Lego has changed since we were kids (2014) | Hacker News Reader

Lego has changed since we were kids (2014)

todaysparent.com

234 pointsmartinlaz291 comments

If you don't like the licensed sets, or even sets with instruction books, then you're still covered. Lego, Mega Bloks, and others have buckets or bags of just parts. To stick to Lego without a themed set, look for The Lego Classic line. If you want them as a themed set but maybe without a media license, there's the Lego Creator line (which does include some licensed material like the Bond 007 Aston Martin DB5).

Kit 10698 is a decent value for building toys and comes with its own storage container. Hasbro has multiple brands of brick building sets, but under their Kreo line there's A4585 or A4584 value buckets. I have a 759-piece Zuru Max bucket that's like $20 - the pieces fit but the quality/durability feels a little less than Lego or MEGA.

This is it. People often complain that Lego is all about licensed sets, and yeah, that type of set has taken over your local toy aisle, but the regular sets are still there, and there are even more of them that there used to be.

The only real change is that Lego gives kids more choice.

It's not all that different from an independent record store promoting the latest collectible vinyl drop to pay the bills so they can continue selling niche recordings, or an independent theater playing Marvel titles so they can afford to run arthouse fare.

Lego has adopted the "keep a corporate job to fund your side projects" outlook, and given the consistent results in the Creator series and the continuing legacy of classic product lines, more power to them.

I really enjoy the Creator series. I don't really have money to spend more than $30 on a set at a time. It's also cool all(?) of them are 3 in 1, so you can choose between 3 instructions. It's fun to mix them and build new as well.

Lego City is also a good line for more modern basics.

What I love is heir move to creating adult oriented sets which are much more complicated and intricate. I seems the article was complaining instructions are getting more complex but that is only true in their larger sets. They still have like you mention all the classic sets too.

I wish I could rent a set. I’d love to put a huge set together, but after that I don’t really want it anymore and don’t want to deal with the hassle of selling it.

This seems like a great business idea, so great I checked to see if anyone was already doing it: https://netbricks.biz/

Wow thats actually a really cool idea. At first I was worried about what would happen if you lose a little piece and they thought of that and seem to have a very generous policy. I'd give it a go but I have a huge backlog of sets to build.

One key mindshift is to realize that many of the newer sets are more in line with a 3D puzzle than a creative 1000's of blocks to invent your own thing. Its a lot less frustrating when you realize the replay value is in taking down the set and doing it again next year or passing it on to a friend - in a manner more analogous to how puzzles are engaged with.

> the replay value is in taking down the set and doing it again next year

There is no end to the “replay value” in taking whatever miscellaneous collection of legos you have and making whatever you want out of them. This is what most kids do. Each new set gets added to the mixed-up pile. (This works because all of the pieces consistently follow a common geometric design, and connect together using a small handful of common interfaces. Note: sorting the collection can be helpful for finding pieces.)

Making the set following the instructions and then displaying the finished model on a shelf, packing the pieces back in its box, or reselling the kit is something more common among adults.

The “follow 3d-puzzle instructions” way of playing is pretty shallow. Even the hardest lego sets aren’t really that hard, and with a couple years experience even very young children can do them. (A 5 or 6 year-old can easily make the sets that claim on the box to be for age 11+ or whatever, with a couple years’ occasional experience.)

But if you like 3d puzzles, legos are pretty good for inventing new ones, and there are a wide variety of ways to make puzzles that are harder than the instructions shipped with the pieces.

The “follow 3d-puzzle instructions” way of playing is pretty shallow.

>> I don't disagree that its shallow but its similar to a jigsaw puzzle, sometimes you want to just do something to keep your mind active and have a sense of accomplishment.

>> As mentioned in the other posts, there are just a lot of custom parts in the new "licensed" sets to have a proper return on investment - particularly once Harry Potter, Marvel, Architecture, Star Wars all get jumbled together. The suggestion for creative play is to buy the City Legos or 1000 random piece sets which seems to scratch this itch really well.

Nearly all of the parts in a “Harry Potter” or “Star Wars” set are generic. And there’s nothing stopping you from making up a game/story mixing robots with your wizards.

Also, even the "non-generic" parts see plenty of reuse. For example, the wand pieces originally created for the Harry Potter sets have regularly popped up in unrelated sets as a decorative part of builds.

> There is no end to the “replay value” in taking whatever miscellaneous collection of legos you have and making whatever you want out of them. This is what most kids do.

It’s interesting watching my sister’s kids interact with lego. Her daughter (the oldest) loves rules, and loves following the instructions on the set. Her (younger) son loves destroying her sets and mixing things up. He loves all the “boy” lego sets - flames, dragons, motorbikes, you name it.

I’ve been trying to get them to relax into building whatever they want with their bricks. “Oh there’s the eyes for a face. Which piece is a mouth?” “Wow cool motorbike. I wonder if this brick would look good as a helmet?”. I try to make bad suggestions and get them to find something better.

I struggle to break free from the instructions a lot of the time too. I think my problem with modern lego is how many individual elements there are. It doesn’t feel like fun creative constraints when you have so many different pieces to choose from. More like, whatever element I use, I feel like there was something better out there I didn’t think of. The huge variety of pieces makes the sets look great - so great that it overshadows anything I make myself. I love lego; but I wish they embraced the constraints of the medium more and let their sets be more blocky. Minecraft’s 1x1x1 block shape constraint makes the game better, not worse.

Something like this might be useful:

https://www.amazon.com/Lego-Ideas-Book-Unlock-Imagination/dp...

I feel like people completely unnecessary put moral value on not following manual. There is nothing wrong with following it. There is nothing wrong if that girl wants to keep some building and play with them. She may or may not build own later, most kids move between the two kinds of play.

If younger brother dostroyed her own creation, in my experience, the anger is even higher. And loss harder to fix - you can help to fix it if done based on manual. You just can't if it was own.

The play is whatever kids do with it. When we demand that they play in certain way, so that they become more artistic ones, it is nit a play anymore. It is educational activity.

One game I have enjoyed with my 5-year-old is to give two (or more) people an identical collection of 20–50 miscellaneous pieces (just pull pairs of identical pieces randomly and dump into 2 piles) and then each make something and compare.

Or have one person make something and see if the other person can copy it, then switch.

As a kid I had a ton of legos and my main obsession were technic sets (Still have them). But, before technic sets I had a bunch of the early town themed sets. So for example if you bought the gas station, it comes with a little mechanic figure and tow truck. Most of the blocks were standard and a few specialty blocks rounded out the set like windows, doors, auto chassis parts, wheels, even trees and plants. Of course the majority of the blocks were generic enough so you could build whatever. Even the technic sets gave you a ton of freedom to build whatever.

Now have a look at the modern licensed sets and notice how MOST of the pieces are specialty. Those specialty parts are there to add more features but they are completely useless outside of their intended position in the licensed puzzle. How do you turn that fancy haunted house into a boat or truck? Lame.

Assuming you're talking this one - https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/haunted-house-10273 - I'm failing to see the specialty parts, outside of a couple of things like the spiderweb. Even the organ is brick-built from parts that could be repurposed in a number of ways (for example, exhaust pipes on a car or truck).

That is not even close to what I am describing. A licensed set is a set that contains licensed material like star wars and marvel. e.g. https://www.lego.com/en-us/themes/marvel

There are sets that are just busts of characters heads like darth vader or an infinity hand, whatever that is, which are more of a one time build puzzle rather than a palette you can turn into something else.

I'm still not seeing what you're talking about. The Darth Vader head and the Infinity Gauntlet, for example, are both built out of standard pieces. Sure, it's a limited color palette, but it still wouldn't be hard to repurpose either to use for parts of a spaceship or themed building or whatever. Even on the page you linked, the only really specialized parts on display are the spiderwebs, the Gargantos tentacles, and the Venom teeth; everything else is ordinary brick-built stuff, including the large robots/mechs, which are built on a Technic frame rather than any specialized parts.

I would say it's more like model building than a 3D puzzle.

My 4- year old enjoys building Lego kits from instructions and I think it is a good learning tool that teaches to follow some rules (4 year olds don't have much patience but they can build it). The only problem that I find is that these instructions are often wrong and confusing and that's where I have to step in and become creative to get the puzzle in a finished state.

I see my kids use modern sets just the way I did as a kid.

I would follow the directions to build the thing. Over time I would break it down and add it to my lego pile from which I made random things.

Sure, some pieces are very specific. But you can still take those specific pieces and add it to some other random very specific piece.

As far as I can tell, legos haven't changed that much in 30 years. There were a lot of specially crafted pieces back then too.

But the colors! Back then you had black, white, blue, yellow, green and red. And today? You even have two different shades of light blue.

from what I've seen, kids are likely to just ignore all the colors and just grab the shape they're looking for

> If you don't like the licensed sets, or even sets with instruction books, then you're still covered. Lego, Mega Bloks, and others have buckets or bags of just parts.

Unfortunately it seems this is not true also for Meccano (my favorite). By looking at their products I see only branded/licensed sets and none of generic parts.

It is a real pleasure to see old-school lego sets at costco - 1500 piece set with no theme.

Ooh. Thanks for that tip.

Most of the now & then examples are both true now. The classic sets still exist and how children play with Lego depends on their personality and what they have available (and how it is stored). Children are individuals and Lego allows a larger variety of play than most other toys on the market.

My kids have a mix of classic & branded sets and the play area is a mix of designed builds and improvised creations. The favourite and larger sets stay in their own bags when deconstructed but most others are added to the common boxes, which are sorted by rough shape based on what we’ve seen stimulates free building. There are a lot of complex shapes but many of those are useful in free building. I’ve purposely bought some sets with multiple complex flats & bricks as they allow more creativity than just the basic bricks.

But I know other children who just like to follow build instructions or just like to play with the characters and that’s OK. That’s the flexibility of modern Lego.

> The classic sets still exist and how children play with Lego depends on their personality and what they have available (and how it is stored). Children are individuals and Lego allows a larger variety of play than most other toys on the market.

Yes. And also, many if not most kids combine approaches. Start by building based on manual, then they play with it and it gets gradually destroyed, then just use it is as material.

Have few favorite sets they keep, the rest gets destroyed and used as bricks when in mood.

I'm pleased you said that, because we also have a mixture, but most of the sets that were built were broken up and are now in communal boxes. This seems pretty unusual compared to most parents, I guess it's mostly because the parents don't want things to get mixed up. In theory we could rebuild according to the instructions, but in reality it's never going to happen as it would take so long to find all the pieces. Almost every day my kids (Boy 6, Girl, 8) do free play with the mixed lego, sometimes for hours. I'm really pleased with it, as it makes a good break from Youtube etc.

I wish my kids were more into free play. When their sets inevitably get broken and end up in the communal box, that's usually the last time they play with it. I should stop buying them more sets, but as an avid collector myself I enjoy getting sets as much for my own enjoyment.

For them I think Minecraft scratches much that creative itch that Lego used to bring me.

Necessity is the mother of invention. I played with legos a lot to try and build a toy I didn't get. When I didn't get a Megazord action figure one year for Christmas, I tried the best I could to build something like it out of legos.

Bingo. I think this comment nails it. Minecraft is the digital lego for alot of kids these days. My youngest daughter is 9 with autism, and she is always talking about minecraft. She just absolutely loves it to death.

This is absolutely the correct way Lego intends you to play. They even make the boxes flimsy and cheap on purpose to not encourage saving them. There are some Lego employees on TikTok that speak of their training and "secrets" if interested. Not a source of truth, but interesting none the less.

Personally, I enjoy the modern Lego in that there is parental choice. As a company, they cater to all audiences without a strong opinion either way. This is the way.

Yes, I think a proper Lego setup for young children requires the parents to set up the right environment. We devote quite a bit of space to Lego so that it’s always on hand and I’m a bit fanatical about Lego organisation. That helps both when starting a free build and also finding the pieces for an official manual. Flip side is the classic pain of stepping on Lego!

> My kids have a mix of classic & branded sets and the play area is a mix of designed builds and improvised creations.

Amazing. My kid just wants to get the build over with so he can get back to gaming or youtube, where he watches other people gaming.

My kid is only 3, but I am already contemplating time boxing and auditing gaming and YouTube time. It seems significantly more difficult than it ought to be, thanks to all the brain hijacking dark patterns out there.

Do so, no question about it! Once most children disappear down a YouTube rabbit hole of unboxing or gaming they're lost. It's scary to see how addictive our modern passive entertainment is. In my experience, the best thing to do is start limiting from early on. My kids are still under 10 and it's 1 to 1:15 hours of gaming + same of TV on each weekend day, never on a school day. They are hardly aware that YouTube exists, they only watch it with us.

This takes up a lot of our time, as we're their entertainment, but the times that I let go and let them watch more typically come back and bite me as they haven't had enough time to play & be creative and that leads to tantrums and bad bedtimes. We use Google Family to control their tablets and it's the timer on there that stops them playing, not us, which feels fairer to them.

I haven't really followed recent Lego developments, but I'm relieved to see the "classic" sets still exist - although it's understandable to not be aware of them, because all of the advertising goes into the branded sets, probably because the margin on them is much better (ok, they probably have to pay some license fees to Disney, Warner or whoever, but still...)

most others are added to the common boxes, which are sorted by rough shape based on what we’ve seen stimulates free building.

I inherited a bunch of legos from older cousins when I was a kid (and I've since donated them to a school). My parents did get me a tackle box to go along with them, and sorting/putting them away is as much part of the play/learning as building, I think. Just like you can't really go fishing if you can't find the right lure, you can't really build that spaceship if you don't know where the cone piece is.

My childhood memory with Lego was the big box we had where all was mixed together. This ment lomg search firnthe "right" piece in the "right" color and the often resulted in finding some different piece and changing plans.

On the side I had precious models, which were not to touch.

When my daughter was about 3 years old,I went on Ebay and bought a huge bag of used Lego. I think it was 10KG or so. My wife nearly got a heart attack, especially when I poured all those little pieces into the bath and filled it up with water,so I could wash them a bit. Then ended up catching the smallest pieces when I pulled the plug. We poured all those pieces in the living room. Took like 3 days to dry out. We built so many things since then. There are lots of sets mixed together,I don't care nor does my daughter. It's still nice to build something, especially when all you do at work is sending emails and writing some code here and there.

The advice I got was to stick your dirty second-hand Lego in a pillow case, zip it shut, and put it through the washing machine.

Though that route can only take quite a bit less than 10kg at a time.

Glad to get this advice. My parents sent me all my old LEGOs a while ago and I’m still in the process of disassembling all the sets, though at least organized into plates, bricks, etc.

Fortunately I know they’re not truly dirty, though they’re still pretty dusty so a good wash will help.

Dishwasher (on low temp) also works fairly well, just don't use any (or a very small amount) of detergent. I like to put about 1kg or so in the "delicates" laundry mesh bags when I have a lot of used legos to wash.

Also need to reiterate do not heat dry or use hot cycles if you go this route :)

They're made of ABS, which doesn't begin to soften until a bit over the boiling point of water (~104-105 C). It's a bit close to risk it, but even the hot cycle might be fine as long as it doesn't go much past boiling off the water.

Definitely avoid cleaning with acetone though; that'll turn it into goo.

Our dishwasher is newer so I think I’ll try it in the washing machine first, but that’s a good idea as well.

I've run duplos through the dishwasher many times with no problems at all. On the regular cycle with dishes. Our dishwasher (Bosch) doesn't have a heating element for drying, it just makes the water really hot and waits for the water to evaporate from the hot dishes.

Fair enough, I've used quite cheap dishwashers in the past for this - where the heating element is used to heat the water up. Due to general cheapness, I'm sure there were hotspots.

That said, under hot loads with an old/cheap dishwasher I've only had issues with the large baseplates and very large/thin elements typically found in Technic sets - everything else has turned out fine.

Legos are still one of the most satisfying toys to buy your children. Yes they are expensive, yes it's annoying that a lot of them are built just once. That being said when you look out at the competition the bar is low.

I have a 5 and 3 year old and watching them patiently page through the instructions and put together something complex that they really care about is incredibly satisfying. Some of the sets have relatively complex mechanisms in them as well (I'm thinking specifically of the Lego Friends Shopping Mall and the Minecraft sets) and the kids are forced to understand them at least on some level.

I don't know that my daughter would be interested in classic Legos, it's Lego Friends that caught her and will keep her in front of a 200 page instruction manual for 4 hours and in my mind there's nothing wrong with that.

>That being said when you look out at the competition the bar is low.

Bluebrixx, Cobi and Xingbao are probably much better.

I would be absolutely floored if any of those other toy brick manufacturer had the quality of LEGO, they are injection molding wizards.

I haven’t tried a kit of those three mentioned, only other competitors, but brick quality hasn’t been any different from Lego.

I have one Cobi model and while it hasn't been playtested by a kid longterm the bricks look solid and the model looks good.

Doesn't the actual injection molding happen in China anyway? Wouldn't it be more surprising if the Chinese didn't learn the tricks of the trade by now?

No, for Lego the injection molding is strictly headquarter business. To the extend that the old molds/tools are literally encased in concrete beneath the buildings (you can see examples if you go to "Lego House" museum at the headquarters in Billund, Denmark).

So, no patents, but trade secrets?

Ah yes checkout Bluebrixx, they are German...the quality...not where it's produced of curse.

I am a big Bluebrixx fan but the quality is a bit shite at the moment.

Their medieval sets are stunningly beautiful. Probably the best looking set on the market.

They are great for experts but definitely not great as a casual first buy for people that try Lego alternatives. They love to use insane build techniques that are fun for experts but not really suited for beginners.

The Star Trek series has been a huge disaster for both design issues but also quality of pieces. They have serious stability issues and barely hold together. I am unironically considering plastic glue for my models.

They are constantly improving and I am sure the kinks will get worked out but currently I can only recommend them for people that like a challenge. Again, they have some stunningly beautiful sets and are worth keeping an eye on but do not buy them for children or inexperienced people.

interesting, the reviews that i saw about the star trek models pointed out some issues but were not as bad. and besides that i have not seen any other star trek set that was better, with the exception of the mega bloks one, but their way to connect the warp nacelles i would consider cheating.

Yeah, some things are really difficult to do any better with standard pieces but honestly that can't be excuse. The quality of pieces that xingbao can deliver is simply not up to the task and they should have expected that.

Plus the pressure that is put in the pieces by the weight of the models might cause them not age well. So the benefit of using standard pieces might not be that great in this case.

As for the reviews, Held der Steine is sadly very biased towards towards Bluebrixx. Look at the comments under the last video where he shows the big Enterprise. They are extremely negative.

Also quality is very inconsistent. Some people are very lucky and get good pieces while some others have less luck. So you can't really know if you get a good batch.

Honestly they are still OK display pieces but the price is not really justified by the quality.

i have read through the comments. most complain about the price and the hanging nacells. none of the commenters have built this model yet. most sound self righteous and they were never going to get this thing anyways. i'll wait until i see more reviews from people who actually built the thing.

maybe i am biased towards lego alternatives, but i don't think that the same model with original lego bricks is going to be any better. i highly doubt that the quality of xingbao bricks is the problem here.

rather this model is at the limit of what plastic can hold, and unless you cheat, like mega bloks, i don't think it is possible to do better.

in my personal opinion, if the model doesn't fall apart, then the quality of the bricks is good enough. yes, there are issues with inconsistent quality, and i have seen models that actually do fall apart. if that happens, then criticism is justified. but for the model as presented in the video, i didn't see such quality issues, and hence i don't agree that the review was biased.

Yeah, fair enough.

I had my own mid-sized Enterprise-A falling apart multiple times when I tried to pose her for photos. I dread having guests over that want to take a closer look/touch it so even as a display model it does not work for my personal need. I could just have had bad luck though.

My point is not that it is a bad model for people that know what to expect. I had fun building her but that people that just like Star Trek and might buy their first Bluebrixx set might have a very bad time.

I hope they will introduce sets that play more to their strengths, that is architecture. Mini figure scale bridge and all.

Again, I love Bluebrixx and I hope they succeed but no need to sugar coat them. They have serious issues when it comes to quality control and professionalism. You can tell from their videos where they are as surprised by the set they are reviewing as the viewer. Zero preparation and the sets are sometimes not even properly assembled. Even had signs upside down for the Chinese modular buildings.

the most expensive part of any video is the salary for the work time of the employees. professional preparation would easily multiply the cost of each video, which will force bluebrixx to charge more for their products.

in the spirit of the original topic "lego has changed since we were kids": the biggest change is that now many alternatives exist. those alternatives are cheaper and offer more choice.

more professionalism would be nice, but i for one prefer that the prices stay low. the added benefit of more professional videos is not really worth the extra expense. better to spend that time on resolving quality issues on the actual products.

Haven't tried those specific brands (and they tend to change brand every time they get sued), but I had a bunch of Lepin and whatever else.

You can tell the difference if you start mixing pieces. The official ones SNAP together, the cheapo copies just smush and don't really stick. They tend to get loose way faster too.

They're good if you want to get that 5000 piece car, build it and put it on a shelf. But if you're looking for something you can give to your kids and grandkids, get the real deal. I still have the same lego sets I got when I was a kid and now they're with my kids.

Competition has made huge quality leaps in recent years. They can not be compared to Lepin anymore.

Cobi, a Polish Company, has actually better quality than Lego and is the only one producing in the European Union.

The Chinese brands are already at 95% percent there, especially as modern Lego is actually getting worse (and probably producing in the same factories anyway). Sadly the remaining 5% can make all the difference and can be a bit frustrating at times but we should hopefully see parity soon especially a those brands try to go into the quality segment more and more.

As an adult, I don't see a reason to pay Lego prices when I can have nicer and bigger sets for much cheaper. I can cope with a little bit of frustration and some pieces not being perfect.

For children though, yeah Cobi or Lego any day.

quality of alternative bricks has improved remarkably over the last few years. and the reputable importers of chinese brands pay attention to not import cloned sets and make sure that the MOC sets they get are properly licensed from the MOC designers. so what you get is much better than what it used to be.

bluebrixx is a german brand btw. they import many chinese brands but also design and produce their own sets. they recently started producing officially licensed star trek sets.

Sorry to be clear, when I say competition I mean non-lego or knockoff toys, things like LOL Surprise or Shopkins, or Paw Patrol figures.

I got some of the Lego Elves sets for my daughter, but the line was later discontinued and prices skyrocketed. I ordered some Communist Bricks / "Illegos" from Ali Express, and the quality was decent if you wanted them to sit on a shelf. Some of the parts, though, did not hold up to "play time" and I had to buy a few critical components from bricklink to put the dragon's wings back on.

My daughter loves the intricate Friends sets, but dislikes the Friends minifigs.

edit: you may find this interesting -- https://brickset.com/article/38929/a-survey-of-communist-leg...

The Friends minifigs are terrible! Their hair never stays on.

The fact that the legs don't move independently of each other is what she dislikes.

> yes it's annoying that a lot of them are built just once

how is this a point people are hung up on. nobody is telling anyone they can only build a set once. hell, Lego has even started offering "alternative instructions" for certain sets to encourage you to take it apart and rebuild it.

You can do whatever you want with LEGO after you buy it and it has never been a better time to be an enthusiast.

People just like complaining about now vs. the Good Old Days (tm)

I can speak to this a little, the issue is that the sets are designed to not be as friendly to rebuilding. The walls and floors to buildings are made out of very specific pieces that aren't easily reconfigured into new structures.

Honestly some of it is so weird that I think they do it on purpose specifically to discourage re-use.

I don't think this is true at all. I recently built the Saturn V and the Mario Question Mark Block and neither had _any_ notably unique pieces in them and certainly not in any excess quantity.

I really dislike all the bizarre "lego ain't what they used to be!" comments - they honestly come from people who haven't spent time with modern legos. For reference I was born in 1970 and played with legos probably from 1975-1985, and then seriously picked it up again in 2012 or so when my son was old enough to play with them. People paint this picture of these new legos that are made up of like 5 parts that you just click together and have a transformer or something. Reality is far from that - there are so many cool pieces that let you build things never before possible. I was going to make an analogy about it being like having 100 crayon colors instead of 1, but it is more like having a whole artist's toolbox at your disposal, including 100 crayons. People say, "but it is too complicated!" - well then just buy the classic bricks, they are easy to purchase in bulk, and you can find lots of instructions all over the place for fun ideas to learn with.

And then there's this weird idea that it is so complicated that you have to build it once and then never take it apart. Please, taking it apart was a huge amount of the fun for my son. He'd repurpose parts into his never ending scene that sprawled a 10x10 area in our family room. He (and us) would play with them literally daily for at least an hour, if not more, adding sets as they came along. Much of it stayed in bins, just because he had so much (youngest child of a youngest child, means you have lots of generous Aunts, Uncles, and cousins!).

Even now, at 13, he literally was putting a set together with is friend just yesterday. It's rarer now, since he likes the intense interactively of computer-based "legos" (People Playground, Minecraft, Garry's Mod, Teardown, and modding for other games, not to mention VR stuff).

Modern legos are awesome.

> Modern legos are awesome.

Indeed they are!

But, as much as I also dislike, like you, these bizarre comments; there's one place where I drew a red line and lego has sadly crossed it recently: lego sets that become obsoleted because lego removes some software from the app store. Previously, sets were standalone and eternal. But today you can buy an awesome technic set that will become "bricked" in a few years when they remove the controller software from the play store.

This is not a theoretical concern. It has already happened (even for sets that were still on sale!). It sucks big time and it is really sad.

If at least the apps were free software, we would have something to hang on to defend lego. But their current stance is indefensible.

I mean, that isn't really new either. I had the first generation Lego Mindstorms set (pre-NXT, with the old yellow control brick), which required a USB device and special software to edit programs on the control brick. After ditching Windows XP for Windows 7, I could never get the USB device, or the required software, to function properly. The software and drivers just weren't maintained and updated, and I could never figure out how to fix that.

I have a few RCX Mindstorms sets, and the software was always a problem. Thankfully, there were some open source alternatives, like http://brickos.sourceforge.net/

As an aside I'm pretty sure my RCX IR towers use serial, not USB.

> As an aside I'm pretty sure my RCX IR towers use serial, not USB.

Both versions exist. Mindstorms 1.0/1.5 had serial IR towers, 2.0 had USB.

What a blast from the past. I remember the finicky IR tower for uploading programs.

I failed abysmally at programming my Mindstorms robot. I could never figure out how to make two things happen at the same time, so I couldn't make both motors run at once. As a result, my treaded robot could only spin in circles.

Sadly, that was pretty much the end of my experience with Mindstorms. Eventually, I gave up and put it away, because it was such a frustrating experience.

I assume it would be easier for kids these days. It was a lot more difficult to find help on the internet in 1999.

Yeah, the bundled software for the RCX was pretty awful, and was Windows-only. That's why I used brickOS, which let me write C (or was it C++?) code to run on the RCX, and it also worked on Linux.

The next generation, "NXT", was somewhat better (I believe it's based on LabView), but I remember it being ridiculously slow and unstable on Macs.

One of my kids uses Lego's "SPIKE Prime" at their robotics club, and while I haven't used the software myself, it seems much better.

> Eventually, I gave up and put it away, because it was such a frustrating experience.

Wasn't there a cheat sheet in the manual for the puzzles? I think I only solved one without copying everything. Way too hard for 11-12yo me.

i always felt that it should be possible to use a raspberry pi or arduino as the controller. with some tinkering i was able to generate IR signals that were accepted by the power functions receivers. and the power functions extension cable seems like a great way to propagate an i2c bus.

there are some pi cases with lego pin-sized holes to help interface the two.

What I've seen is that kids get that dopamine rush from putting together everything exactly according to instructions. From opening the numbered bags and methodically working through thick instruction booklets.

The problem now is that they have this expectation of gratification from making something kind of perfect and their own creations are less interesting and fulfilling.

I don't know what the name is for the idea that offering an "extra" optional path can detrimentally affect the other path. (I'd posit the same theory softly applies to Minecraft's creative mode.)

But might just be my experience.

There's nothing wrong with someone only liking the follow instructions aspect of Lego and not the fully creative DIY aspect.

I think one of the weirder parenting things is a parent trying to get their kiddo to like something in exactly the way the parent wants and anything else is a failure. "I built my Legos without instructions and we had fun! Kids these days...!"

But then parents don't realize they misunderstood the entire point from the beginning. Legos were never a magic device to make someone creative. They were always just a way to try and sneak creativity into people. It just doesn't always work. Some people pick up Legos and make castles and cars and all this stuff, while some people pick up Legos, make a box house, and give up.

Maybe your kiddo is secretly part of the gives up camp, but it's satisfying for them to follow to build instructions.

What matters as a parent is that you gave them an option to be creative. And that's super cool on its own, y'know?

My son treats Lego sets like a model airplane: build it once exactly to spec, put it on your shelf in your room, never change it again. The one difference maybe is they will get played with more.

Yet he's very creative with Magna-Tiles in exactly the same way we played with Legos when I was a kid (I was born in 1976). I do think part of the difference is the presentation and marketing of the set, and how specific some of the pieces obviously are. Yes, some kids can be very creative with these sets, but Lego the company would prefer you buy another set.

I find that I am qualified to offer the following data point.

My daughter is 8. She enjoys both Legos and Minecraft.

She mostly plays Minecraft in creative, but recently I've been playing through survival with her (first time survival for both of us).

She still enjoys building in survival. If anything, I would say her survival builds are more satisfying because she has to do the work of obtaining the resources, and crafting them into the parts she needs. There is also the added challenge of not being able to fly and to easily undo a misplaced block.

If I'm doing a complex build like an automated farm, she enjoys crafting the parts for me.

Back to Lego:

She mostly goes for the Lego Friends kits, but also has a few Lego Minecraft kits. After she'd built something, she does imaginative role play with her 6-yo sister. Sometimes, they'll take the kits apart and rebuild into something different.

Regarding temperament: My 8yo is pretty easy going. She is generally patient and doesn't get easily frustrated when things go wrong.

I could easily see how a different child could hate imperfect Lego builds, or survival Minecraft.

My 4- yo kid likes to build from instructions but once that's done he'll take them apart and mix the pieces with all the other dismantled kits making it a nearly impossible task to redo the original kits. But he'd rebuild simpler variants, the play factor is still there. I on the other hand am bit stumped by the amount of small varied pieces. I'm thinking of getting a bucket with classic pieces, perhaps non branded/generic legos.

My kids do the same. They get a set, build it, play with it for a while, and then it gets deconstructed and mixed in with the Big Bin O' Lego. Oddball pieces become wings, or arms, or showerheads, or whatever their imagination sees.

To me, that's the spirit of Lego. Even as a kid, I had friends who had, e.g., the Space Shuttle set, and once that shuttle got built, it was sacrosanct. If I tried to pilfer something from it, a blood feud would ensue.

I have definitely gotten that dopamine rush, and I think I still do. It's probably a big reason why I'm a programmer. There's a certain satisfaction you get from knowing definitively that you "solved" the problem. Making music is another interest of mine, but due to its open-ended, creative nature, I don't think it can provide this kind of satisfaction.

I feel like a lot of people look at the intricate sets that cost hundreds of dollars, and conclude that Lego has abandoned play and creativity. In reality, there's an abundance of kid-oriented sets that are meant to be built, played with, deconstructed, and modified. But those aren't the sets that get shared through social media.

Lego has embraced the adult collector as a valuable customer. But that does not mean they have abandoned the children who just want to play with some Lego.

TBF the best advice for people who only want a bunch of "classic" bricks for their small child is to buy them used or of some generic conpatible brand.

I totally understand Lego not putting any marketing power in that direction and pushing so hard for more branding and licensed sets.

The other end of the spectrum is their educational sets, but then we're really into the multi hundreds of dollars sets.

Every major retailer that sells Lego sets will likely carry or stock some version of a "classic" set which is 1000+ bricks that are the same as the ones from 40 or even 50 years ago (just available in more colors & perhaps some bricks introduced in the 80s or 90s). There's no license, stickers, software, etc.

Most of these sets are sub-$50, so relatively affordable.

Indeed: https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/lego-large-creative-brick...

The promotional photos even echo that long-ago Lego ad the author laments as a bygone era, with a little girl building a house with no instructions (albeit the modern version is perhaps unrealistically restrained for something a kindergartner supposedly came up with).

> Most of these sets are sub-$50, so relatively affordable.

Second hand buckets are around $10 if you buy from a store, and way less if you get them at a flee market or from families who don't use them anymore.

Sounds hippy and extreme, but I anecdotely know around ~20 people who went that route to start or grow their collection, and that's the advice I'd give people if asked. Lego seems to be the only toy people don't mind just getting second hand, machine wash in a net and start playing.

Bucket will stay in store as the anchoring price, and also to avoid having non Lego brand take that shell space, but I don't remember seing any marketing effort from Lego to push them in the last 10 or 20 years.

Classic bricks are available in toy stores. Not like a rare item, it is there pretty much all the time, usually at the bottom shelf. And they are not expensive either.

Every so often Costco will have this giant "classic" lego box for $40 which is a pretty good deal: https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/bricks-bricks-bricks-1071...

For me, the biggest difference between Legos when you and I were kids and now is that the sheer number of different pieces makes it too often nearly impossible to find the piece you need when building something from "the pile".

My kids also have a lot of Legos (by volume, more than I ever had). When engaging in free play (i.e. not building a new set from the instructions), I find that the things they make tend to be much smaller than many of the things I built when I was a kid.

I think this makes sense. When I was a kid, for the most part I had a bunch of bricks, a bunch of girders, a bunch of plates, and a bunch of smaller, more specialized pieces, but the latter were used more for adding detail. So it was relatively easy for me to find the pieces I needed to make something decent sized and them embellish it.

When I look at my kids pile of Legos, it looks like 90% small, specialized pieces. As a kid, I remember spending a lot of time looking for that one piece that I knew I had if I could just find it. But nowadays, that situation is far, far more common.

The specialized pieces make for great looking creations on the outside of the box. In theory, they should also allow for great looking creations during free play, but in practice it ends up being too much trouble to find the pieces you need. And at that point, a new set looks even more enticing than spending all your time searching for pieces, so...

> "the pile"

it's essential to organize them otherwise locating the piece of interest becomes too frustrating and time consuming. we use a stack of tool boxes from the hardware store to organize ours.

A ~550-piece set from my childhood (90s): 10 minifigs and accessories, end result will fill about a 1-foot cube. Plenty of room for small hands to get in and actually play with it. Construction simple enough you can easily put it back together if it's messed up during play, without resorting to the directions. Exposed studs everywhere for easy adding-on.

A modern ~550-piece set, also from a line aimed at kids, not one of the adult-aimed models: 3 minifigs, fills 1/3 cubic foot at best because 450 of the pieces are little 1x1 and 1x2 plates or similar. Finished set's too small for even kid hands to get in and play. If it gets messed up more than a very tiny bit, you'll probably have to re-build from scratch, because the construction is... very CAD, I guess. All surfaces clad in smooth bricks if at all possible, making adding on awkward.

The modern ones do have more cool mechanisms and gadgets, though. Also they include extra pieces for the small ones now, and more sets come with a brick tool. Those are all nice changes. But the sets themselves seem to be tuned for inflating part counts and looking nice on a box, not for play.

The sets you are looking for still exist today. For example:

428-piece, 1-foot cube, $55, 4 minifigs, 1994: https://brickset.com/sets/6571-1/Flame-Fighters

540-piece, 1-foot cube, $69, 5 minifigs, 2022: https://brickset.com/sets/60320-1/Fire-Station

LEGO just has a much much larger catalog now than they did back then (200 sets vs 800 sets.) But the classic style sets are still there for you, if that's what you want.

Am I the only one who thinks the 1994 one looks nicer?

Yes, the 1994 Flame Fighters is an outstanding set! My main dislike of the modern version is that the fire truck does not have a ladder (that would offer a lot of playability). The water gun just looks puny.

EDIT: still, even if I have a weakness for even older fire sets, I acknowledge that the modern lego fire stations are very good toys. My son has spend countless hours playing with the 2016 version [0], which is incredibly playable, and whose fire truck is the best.

[0] https://brickset.com/sets/60110-1/Fire-Station

The modern one reflects some... changes - the more contemporary window style, and the number of minifigs wearing ties in the firehouse has increased. I expect it reflects an assumption of a higher tax base in legoville. In all seriousness, the custom piece count is on full display, where the 90's set is dominated by reusable generic pieces.

Those outward-sloping windows in the 90's set were the bomb though, useful in so many cool applications - (star)ship bridges, towers, and the like. :D

There’s also the entire Lego Classic line which is just a box of multi coloured standard bricks.

Parent was exaggerating, but the 2022 set has 25% more pieces (and 50% more distinct pieces), but isn't any larger.

Organizing becomes seriously important, now.

I help my kids by organizing their pieces by colour, with an extra box for "bits". So there's a grey box, red box, etc and a box full of minifigs and assorted non-building accessories.

It's generally accepted among online lego communities that organizing by part/shape makes retrieval more efficient than organizing by color. It's tough to find a red 1x2 plate in a huge bin of red pieces, but it's easy to find a red 1x2 plate in a bin of small plates of multiple colors. If you don't have enough parts to justify breaking down to the specific part, you can do categories at whatever level of granularity makes sense for your collection: bricks, plates, modified bricks, rods and clips, etc.

> I find that the things they make tend to be much smaller than many of the things I built when I was a kid.

Could this be that the constructions are the same scale but you have gotten bigger?

Lol, that's a good thought but no. I still have some pretty specific memories of some things I made (lots of spaceships).

Companies that don't change tend to go under. Lego has to innovate just like everyone else.

100% agreed. Our 5yo started getting into them about a year ago as we sunsetted the Duplo bricks and they're by far his and my favorite toys.

We have a bunch of Star Wars sets and while the builds themselves are great, 90% of the fun has been breaking them down and building our own ships and designs. I watch him completely immersed in the world when he makes and flies these ships around, it's amazing. I hope we're still doing it when he's 13 too.

This rules

Yeah, I have been getting Legos for my kid, and man, I just don't see the complaints. I'm very happy with the modern sets, as happy as I was when I was a kid.

But you're literally admitting that legos aren't what they used to be. My exposure to legos was very similar to yours. Yes, there are more variety of pieces now, and it can be both a blessing and a curse, depending on what angle you squint at it from.

In my experience, old legos had a far more rigid feeling: idiomatically, sets relied heavily on the verticality of system (i.e. usage of the traditional tall or short bricks). Nowadays, sets come with a huge variety of 1x1 and 1x2 pieces with sideways elements, and a good portion of pieces are of the beam variety (i.e. pieces that require connectors to be put together[0], commonly found in mindstorm sets)

So with a modern mindstorms set, you can build some really elaborate things with high degrees of motion, in a way that is intended by Lego, but conversely, the traditional blocks look dull in comparison. I was building some random robots w/ my kids a while back, and the way we approached the bricks was fairly different. They largely build following the system as intended. My childhood techniques, by contrast, are distinctly "illegal" (according to what Lego considers valid/stable brick arrangements in official sets). For example, this[1] is a technique to achieve a movable joint that I used to chain together to create things like arms, animal tails, etc.

The entertainment environment for kids has also changed, through no fault of Lego itself. Despite the availability of high range of motion components, there are so many other ways for kids to entertain themselves nowadays that it would just never occur to them to exploit Legos in unintended ways the way I did.

[0] https://img.brickowl.com/files/image_cache/larger/lego-dark-...

[1] http://www.publishyourdesign.com/design/102080

> For example, this[1] is a technique to achieve a movable joint that I used to chain together to create things like arms, animal tails, etc.

It can only revolve a little before the next "button" hit the fork, right?

EDIT: Nvm it should be able to bend alot. I am going to steal that technique. =)

No, the second button is clear from the tip of the top piece, so that specific configuration has a range of motion of well over 270 degrees. It isn't considered kosher by Lego because obviously the second button does eventually hit the side of the top piece and if you force it, you can break your build or damage a piece.

You can, of course, modify it to use a tall brick and some 1x1 flats to achieve a swiss-army knife setup[0] with a 360 degrees range of motion. I'd use this variation for things like retractable wings.

[0] http://www.publishyourdesign.com/design/102082

I've played with Lego (never Legos) since 1980. I love the modern sets. The branded sets, to me, make it even more fun. You can mix a Batman mini-fig and use the branded parts to make an uber-Batmobile of your own design. The Star Wars kits are fantastic. I actually bought all the Friends sets for myself because the brick colors are great.

Even today I opened my mail to find a teddy bear valentine's heart Lego set from my girlfriend that is constructed from clever use of generic bricks, none of which would have been out of place in 1970s sets. In fact, I think Lego has become 100X more creative since the advent of the Internet, where people are making the more insane and elaborate constructions from the simplest bricks. It's become competitive in the nicest way.

Lego today is thriving and is better than it ever was.

> Now you don’t have regular Lego cops and robbers—you have Batman and the Gotham criminals.

You also still have regular Lego cops and robbers. Cops and robbers is still by far the largest sub-theme of the City theme. Almost every set, even some sets that aren't about cops and robbers at all, will have a cop and a robber in there.

That was a particularly weird gripe, considering some of the themes that have in fact been replaced by licensed stuff (looking at you LEGO Space/Star Wars) but the cops and robbers is definitely not one of them. The LEGO City theme has always been packed with cops and robbers and still is to this day.

While Lego Space may have been replaced by Lego Star Wars, Space has also come back as a sub-theme of City, but now much more realistic, with bulky space suits and realistic space shuttles. I love it.

I would love to know what percentage of Legos revenue is now from adults buying the incredible large, complex and expensive sets to build themselves. Lego is so associated as a toy for children just as computer games are, but gaming is a larger industry for adults than children.

My wife and I now regularly buy these large lego sets for each other (birthdays, Christmas and anniversaries) and do them together in the evenings after the kids are in bed. Its such a lovely way to relax.

I think 1980s kids who grew up and got well-paying tech jobs are their largest customer demographic now. Kids play Minecraft instead.

That's what my oldest son said, at least; he doesn't see the point in Lego now that Minecraft exists. Breaks my heart. I mean, Minecraft is fantastic, but it's not Lego.

Overwhelming majority (but not all) of kids I know have parents that limit how much they can play on computer or tablet. They play with legos regularly (among other things).

An alternative viewpoint: Minecraft is Lego, and Lego isn't.

When there were fewer themed Lego sets, Lego was a sandbox. You had a mish-mash of generic pieces and your creativity. Modern Lego sets are extremely tailored, both in theme and with sets having bespoke pieces - even if you throw all of your newer sets together in a pile (which people tend not to because each is supposed to be a thing), the pieces aren't as modular, allow for less extension of your imagination.

Minecraft is blocks and what you do with them. Minecraft isn't a digital extension of Lego, it's serving the experience Lego did a few decades ago but no longer does.

There are a lot fewer bespoke parts than you might think. Creating new molds is expensive and if you look closer you'll see that odd shapes are reused for different purposes in different sets.

For some firsthand examples, I have a few of the "botanical" sets, and they have things like Technic wing/fin pieces for leaves, flowers made out of car hoods and trunks, and pink frogs used en masse for cherry blossoms.

They're very creative at reusing pieces. One of the Lego Mario sets has a bomb on a parachute, but the parachute is made out of a white version of the old 3-flower-stem piece.

> I would love to know what percentage of Legos revenue is now from adults buying the incredible large, complex and expensive sets to build themselves.

If you have a Lego store nearby, stop in, and it's mindboggling how many $100+ sets they carry. Not great for shopping for a Lego Friends set for my daughter, but if I wanted to drop $300 on a Ninjago set they'd be able to help.

Exactly, thinking though what lego we have brought each other and the kids (3 and 7) in the last year we could easily be spending twice as much on "adult" lego than on the kids, and we get it for them even more regularly.

Lego is working hard to make it an adult thing too. See the many Lego Masters tv programs in many countries, were it is mostly adults competing. I would say the have unlocked the adult market, and this is why the had such good results lately.

I'd also wonder if their cost per part on the bigger sets is higher or lower.

I've been building the adult sets over the last few years and you're right it's a nice nondigital way to unwind. Unlike my job everything works, has a place, and is all neat and organizable.

Interestingly my mother who is retired has gotten into lego. Initially she got into it because she decided to resell all my childhood sets which were stored in a large bins. I had kept all the instructions so she just build lego sets one at a time and sold them off. It got her hooked, and now she regularly buys used or new sets, assembles, and then resells them. It's interesting to see someone get into lego rather late in life with no childhood nostalgia of them what so ever.

There was an average price by piece comparison a few years ago but I can't find it back.

The gist of it was that price by piece didn't change that much, while sets are getting bigger and more complex. I'd also wagger that we now have a lot more smaller pieces that make these kind of calculations more flawed.

It is not even that sets would be universally bigger. You can buy middle sized, small and super small sets still. Lego sets literally start from small bag for 5e that builds something super small.

Yes, and I think they will always be covering every price ranges with something, be it just the mini-figures you'd set on your keyholder for instance.

> I would love to know what percentage of Legos revenue is now from adults buying the incredible large, complex and expensive sets to build themselves.

Small enough that I still can drive envy from every child in the store when I buy big Technic sets. Like the huge CAT Bulldozer (https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/app-controlled-cat-d11-bu...) from last year.

I don't have a number for you, but I recently read an interview of their head of the "adult division". He basically said that it was their fastest growing segment. All the IDEAS sets are targeted at adults and they seem to be doing very well.

The main difference is that the sets and instructions got way more complicated and elaborate. So much so that they stifle and discourage the creativity instead of feeding it.

The first set I had was a minuscule "mineral detector" from the space set - https://media.brickinstructions.com/06000/6841/001.jpg

There were 6-step instructions [2,3] AND there was a separate page with what else was buildable from the set [4]. That was the Lego magic ingredient, the most crucial part. It forced one to look and think and imagine how those extra models were put together. That, in turn, kick-started the process of trying other things. Above all, all of it was simple. So when you got more sets you'd look at the instructions as a starting point only and then dive right into building the alternatives.

Modern sets have none of that. If anything, they basically demonstrate that you can't possibly come up with the thing you are building on your own. No way. And whatever you can put together will be so inferior in comparison that it's not even worth trying. It's really sad what Lego did to itself, because it was something magical :-/

[2] https://media.brickinstructions.com/06000/6841/002.jpg

[3] https://media.brickinstructions.com/06000/6841/003.jpg

[4] https://media.brickinstructions.com/06000/6841/004.jpg

https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/the-fox-lodge-21178

https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/bricks-and-houses-11008

https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/creative-suitcase-10713

first-party extra models: https://www.lego.com/en-my/service/help/bricks-and-sets/buil...

third-party extra models: https://rebrickable.com/sets/alternates/

> https://rebrickable.com/sets/alternates/

This is excellent, thanks.

I was a kid in the 90s and most of the things written in that article were already true.

I still broke down all the elaborate sets, put them all together in a big box, and built my own things later.

A more interesting comparison would be to put the core themes of the 1990s (Castle, Pirates, Space, Town) against the modern popular themes (Ninjago, Creator, Star Wars, City). The old sets had less specialised parts and less colour variety, which allowed kids to combine sets from the same theme easily. The buildings (castles, fortresses, harbours) almost always had a big baseplate (flat or 3D). Minifigs were themed and textured, but weren't cartoonish with facial expressions.

Nowadays, most of the sets are some imaginary vehicles with Creator-style builds. You can probably build a new vehicle out of the same set, but combining different sets from the same theme is much less enjoyable. The few sets with buildings rarely have baseplates and feel very airy and unharmonic.

The number of specialised parts is one thing I dislike about modern Lego sets. They do look great and have really smart building techniques, but I just want to build a brick house with my kids.

There is always Lego classic sets, and smaller creator houses do have a lot of regular bricks too. But it is a bit annoying once you amass a few sets from other lines.

Still, I'm glad they are in business. I will take whatever they do now Vs them going bust, which was a risk a decade or so ago (or maybe longer, I can't remember the details).

My brother and I got the first two grey castles in the 1980s (the first castle yellow; grey was a fairly new colour back then). Those castles mainly relied on fairly large castle wall pieces. At first, even as a kid, I felt that was cheating; we should have gotten bricks to assemble all those walls. Later I discovered what a boon they were, because they allowed me to rapidly design new and different castles. Sure, I couldn't build a spaceship out of them, but just exploring the space of all the possible castles you could build was amazing.

Some of these specialised pieces inspire creativity. Especially with spaceships.

But I do agree that many modern sets just invite you to build this one thing out of them. We did actually turn out Millennium Falcon into an X-Wing and a TIE-fighter once, but we did eventually turn them back into the Falcon. It feels more wrong than it used to to build something else.

If you still have the flag for that yellow castle hang on to it, that's a collectors item.

I don't think we ever had the yellow castle, although I do remember that flag. And we definitely had a set with a horse in the style of the yellow castle. So either we did have the yellow castle but lost the instructions, or I knew someone who had it, or that flag also appears in another set.

But I really have no idea. It was a long time ago.

The reason those flags are so rare is because the grip of the 1x1 round brick at the bottom is much stronger than the strength of the flagpole so if you would remove it by pulling on the flag you'd break it.

So these commend ridiculous prices for small pieces of plastic (about 8 euros or so last I checked).

8 euros isn't that much. Certainly not an expensive collector's item. For an item that hasn't been made in almost 40 years.

It translates into 5000 euros / kg or so, which is pretty impressive.

Of course if you had a kilo of them the price would crater :)

I did use those castle walls for a space ship. It was massive, maybe 3ft long, vaguely resembling Spaceball One.

>The number of specialised parts is one thing I dislike about modern Lego sets.

Lego started pulling back from that a long time ago because they were too expensive.

They had a leadership change in 2004, Jorgen Vig Knudstorp came in and one of the first things he did was halve the number of different parts.

If you look at Lego Space during the 90s it is a long list of new versions (almost yearly) each with their own specialized parts.

Personally I don't feel like this narrative about a substantial shift in Lego sets fits with reality. To me it feel like people conflates it with the rise of licensed sets.

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

Let's take a look at this particular small set from the old Pirates theme:

6259: Broadside's Brig [https://brickset.com/sets/6259-1/Broadside-s-Brig]

For what was a very small and cheap set at the time, you are getting 3 minifigs and a small building on a baseplate. The bulk of the parts are yellow- and white-coloured bricks for walls and architectural elements. There is a specialised yellow-coloured edge panel with a red brick texture, but it plays very nicely with the rest of the parts architecturally. You can easily combine this set with the bigger forts and harbours. The colours are compatible, the parts are compatible.

This is not certainly the case with modern Lego sets.

Then lets look at this one, from the same period: https://brickset.com/sets/6834-1/Celestial-Sled

Weird ski bricks, seethrou chain saw, antenna, big arrowshaped structural piece, etc.

I'm not surprised the one you linked is from 91. Noone is disputing that the complexity rose from the 80s. But the complexity we are seeing now is not a new thing. It started in the 90s.

The ski bricks are standard technic skis. The chain saw and is found in the entire series of kits. The arrow shape plate is a very common piece in all space kits back to the 1980, though the usually were grey or black. Often used for wings with hinged plates. I have literally dozens of those in my childhood lego collection. Antennas were on each an every space piece, though the thin and slender ones only started showing in the early 90ies. They’re still around.

Some of the late Ice Planet (dunno the real name) space stuff from that same series, and some of the underwater exploration sets from IIRC about then or a year or two later, are specifically what I think of when I think "where did lego start to go wrong?" I kept getting them for Christmas and kept building and playing with them but the 80s (through very early 90s) themed sets were peak for those, IMO. I never did as much combining and modifying/expanding with those later sets as I did with earlier ones. I was still playing with the earlier ones and changing them to other things and combining them when I had those later sets, but the later ones could only really fit in if they could do it whole and as-is, that is, the earlier sets had to change to fit them, they couldn't really do the reverse.

... I don't think that era was especially complex, though, and in fact when I think about the worst sets from that era they were ones that were built with like half a dozen huge pieces for the bulk of the structure (there was some kind of Ice Base from that same series you linked that stands out, in particular).

Complex is the modern sets. Fiddly, even. Look at the size of a finished largish modern set (for kids, not one of the adult stick-it-on-a-shelf models), and its part count, and look at similar-sized sets from the 80s through, I dunno, maybe '95, and see what their part count was. The modern sets have so many itty bitty pieces. 500-something piece sets used to be really big when assembled.

Afaik, lego went through changes. They had period when then introduced a lot of special parts (I think nineties or so) and then period when they simplified again.

They introduced special parts at the height of popularity and money success. Simplified when they had money issues - simple parts are cheaper to manufacture. Now that they are popular again, they are having more special parts again, but still less then used to be.

> Nowadays, most of the sets are some imaginary vehicles with Creator-style builds. You can probably build a new vehicle out of the same set, but combining different sets from the same theme is much less enjoyable. The few sets with buildings rarely have baseplates and feel very airy and unharmonic.

“Most” doesn’t feel right to me - my son’s mostly had City sets and they’re all repurposable, buildings use large flat pieces with configurable roads so it’s not quite as big but also allows more combinations than “large square”, etc. There are definitely specialty pieces but I’m skeptical that they’re that much more common given all of the pieces I had as a kid which were pretty specialized, too.

> I still broke down all the elaborate sets, put them all together in a big box [..]

In a box?!!

Our kids store piles of bricks on more or less every horizontal surface in their rooms.

> the elaborate sets

Our kids will always build each elaborate set once, according to the instructions, wait a day or three, then it's fair game to be cannibalized for their latest homespun supermegagiga-jet, -spaceship, -car or -house.

haha, yes.

My mother wasn't too happy to step on the bricks, so I had to put them in a box.

Honestly I think people also underrate how fun it is to add on to existing sets. This is harder to do with technic sets, but for the traditional block stuff it was easy enough to build the set to instructions and just keep building.

I've been doing more of this recently as I picked up some knock off mech based lego sets and adding more arms/building them more weapons/other things is fun way to make them look better.

That dark pattern where a website gives you the next article it thinks you should read does not work well here on this older article. Below the Lego article I get “Hate math? Then don't help your kid with their homework” — which it proceeds to load hundreds of times (a search for the word 'homework' yields over 1000 hits now) below each iteration just because I tried to scroll to the bottom. Somehow its recommendation engine ended up recommending the same article, recursing endlessly.

Stupid me, why would I expect to be able to just scroll to the bottom of the article for the website's footer?

Are your surfing without protection? Scrolling to the bottom for me works perfectly. I tried disabling uBlock, then I got the behaviour you mentioned.

I always have uBlock on to disable scripts and fonts. Quite a lot of sites work perfectly well that way and I enable the minimum scripts and fonts for those that don't.

A website optimizing itself for freeloaders rather than ad-watching users, seems... counterproductive for their bottom line.

Almost every single website, especially anything involving articles, is completely unusable without an adblocker. I don't know how those who don't use adblockers do it...

I'm using uBlock Origin in Firefox, and I also got the infinite scroll on Math Homework article loop.

Yeah, I got what I posted above with uBlock Origin on, in Firefox.

Ditto. Chrome on Windows. It is the perfect example of Doom Scrolling. You Scroll And Scroll, yet nothing new appears. ;)

Some of the items here read less like lego changing, and instead as the person growing from a child to a parent, and their point-of-view changing (#2 and #3). Also the "now" in #5 does not even mention the modern advertising in it.

All in all, this article from 2014 seems have not other reason to exist but to attract hate-clicks.

> Lego has become more gender stratified

In this day and age, I would be surprised if the Lego Friends line, which was created with girls in mind, were marketed explicitly to girls. My guess is that the girls stratify themselves by what type of toys they are attracted to. There's evidence that the preference is biological:

Male monkeys prefer boys' toys https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13596-male-monkeys-pr...

I think the point is capitalism gives people what they crave. Not necessarily what they need. But any alternative is unimaginable in individualized minds of modern people.

Oh, it does give them what they need, plus loads of other needs they didn't even know they had - and sometimes these other needs take priority regardless of whether that should be the case. I.e. they will sell you milk, which you likely need, but also all possible types of cheese and yogurt and cream, which you really don't but might actually end up consuming more than milk.

Cheese and yoghurt may be healthier than milk, because bacteria already processed the lactose in the milk.

I for one am glad that LEGO provides the girls series to get my daughter interested in building things with it.

The photograph of the girl building things with the universal bricks is just marketing, not a report from the 60ies. It does not imply that girls actually did that en masse.

Personally I remember building houses with Lego (so walls and a roof), but not much more. These days the Lego toys may actually be more fun.

That study doesn't show what most people think it does. Monkeys have no idea what a firetruck is, so how could a monkey have any preference towards it? The only thing they managed to show is that there is a flaw in the experiment. In a sense it is the ideal control question: do the monkeys distinguish based on something they cannot know? A more charitable reading which is mentioned is that male monkeys prefer hard shapes with wheels, but I doubt that is very relevant.

And yes, companies absolutely do market towards boys and girls. They don't write "for girls" on the box, but they consciously produce two product lines. Often it is one unisex line and one that is "forbidden for boys", i.e. it has pink and glitter and you would be teased as a boy of you bought it. This way, they can create artificial market separation and increase sales.

A monkey doesn't know what a firetruck is, nor is it influenced by cultural pressures, such as glitter and pink are for girls. The difference in gender preference is that the females prefer people, such as faces and social interaction and boys prefer objects such as trucks.

This preference was also shown in studies where female new born babies tend to look at faces more than male babies.

All five characters of the Lego Friends line are female.

> I would be surprised if the Lego Friends line, which was created with girls in mind, were marketed explicitly to girls. My guess is that the girls stratify themselves by what type of toys they are attracted to.

Lego themselves talked about lego friends being meant for girls, publicly and loudly. Also, all characters are girls. The kids in ads for lego friends are all girls too. It could not have been more clear that it is for girls.

The other legos at that time and few years before were very very clearly for boys. They used colors used for boy toys. Toy stores are clearly separated to boy and girl section by color. They also used themes that literally any kid over 2 identify as boys.

---------

As side note, claim that they are less about building then other lego sets for same age brackets is untrue. I dont know why the article felt the need to claim the difference is character vs building.

Actual differences against other themes are colors, fight vs life, indoor vs outdoor, gender of characters.

I have a boy and girl, I purposefully made the effort not to push them into gender specific things, but hell they still ended up pretty stratified. They even play minecraft differently!

I'm convinced there is a major biological underpining after watching these two grow up.

Really weird you just jump to "biology," as I assume your kids have access to media and at some point interacted with someone else other than you (children and adults).

I didn't learn gendered behavior or thoughts from my parents but I learned them from everyone else and society as a whole. I learned from a very, very young age that some of my interests were very much not acceptable for girls and I internalized a lot of it.

> They even play minecraft differently!

Pls explain

I have some issues with Legos, but a lot of these criticisms do not at all match my experience.

For example, there are a crazy number of Lego shapes these days, but the degree to which they fit together satisfyingly — even in unexpected ways — is amazing. And I love this about Legos, and it's so much more interesting than just blocks. My kid builds whole scenes and detailed models thanks to the wide variety of little "unique" pieces.

And from what I've seen, sets these days are big idea factories: My kid will build what's in the instructions a couple of times to learn it, and then will take things apart and do his own thing with it, make his own creations. I love that he gets an example and learns new techniques with these big sets and then applies that to his own ideas.

The branded Lego stuff I don't care for — I'd rather kids think about actual space exploration rather than Star Wars, for example — but I appreciate how Legos are designed and sold right now.

title correction: 9 ways lego has researched and expanded it's product line to increase profits while continuing to sell less popular traditional products

Yes, it is so much fun to tell stories with cherry picking.

Largest toy manufacturer in the world. Can't really argue with that.

I do miss the old, simpler lego from the early 1980s, but those things still exist in the Classic and Creator lines. Buy them. I love Lego Star Wars, but Classic and Creator are the soul of Lego.

And leaders in plastic piece production ... and interestingly also long-time IT experts.

Trying to buy lego for kids these days is a nightmare.

I went looking for a spaceship lego set. Just a simple rocket or something.

Instead it's heaps of adult themed/Star Wars/NASA licensed stuff. The alternative seems to be a bucket of standard bricks.

The adult orientation of LEGO these days makes me hesitant to buy it.

I don't mind Adults having LEGO sets, I do mind if that becomes so lucrative it stops kids being able to enjoy it.

A simple spaceship

https://www.lego.com/en-be/product/space-shuttle-adventure-3...

You have to sift through pages to find this one and it is 50 euro for a small set.

In my head, Euros are worth basically the same, maybe a little bit more, than USD. But the US version of that set is only $40 (although it's sold out, so maybe the EU version is higher in price due to scarcity). https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/space-shuttle-adventure-3...

EU has about 20% VAT, but even taking that into account it's still more expensive

There's few other generic-ish space sets you can find just by putting "space" into the search bar on the Lego site:

https://www.lego.com/en-be/product/lunar-roving-vehicle-6034... (cheaper, similar play value)

https://www.lego.com/en-be/product/lunar-space-station-60349 (slightly more expensive, bigger)

https://www.lego.com/en-be/product/lunar-research-base-60350 (more expensive, but much bigger)

The space sets are definitely there in general, they're just a sub-theme of "City" now for some reason.

There's also a few space fantasy sets under the Monkie Kid line, like https://www.lego.com/en-be/product/chang-e-moon-cake-factory... and its rabbit-piloted moon mecha.

> I do mind if that becomes so lucrative it stops kids being able to enjoy it.

I've got 3 young kids, and trust me, that's nowhere near happening. Kids love lego.

It was about making it accessible. No doubt they love it!

Legos are like coding. The simplicity of Lego yesteryear was like some of the simpler programming languages out there. Approachable and rewarding, but limited. Over the years, the language of Lego has added new programming constructs and is inherently more complex, more capable, and harder to approach.

The evolutions the article describes may be deplorable to some, but it was adapt or die. Anyone playing with Tinker Toys, Lincoln Logs, or Erector Sets anymore?

I am 51 and still collect Lego. I realized some years ago, that my own four kids were not getting the same enjoyment out of them that I had. Chagrineldy I realized that in my attempt to help them love them, I had over glutted them. Two large bins (the kind you put in the back of pickup trucks), an explosion of piece types, and an explosion of color, made it too difficult to find the piece you wanted.

So I sorted them. Today, I have more than 200 clear Sterilite storage containers with the whole collection sorted by basic shapes or types. Some are very specific (2x4 bricks), some more of a category (all technic gears). I had tried sorting them by color in the past, but all that led to was very mono color creations.

When I build something, I use the whole set. But when grandkids and nephew/nieces come, I just get a few of them out. With about 20 boxes, it returns to that simple approachable phase and they do the coolest things. You can get a lot of mileage out of just the plates and bricks, plus one or two of the “specialty” boxes thrown in for grins (e.g. two of my nephews just love the big box of wheels).

The most popular boxes are still the minifig boxes: heads, hats, vests, torsos, legs, tools, animals, foods, weapons. They’ll “play dolls” with those all day. They generally push the few Friends pieces out of the way. When the kids were younger, we used to do a monthly bricklink order as a group. My 3 girls always opted for more female hair pieces.

One additional thing…

Reason 9 from the articles is exactly why no on plays with my Lego except in bare feet. Little shod feet break Lego. Little bare feet learn not to step on Lego.

My brother found some Tinker Toy sets that he gave my kids for Christmas a few years ago. They loved playing with them.

Soda was sweeter when I was a kid. The playgrounds were taller. I never needed money. Cartoons were so good I could sit and watch them for hours after school everyday, and the advertisements never bothered me. My computer had a 4MB hard drive, and that was enough for everything I ever needed. My Dad still loved my mom...

That's not the original minifig. That's not even the original minifig that had a face.

https://blog.hobbydb.com/2018/11/05/the-evolution-of-lego-mi...

I started reading disagreeing with many points of the article, I did realize that she is from a different generation then me, so her "then vs now" is very different from my "than vs now". But still, when I look at what sets were available when she was a child I would say that her points "1. The instructions", "2. The sets", and "The building method"; were based mostly on what specific sets she happened to have, and no on what sets were available at the time.

Yes, up until the 60s (before even that author's time), Lego sets were mostly generic bricks with just a small set of specialized pieces (just some wheels, doors and windows), for example sets of the "Universal Building Set" family [0] like the one pictured early in the article. But by the time of most of our childhoods (the 70s or even 80s), Lego had already introduced sets with plenty of specialized pieces. Also at that time they already introduced some more complex sets tailored for a specific build, some of them, the kind of set some people may chose to build only once (as if it was a glue-on plastic model kit).

The thing is, most rants about old Lego being better more generic, are just misguided rose-tinted nostalgia talking. Lego still sells awesome generic sets, even better than the ones we used to have when we were kids. They just happen to also sell some hobbyist sets. For example, my son's big box consists of a mix of my old 80s era (e.g. [1]) plus my niece's 00s era (e.g.[2]) Legos, and I have to say that the 00s era is much more generic and full of bricks, allowing for much more varied imaginative play, than my old 80s spaceship sets full of large single-use pieces.

[0] https://brickset.com/sets/theme-Universal-Building-Set

[1] https://rebrickable.com/sets/6971-1/inter-galactic-command-b...

[2] https://rebrickable.com/sets/31025-1/mountain-hut/

> Lego did extensive research and found that girls preferred to play with the characters rather than build sets. So they created the Lego Friends line where the characters own beauty salons, pet boutiques and can be news reporters working on stories about cakes. The sets do not come with hundreds of pages of instructions because most of them are fairly simple to build. The Lego Friends line is immensely popular.

1.) Majority of lego sets kinds have characters in them. That includes Star Wars sets, Ninja go sets, knights sets and what not. Lego Friends having characters in them is not something unique.

2.) Also, lego sets marked for similar age brackets have similarly complex manuals. It is just not true that Lego Friends for 7 years old would be much less complex them Minecraft for 7 years old or City for 7 years old.

3.) The actual study lego made and wrote about distinguished "indoor vs outdoor" as differing preference between boys and girls. And I think "a lot of details" in that indoor (not sure about this one). This is the first time I hear about the difference being "character vs building". Which does not even match what sets lego makes. Knights series are all about characters.

> Last year, Lego created a female scientist set on a limited run. It sold out quickly.

The special thing about this was that they were based on actual real world scientists. It was very much collector item.

My friends and I used to build Lego spaceships and then "battle" by physically smashing them in to each other. Fond memories.

My brother (1 year my junior) and I did exactly this!

We prefered a knock-off brand for special-effects for our home videos because the pieces came apart more easily.

I was a Lego obsessed kid through the 90s and 00s, and now I have a school age son who is similarly devoted to it. Lego today is waaaayyy cooler than it was when I was a kid.

I got the very first Lego Star Wars set, Lukes X-Wing [1], and while I loved it as a kid the newest Xwing that my son just got [2] is so much better on every level. It's bigger, more detailed, looks sleeker, and has this really clever mechanism that opens the wings synchronously when you press down on a piece.

All the new sets are this way. The care and detail that Lego puts into them has dramatically improved in the last 20 years.

He still takes them apart a few months after he gets them and builds something new. I don't think that will ever change, the thrill of making something on your own will never go away. Furthermore, the online community of people making things and sharing their creations has exploded since I was a child. We had a single user forum (LUGnet) where a small handful of people congregated. All images were uploaded to a single, tiny website (brickshelf) to be shared. Now you have youtube channels, instagram pages, tiktok creators, subreddits, you name it. The resources available for creating and sharing your own designs is massive!

1: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/9yXo6HF8hTo/hqdefault.jpg 2: https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/luke-skywalker-s-x-wing-f...

>The ads were just plain awesome. Case in point: This 1981 ad featuring a young girl with her Lego creation.

That picture of the girl holding up a lego set is only "AWESOME" for parents. As a kid if I saw that I would barf. First off as a little boy back then... there was no gender equality. All girls were stupid and had cooties and I was a little sexist tyrant.

Second little boys aren't dumb... that blob of a thing made by girl is infinitely less interesting then a space ship designed by a professional adult with a cool color scheme. Case in point I loved the M-tron series: https://imgur.com/a/bK7w8. Of course being a little boy my skills were only good enough to produce that multi colored blob but that doesn't change the fact that I knew what quality was when I saw it.

This article is just an adult projecting his opinion and woke sensibilities onto a kid. That being said yes it's ok for a boy to like doll houses. Perfectly fine, but let's be real, legos are mostly for boys and most boys would prefer dinosaurs over doll houses and any advertising that doesn't target that is advertising that doesn't understand the majority of its target demographic.

My main argument is against the author of the article and their complete blissful ignorance about how kids think. Lego knew their shit though. That photo is an ad targetted towards parents. The M-tron legos had advertising targeted directly towards me when I was a kid, while this article on the other hand is an article targeting parents who don't understand how kids think.

I think you are missing the point.. The gender equality was portrayed by the company and therefore picked up by the parents. Nothing to do with what little boys thought of girls. Today you have marketing pre-disposing parents to thinking girls should follow X interests and boys Y. This is big part of why we have lack of females in STEM since for example "girls" Legos shows they should just worry about beauty salons and not rocket ships.

>The gender equality was portrayed by the company and therefore picked up by the parents. Nothing to do with what little boys thought of girls.

I know. Legos has two modes of advertising. One targeting parents, the other targeting kids. Both were accurate in their objectives. However the article itself fails to understand the psychology of kids.

> This is big part of why we have lack of females in STEM since for example "girls" Legos shows they should just worry about beauty salons and not rocket ships.

Don't want to turn it into a huge debate about gender stuff. All I can say is I disagree. Male and female preferences influence the advertising and the advertising in turn does influence preference but to a much lesser degree. Many studies show that the interest is innate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-equality_paradox

You can disagree, but there's no point in turning this into a debate... let's just agree that there's controversy around this area and definitely a lot of interest groups seek to color this area with their own agendas.

It's still interesting to note that boys wore pink and played with dolls in the USA 100-150 years ago.

You can build dolls with legos. It is the act of building that is really the core that draws this line of demarcation IMO. Other stuff like whether pink is associated with masculinity is harder to judge.

Additionally don't forget practically all of our technology and science from the dawn of human kind (with many exceptions) was built from the ground up by males. That is the key, despite the exceptions, men are basically responsible for all of it. It seems illogical to dismiss the difference with a simple answer like sexism.

It may be that males in the past didn't permit women to enter STEM and that is WRONG. But there's also the fact that males built all of STEM and no parallel structure was built on the female side; that difference is worth exploring as is your remark about boys wearing pink and playing with dolls.

Genuinely curious: Has anyone here personally experienced a <20 year old doing real engineering with the modern "studless" technical Legos? You can find truly awesome contraptions on Youtube, sure. But has anyone seen it first hand?

The old "build from the bottom" Lego Technic was just so inviting for technical tinkering. We built all kinds of machinery out of them. Not kids any more on this occasion; we dug out the Legos from the late 1970s to play with them just for fun once we were grown up. But representative.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mw3dUbRfMSw

The "What it is, is beautiful" aesthetic. Who cares what colour a piece is; it's the shape that matters.

In this respect, Lego has changed. Sure you can still get buckets of basic parts to build with, but the Technic sets of easy-to-engineer-with parts, with lots of the studded beams and the ever so handy 40 tooth gears have gone away.

LEGO Technic is different. I was a vivid user as child and now as adult I rediscovered it. It is indeed more challenging to build inside out (what you need with the new beams/pins) than bottom up (old stackable & studded beams).

I however, would not agree with your statement that this block kids. I think nowadays tinkering is possible with so many more things than when I have been small. I had LEGO and alternatively real tools with wood. Nowadays, you have that and also things like Minecraft, Gravitrax, City Skylines, ..

Also LEGO Technic is too expensive. I luckily bought the 42082 giving me 4000pc for 160€ ... but usually that many pieces would go for 400€. And what I have is a bare minimum to build something meaningful like a robot arm, plotting thingy, some cars, etc. The modern Technic motors/battery hubs are also extremely expensive (ignoring the other flaws).

I think the kids have so many choices that they do not pick up LEGO Technic for the price.

I remember my old studded Technic sets fondly. Back then you could at least see what you were building a few steps in. I bought and built a Jeep Wrangler set a couple of months ago, and I have no idea if I will ever be able to come up with an original Technic design myself using modern studless beams. I had no idea what I was building at least halfway into the instruction booklet.

Technic hasn't gone away at all. They've got everything ranging from the old-fashioned air hydraulics (https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/heavy-duty-tow-truck-4212..., notice all the gearing designed into the tow assembly so it can be genuinely load-bearing) all the way up to RC vehicles that are entirely brick-built outside of the motor (https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/app-controlled-cat-d11-bu...).

A few counterpoints:

- LEGO still makes bins of fairly generic pieces that can be built into all sorts of things: https://smile.amazon.com/LEGO-Classic-Medium-Creative-Brick/...

- My daughter has a few LEGO duplo sets. One for example had instructions for building a Minnie Mouse house, but we only did that once. Now all the sets are taken apart and mixed together and she pretty much builds whatever she wants, mixing and building with pieces from 4-5 different duplo sets together.

- It's super easy to buy bins of used legos online, especially in local parenting communities. I see people exchanging bins of LEGO pieces all the time and usually it's just bins of pieces, no instructions or defined sets or plans at all.

In any creative endeavor, be it lego or minecraft or anything else, you can endlessly watch the global greatest hits on youtube, things you have no chance of "competing" with. I have no idea how this affects people growing up in this environment. Is it stifling? Inspiring? Just normal, since you start out as a kid not knowing how to do anything and surrounded by people who do? How different is it really from how we grew up, listening to professional music, surrounded by professional visual art?

I don't know any of the answers. But I'm grateful that my kid can assemble a complex thing from a lego kit. For her, it looks empowering to me. And when she's done, she almost immediately starts tweaking it, then disassembles it completely within a few days and the kit ends up in the pile of assorted bricks for "free play."

> you can endlessly watch the global greatest hits on youtube, things you have no chance of "competing" with

I think it is pretty much normal. I'm reading Art & Fear (1985) right now, and it discusses a lot of myths about talent and genius that would be relevant to this.

Whenever my kids ask me how I got to my level of ability in art or music, I make sure to let them see paintings and prints that I abandoned on the way to a final piece. They see me reworking things on the light box. They hear me practice and flub my scales. I'm at least trying to instill the notion that there's always an effort and a huge mess on the cutting room floor.

i.e. they figured out what the market wanted, then sold that thing, and it was profitable. I too prefer older legos but if people generally prefer another kind, what is lego supposed to do? The market also isn't the same as it was in 1980, how realistic is it to expect their offerings to be the same?

I went through an experience of picking up LEGO Christmas gifts for my little cousins (boys and girls, age 6-11). It was very difficult to find anything that wasn't a promo for a massive Disney franchise. After filtering by the age group and removing all comic book/movie/cartoon tie-ins on LEGO website, what was left was just several options for each child.

I may be misremembering, but when I was a kid in the 90s there was a much larger variety of sets to pick from. As a space nerd I love their ISS, Shuttle and Apollo themed sets, but it's still disappointing how limited are their kids' options these days.

The bricks also look cheaper (slightly glaze-like surface) since they started using the same translucent-white pellets for all colors, just with different dyes added when injecting the moulds, instead of full-colored pellets, around 2000. It’s also a pity they changed the gray colors from neutral-warm to the bluish grays, which to my eyes slightly clash with most of the other colors. Along with the changes to the available bricks, sets and minifigures as mentioned in the article, this made me lose interest in "modern" Lego.

Good. If Lego won't evolve, they'll die. I'm glad Lego is still around and thriving, as that didn't always seem like it would be the case (from my personal experience as a kid).

I don't remember her name but I once met an experienced market researcher about 10 years ago who worked for Lego in the 80's and 90's to study their users and figure out how to grow the company. She basically went on to explain the complete strategy that you still see them executing. Lego identified that at the core, there are 4 different needs. 1. Kids who like to imagine and create characters on their own and build Legos they can play with. This is typically at an early age. Hence the generic sets around trains, cars, dollhouses, etc. 2. Kids who love their favorite characters and play with them - hence Lego did partnerships with Marvel, StarWars, Disney, etc. 3. Kids who like to display their work with pride, build it once and never touch it again - hence the architecture series. 4. Kids who like to build and rebuild different things from the same set - hence Lego technic.

She used Kids to mean not just by age but anyone who is a kid at heart :) After hearing it, I can't unsee it in a Lego store and am always amazed at the genius of doing market research. We have glorified these things in startups, but when done properly it helps any company.

I grew up in the classic space era (of course the best, but then again everyone's childhood pop culture is "the best").

The #1 thing that should be emphasized is that lego is cheaper than it was back when I had it. I think that's a good thing.

What would I really like? I'd like Lego to do re-releases of old sets that are 20 or 30 years old. Or maybe megasets that re-release the entire year's sets for a line (Take my money for a UCS millenium falcon-pricepoint of all of the classic sets from 1980/1981 re-released)

I bought a ton of used legos on CL (too much of course) when my kiddo was born. Then I sorted them to get a feel for the new pieces. I think wheels are better (there's basically 2-3 axle standards which I think is an improvement).

I think the main bad thing is that there are too many colors and shades, due likely to over-perfecting a branded set or something like that (or its a conspiracy).

The minifigs are a bit much sometimes, but I don't think it's that bad. THey still are largely minifigs.

The amount of cool MOC/custom builds on the internet is great. The other great thing I didn't have was digital photography: I didn't want to take apart my own models as a kid because I know I'd never be able to rebuild them. Now you can take a whole bunch of pictures to remember it and rebuild it if I wanted to.

I do think the overbranding of sets leads to them not being deconstructed. But I bought a ton of "spare bricks" so I don't think we'll have that problem.

When lego does an occasional "classic space"-ish set like the mars rover or the mech, it is amazing. The creator sets are great.

> Lego did extensive research and found that girls preferred to play with the characters rather than build sets.

I barely roleplayed with Lego, I was all about building (first by following the exact instructions, then by ignoring them and trying to figure it out on my own, and finally by building my own stuff based on my own imagination). When I became about 11 or 12 I finally got, via a friend, into roleplaying, with Lego (I got bored of the other 3 purposes). He used the lego in the garden and made entire plays with stories, and I joined in, and we co-interacted a lot. I didn't even know you could roleplay like that!

His parents and me, we kinda didn't like each other (they were quite hardcore Christian, while my parents were more loose Christians who let me decide for myself and I was atheist from elementary school because even at age 5 or 6 I asked questions with answers which I found inconsistent in [the] religion and ended up seeing it as just a story). Eventually that difference between us ended our friendship. I look back fondly to my past friendships.

Large amount of “old man yells at cloud” going on here.

Lego is still fantastic. My kids love them. They can build a cool ninja car or a police plane or a house. And later recombine the three into a fantasy jeep-truck combo with a ramp.

The bricks are durable as f*ck. They learn fine motor skills. They learn to read instructions. They get creative. They role play.

There’s really no need to gatekeep Lego.

Eh, I think the biggest change is that technic style bricks are pushed down much farther in the line than they used to be (late 70's early 80's). There are a lot more moving parts, more wheel and tire styles, and the average part is now a 1x or flat rather than a full height 2x4. There's also just a lot more sets and options.

The other big change is that all of the sets have instructions that the kids seem to start out following, and some of that comes from the branding, but some also comes from the more complicated nature of the more technic style sets.

There are a couple of unique parts per set, but nowhere near what most pundits claim. Most of the parts are interchangable for builds, especially if you're not too worried about the colors.

(source, 3 kids now in their teens with 10+ years of someone getting at least one set for christmas/birthday, and 1/3 m^3 of lego that's less and less used now. And my own collection of ~ 1/2 ft^3 from way back when)

One other change: the gradual introduction of weapons and violence-related styling.

Back in the 80s some "minifigs" may have had sad faces, but never angry/violent ones. That changed a lot over time.

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

I think traditional Lego died when they introduced the parts separator tool - back in my day, you destroyed your fingernails (and sometimes even used your teeth) separating parts. Attaching two 2x1 thin bricks was considered horrific, because you knew you'd never be able to separate them anymore.

Kids these days have it too easy.

Pro tip: push a brick at a 45 degree angle between the two stuck plates, instant separation.

Maybe I'm wrong, but the vibe I get from the article is that Lego has become less creative and more about marketing/profit; sort of faulting Lego. I think this shift to complex, structured sets says more about the parents than the company though. Unstructured/unguided sets are still available.

It seems many more parents today want brag about what their kid did, want some Instagram worthy end product, or instill that structured/conforming result-driven mindset today. Again, I could be wrong about all this. This certainly isn't every parent, but I just feel like it's a larger percentage than the past, just like the amount of time kids spend in structured groups/activities vs self-organizined friend groups running around the neighborhood.

From the post:

> Now: The bricks still exist, obviously, but now each set contains many odd shapes that are specific to that particular set and do not work with any other creation.

To further this point, there are central components like motored hubs that are only available to specific sets and can't be bought as individual pieces.

A lot of people will point at token actions Lego still does that match the old philosophy, but at its core Lego thinks in sets, and new pieces, new mechanisms etc. are introduced for specific sets, never in the buckets.

Well sure, new pieces and specialized pieces are going to be sold in the set they work with. The point is, parents are choosing to buy the new sets with specialized pieces. You can also see in the article the points about the parents being frustrated while building, sad when the set is destroyed, etc.

So yeah, Lego is marketing and making profit, but it's the parents that drive/enable that. As stated before, we see this in other areas of life too with the full schedules of structured group activities and less self organized time.

There's different categories of what you call "specialized" pieces though. Some only make sense in a specific set (e.g. a light saber piece in a Star Wars set), and some are completely generic but only exist in the sets that couldn't work without them.

It might be different now, but for a while you couldn't get the 4 ports Power Control Hub outside of 2 or 3 sets. You could buy weaker and bulkier hubs separately, but the specific smaller new generation hub only came in sets.

It's interesting listening to Lego designer interviews, when asked about future plans they'll often mention that some development is totally possible, they'll just have to wait for a set that makes use of it.

I enjoy modern Legos (with my now 7 year old) but only because I have them a giant bin, unsorted. I managed to get an enormous collection for $150 from a kid that I guess was growing out of them and wanted the money. And I immediately disassembled all the "kits" (like the Slave I ship now known as "Boba Fett's Firespray gunship") so they were just random pieces. Yes it is fun that there are a ton of weird minifigures, some recognizable and some not. There are all kinds of interesting pieces in there.

But I really hate the idea that you should approach it like an airplane model or the like, where you put it together the one correct way. That is boring. I don't expect to ever buy a kit like that.

I was fortunate enough to have the "right" amount of legos, enough that I could mostly build what I wanted but not enough that I was always missing pieces / colours and pushed to engineer around limitations. I credit legos to developing my mechanical and spatial aptitude. I remember playing with less fortunate collections and wonder if these qualities would have been stunted if I had less, or if I could have been spoiled if given too much. I do know I'm very envious of not growing up with minecraft where having unlimited resources or being forced to manage resource seem to develop more skills. What's the situation with building legos in VR?

Is it still controversial that girls have different interest than boys? Please stop pushing ideology and let kid be.

I can see it plainly with my kids and with my wife and that is fine. It is just our nature expressing itself with variations through each person.

I feel many of those points ring true, in our case. What I discovered was that Minecraft is the Lego of today, but digital. It fills many of the same creative urges.

We have quite some Lego Friends and different kits on shelves, which can't be touched according to the Creator :). A big bag of second hand parts lies in peace, but Minecraft on the PS5 is now the go-to. We sometimes play 2 player together, building things. Basically almost always in "creative mode", and never online.

I kind of wanted my daughter to feel the same positive way as I did with Lego, but no dice. Minecraft seems to do that.

Reminds me of this brief scene from Community. RIP Michael K Williams: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8e2f9j-iJo

I knew this would come up! "What happened to Lego? they use to be simple"

They’re also not as well made.

My kids newer fire station set has had multiple blocks crack in the last couple years, and he’s not rough on them. He bashes his action figures up but simply builds legos.

Fortunately my mom hung onto my stash and we were able to swap out parts right away. The aged coloring adds artistic texture.

Still a bummer to spend $30-$40 and if you don’t have a bunch of spares when blocks crack, you’re left with an set that can never be completely built.

Been wondering if a 3D printer is the way to go for this sort of thing now. Make action figures in parts.

Yes, many, but not all, Lego sets these days are more specific and have more specialised parts. But in the end, most children end up with a big box with a jumble of many sets, same as past decades. Maybe the first few days of a new set being introduced is dominated by following the instructions, but after that imagination takes over.

My son and his friends played with Lego for over 10 years - there are few toys that comes even close in terms of longevity and value for money (despite the high up-front cost).

I was a kid in the 1990s, and my parents were already making the same complaints (except for the film merch one). The kits haven’t changed that much in the last 30 years. At least those for kids; there weren’t many kits for adults back then.

I hate the branded kits with a passion (Batman and the others), but thankfully there are many others available, including great ones. I would have killed for a rocket like the newer ones when I was 10. OTOH recent trains are not much better than older ones.

> It would appear that, in the 1970s, equality of the sexes and creativity was the end goal for Lego

No. Saying you can buy your daughter a spaceship and your son a doll house doesn't mean that was your end goal. More likely, having to come up with fewer differentiated toys to sell, i.e. broadening the market, was.

I'm not saying that equality (although playing with nontraditional toys isn't synonymous with that) be an aim, but it's not the most obvious "end goal" explanation.

One thing that has changed is the quality of some of the bricks. I used to play with Legos in the 80's. I had dozens and dozens of sets that my parents kept, and now my kids are playing with them. Very very few pieces are broken.

Compare that with the current sets. My kids have a few of these and parts seem to break very easily. Especially minifigures. Hands, arms and "hips" deteriorate quickly. They crack slightly, become loose, etc.

It's fun when you read an article about lego changing and realize that the author is old enough that the "new" legos he's talking about are actually the legos you played with when you were ~6-7 years old.

Take it from an adult raised with "new" legos, if your kid has some imagination, it does not really matter if the kit is made with simple bricks or more complex pieces with a rudimentary mechanism, I had ton of fun with those.

This is a really refreshing point.

One thing that seems to have changed is the understanding of impermanence. I loved the things I built with Lego but quickly had to accept that none of them was permanent. Kill your darlings to build the next thing. Being too enamoured with what you built before reduced your options for building new creations and you found that you loved nothing so much that you weren't willing to destroy it to accomplish your new goals.

Lego really dialed the monopoly rent to 11. I wonder what the material cost for a 2,000 pieces set really is? After all it's a bunch of formed plastic pellets. My journey and a product idea: https://medium.com/hyperlinked/whats-missing-creator-platfor...

Seems like you're missing the part where they have to pay someone (or more accurately, entire teams of people) a lot of money to actually come up with the set idea and instructions.

Boiling LEGO down to just "a bunch of formed plastic" is criminal.

Please read the article before you write a comment.

I explicitly said in it that LEGO is successful because of the combination of instructions and plastic.

I further argue that you could unlock value by unbundle the two. If you have salary data on LEGO designers please share. In the meantime I assume a good model designer would make more in the described platform model. (Comparable to a newspaper journalist going solo with Substack.)

2014? What's new since then?

Fairly common knowledge that Lego basically saved the company and earned a ton of new money by focusing on branded sets and marketing-tie-ins etc, which was a change from the generic box of colored pieces and more independent-creativity-encouraging approach many of us grew up with. But that ship sailed so long ago and they made so much money, it isn't gonna stop any time soon.

Alternatively we could say Lego didn't change that much. We still have Lego classic which is still quite popular and often out of stock. So other than advertising I think nothing else changed

Now it's true that there are new alternative "lines" to bring in new people, but we also had that back in the day. I remember when I got my first Lego Technic for example.

You have to go way, way back to the 70s or very early 80s for some imagined Golden Age of Lego where the things this article is moaning about were not the case.

The most concerning issue with Lego to my mind is that they seem to be creatively bankrupt. Licensed IP kept the company afloat in their dark days, but they don't even try to put out their own themes anymore.

I thought the Mario sets were pretty awesome. My friends kids showed me there and I had to have them too. Mario also Bluetooth connects to a smartphone for various activities and there are 3d rotatable build instructions

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Fq3hw4imZ3g

I've been trying to find an article I read as a kid (late 70s) about a guy who made custom LEGO models, by putting bricks together incompletely. Like, you can make a cylinder with slightly-out-of-perfect snap-together pieces. I think he made a 747 out of regular pieces. At the time I don't think I was even aware of model kits.

I loved the general lego sets I had as a kid. One year my parents had gone on a short vacation to europe (germany?) and returned with an "expert lego system" kit of a front loader. Once built you could raise/lower and dump the bucket. Man I loved that thing also. One can like both types of "kits".

I kind of don't like the huge push for sets, because it feels like it ruins childhood imagination. You're just following instructions and not actively building something new. I know Lego sells the "Classic" sets, but it's usually harder to find and relegated to the clearance aisle.

> Blocks hide in the carpet until you are walking around barefoot in the dark. The pain of stepping on a a sharp Lego piece is not easily forgotten.

My first parenting superpower was the ability to step softly on Lego bricks. If I'm in a serious hurry, I'll even grip the thing with my foot and keep walking.

When I was a kid I always wanted to build a doll house because of the intricate details you can see inside the house. It was so hard I gave up and just bought scale model planes then use firecrackers to blow them up during new year. You will never experience the freedom of a kid once you're an adult.

I agree with some of this. But also, my mostly complete Ice Planet set has been my singularly most cherished toy ever. I still have it today.

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with well structured sets with instructions. As long as they use enough standard pieces to be able to mutate.

All I want from Lego these days is a reintroduction of a full medieval Castle style lineup again.

If they did I think I would collect and build the entire lineup. I see things like the Medieval Blacksmith set and I want an entire village and castle like that theme.

What exactly is wrong with Lego making a line of products for children who prefer to play with the characters than build complex models? Particularly when it was based on extensive research rather than just prejudice.

Blacktron, Space Police II, Spyrius and my beloved Ice Planet 2002 was the greatest series of all time.

While all of them were set in space theme, there was literally no chance you could mistake one with another!

What about:

1. Massive online community

2. Virtual simulators

3. Part numbers and 2nd hand retail

4. Computer and phone interfaces

5. Patent expired so more community

> 5. Patent expired so more community

This should probably read "competition". Some of the stuff secondary brands offer puts shame to Lego, both in creativity as well as in pricing. Bluebrix and Xingbao both have models that are a lot more playable than anything Lego has ever offered.

Their patent was bogus anyway.

I still have tubs full of legos sitting in the attic.

My favorite moments as a kid were starting with a lego mindstorms kit, I think that ended up leading me down a path where I started to learn programing.

On behalf of all Europeans, can I express the sentiment:

LEGO is a brand, LEGO Bricks, or LEGO pieces are the individual bricks/tiles/plates, etc. 'Legos' looks very wrong to us.

Another good way to get lots of random pieces cheap is go to eBay and look for bulk lots. Most people sell by the pound and ultimately it’s just your imagination holding you back!

Are resin 3D printers any better than FDM in printing Lego bricks? I hope they get good enough so that every kid can make all the pieces.

It's a shame that a new 8880 kit costs an arm and a leg.

A friend prints lego rail tracks that don't exist but should.

For regular bricks, however, Lego's manufacturing process is incredibly precise in a way that I don't think 3D printing will ever be.

It’d cost more money and time to print inferior parts.

There is no problem buying the parts separately needed to build such model. Of course, some exotic parts were discontinued. Lego provides instruction as pdf on their website.

Edit: the other brick manufacturers have problems replicating brick quality with injection molding machines. I assembled thousands Lego parts with my son and their fit was exactly the same - perfect. The Chinese kits have one in hundred parts that doesn’t fit well. However it was one in ten some years ago, Chinese learn fast.

I doubt one can 3D print anything as Lego replacement.

Competitor brick quality is on par or better than Lego at least for some. You need to do a little research on which competitors use which brick producer, but for example the bricks I’ve had in the Mould King sets were absolutely indistinguishable from Lego bricks in quality.

Building Mould King right now. The difference is almost gone. Cada is worse than Mould King. Anyway with 5x price difference I can live with a bit lower quality. Lego pricing is just sick. Even used sets from not that distant past.

The tolerance to which Lego bricks are fabricated is impossible to achieve using affordable gear.

You can make Duplo blocks. I printed some nice adapters that let you build a bridge for wooden Brio railroad tracks, with Duplo stands. And it think you could make specialty parts, like it excavator arms. But for regular Lego pieces, printing is too expensive and not accurate enough (don't know about resin, but I can imagine it is not flexible enough or too toxic?).

What's really holding us back is copyright. I wish there were high quality Ninjago or especially Star Wars clones.

They have much much better quality, but the resin is usually brittle compared with ABS.

Also it releases fumes that are extremely bad for children. There are quality resins but costing $100 per litter or so.

Today with 3d printers you just can print connectors and connect aluminum beams and wood boards to do whatever you want.

I teach children to cut wood boards with a fret saw and to mark holes that we drill super fast with a column drill machine.

They also know how to create basic shapes with the FDM machine, and print standard connector sets.

They have today way more advanced options that Legos.

There are two counterpoints that mean that this is unlikely to be what happens:

Lego bricks are made to micron tolerances. When you add up tolerancing errors over 10 or 50 bricks in a row the differences can add up and things don't fit. This is a big part of how Lego saw off the cheap competition - they were generally not satisfying to build. This is achieved with very careful injection moulding, and the only rapid prototyping tool at that level of precision is 3D CNC.

There is more to the sets that pieces of plastic. Look at Warhammer - the figures are all plastic, they could easily be 3D printer, they might not look quite as good but they'd work just fine. Yet, Games Workshop sells set after set. Lego sets are also designed, come with instructions etc. There's more than just the components.

From the Simpsons: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fcyva_ltKug

A good hack to getting lots of random legos cheap is buying bulk lots off of eBay. Most people sell by the pound and it’s always fun to see what you’ll get!

Today's Parent dot com, what you've just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent article were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone on this site is now dumber for having read it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.

With that out of the way, let me try and address this article, as someone who played with LEGO bricks in the 1980s and 1990s and has offspring that do so today:

1. The Instructions: There are more instructions in sets that are complex. The Model Team truck and helicopter set had 1,000+ pieces and tons of instructions almost thirty years ago. [1] There are still sufficient sets that are not complex and a wide variety of sets that come with no instructions. Not a valid argument.

2. The sets: Again, another fallacy. Non-branded sets still exist. Branded sets existed twenty years ago. This is a complaint about bad parenting (giving in to every demand from your children), not Lego.

3. The building method: Another fallacy. The building methods are up to individuals. You are free to buy whatever set you want and build whatever you want. You are, in fact, still allowed to take apart sets the day after you make them. (I notice that my children are very excited to do this as I was at their age but I am not).

4. Gendered toys: I have pored over local bylaws, UN directives, and have asked my priest. You can buy a Lego Friends set for your son, and a Lego Speed Champions set for your daughter. This is a parenting problem, not a Lego problem.

5. The advertising: This may be a valid point, but not for this argument because it does not affect the toys themselves any more than I could buy Legos at Toys R Us thirty years ago but not today.

6&7. The blocks & minifigs: Simple blocks are still available and you can build exclusively with those if you wish. Minifig choices are better as it allows to build different things (i.e. the cast of Top Gear UK).

8. Branding: I don't like branding in Lego, but this has been the case for at least twenty years. If you don't like the branding, you can buy unbranded sets.

1 = https://www.bricklink.com/v2/catalog/catalogitem.page?S=5590...

Is it just me or does the letter from 1974 look like it was typeset in Microsoft Word?

It does.

And this is going to be my only comment on this topic because I'm too traumatised by people pluralising "lego" with an S.

I find the act of building a set and putting it on a shelf to gather dust a bit sad, but big piles of similar shaped blocks are also a bit uninspiring.

So I was pleasantly surprised to find the BricQ Motion sets aimed at classroom use. They come with lessons plans and videos to give some direction, but even without them it's a great self-contained box with very carefully selected pieces to encourage learning about physics and a pile of more "silly" pieces to add character. There's a good selection of wheels, springs, weighted blocks, "ropes" and Technics style pieces. They come in a segmented tray and are colour coded to make finding particular blocks and experiment with related blocks easier.

I think they're the best of both - experiment, solve a challenge, learn something, build nonsense and then break it all up and put it away neatly ready to do it again. Big hit compared to sets.

Lego, singular. Never "Legos".

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