Ranking the 25 Most Painful Lego to Step On
nerdist.com
nerdist.com
#4 is NOT Lego ABS, it is another Lego plastic and is actually quite "soft" and will bend easily.
#5's clips are really too small to be incredibly painful - you need something more like #2.
And if you really want to suffer you will step on something like the off-brand Hubelino Marble Run pieces: https://www.hubelino.com - they, unlike Lego and Duplo, have extremely sharp edges on the blocks, perfectly molded 90° angles. Almost all Lego and Duplo bricks actually have slightly rounded (rounded rect!) corners.
And walking on a entire floor of bricks won't be that bad, as they will move aside like walking on sharpish gravel. The real pain is when you hit a lone brick on a hard floor.
Well that’s no fun at all!
I was hoping for human trials of sleep deprived adults, with scoring metrics like “Number of hops” and “Number of shouted obscenities” and a probability likelihood estimate of all visible blocks being tossed into the trash after impact.
I was surprised how efficiently my children picked up the ones I muttered in the middle of the night when stepping on stuff.
I know they they picked them then (and not, say, when hitting something with my small toe) because they were particularly inventive to keep sputtering them while the pain lasted.
Meanwhile we're stuck with the Great Ball Contraption which is amazing, but not exactly the same. https://www.greatballcontraption.com
https://www.bricklink.com/v2/catalog/catalogitem.page?P=7039
Never had any of these but I suspect this variant would be even worse due to the smaller area at the tip of the axle:
https://www.bricklink.com/v2/catalog/catalogitem.page?P=7039...
Source: the scream of my dad about 20 years ago
https://www.bricklink.com/v2/catalog/catalogitem.page?P=6064... looks terrifying until you realize it's a softish plastic.
The 2x2 is the Gold Standard of Pain: ubiquitous, plentiful, and no matter where it connects, it's knee-buckling (vs. say the 2x3s, which I find can be tolerable if it runs lengthwise along the outside lane of your foot.. you can kinda roll with it).
The 2x2 is the bedbug of toys: perfectly engineered for torment.
Now you can take these plugs out of my cold, dead hands, I love those plugs with a frankly alarming passion, but $deity$ do they hurt to step on.
Tom Scott [1] has all the reasons why.
It seems that the pre-90's Lego sets were easier underfoot as the bucket adapter and flower stalk are the only ones pictured that existed then. Have Lego sets become more troublesome underfoot?
Some of the original small windows had pretty sharp edges.
When the kids are at that age, better to buy from brands that use softer cheaper plastic and don't share Lego's commitment to precision engineering.