nowhere to put a pink turbo booster mode button at all.
The truck looks like a plastic model. Anything built with the creative brick box has studs all over and looks like a pile of Legos begging to have something added to it or to be rebuilt into something else.
I'm not the greatest fan of the explosion in use of small tiles and cheese wedges in recent years. It's kind of like AAA videogames that have a billion vertices but are empty
As much as I'm sympathetic to the toy in its basic form, I'm very much disappointed in the company behind it.
Holy crap... I used to love Lego as a child and I knew some of the kits were expensive. They would be our "main present" at Christmas. But now they are the best part of a grand?! I had no idea people were spending that much on things like this. Maybe stuff like this is why all my friends seem poorer than me despite earning similar money?
E.g. this is 11.8 cents/piece, where some other large "adult" sets are more along the lines of 6-7 cents. And the kid-focused ones have similar ranges, (or worse if you include the really small ones)
http://bramlambrecht.com/tmp/jamieberard-brickstress-bf06.pd...
However, illegal setups have slipped through in the past.
It's an absurdly robust model.
https://www.ifixit.com/Store/Tools/Precision-Screw-Extractor...
But it makes business sense for Legos to do that (short term)... it is basically single-use and discard Legos.
note: I have over 1000 lego sets ranging from the early 80's to modern times, I love lego.
That's a shocking price.
My kids are getting into Lego currently, and the quality is just as good as it has been. My Lego works perfectly with their Lego, and is just as fun!
My wife has been buying the Harry Potter Lego, because she likes to build them and display them, whilst I like to dig out old instructions and build old stuff with the kids, which they can change and tweak.
Swings and roundabouts etc
With a modern theme like Ninjago, most of the sets are some imaginary vehicles with very specific parts and colours. You could probably build a new vehicle from the same set, but combining different sets is much less enjoyable. The few sets with buildings have no baseplates and the structures feel very airy and unharmonic.
The NES set has a TV with a moving Mario level. A _moving_ Mario level. It's insane. My mind is blown as an adult; I can't imagine what child me would have done with that engineering knowledge.
I haven't built the piano nor the typewriter yet, but from what I've seen they are similarly impressive sets.