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I've seen this sentiment time and time again, but careful examination of the actual pieces and sets, excluding the obviously marketed to adults sets shows them just as adjustable and combinable as I remember them being when given to kids.

My ability to see what is latent and possible in the pile has decreased, but my kids have what seems to me to be quite the same amount of fun I did when I ways young.

There's even now an entire Lego line dedicated to "3 in 1" where the parts have three possible buildouts: https://www.lego.com/en-us/themes/creator-3-in-1

My pirate ship never came with alternate models with instructions https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/pirate-ship-31109 though some of the sets would have an alternate model or two pictured on the box.

This depends on your age. I think you were playing with Lego in the 1980s or 1990s when there was theming like pirates and what not. I had Lego in the 1970s. We really just had sets with square/rectangular blocks of various sizes and a few special parts like windows and doors. We didn't even have minifigs. But I get why Lego changed -- you only need to sell one or two generic sets and the kid has enough legos for life. If you add theming then suddenly there's space lego, pirate lego, etc. and then the kid wants a new set every Christmas and birthday.

>> We really just had sets with square/rectangular blocks of various sizes and a few special parts like windows and doors

Same here. For me, they were stored in the same large bag as the Lincoln Logs, Tinkertoys, Hot Wheels, and green plastic army men.

Which allowed you to realistically portray such common situations as "infantryman, flamethrower, and radio man hide behind giant plastic multi-colored wall while preparing to assault Porsche 917 garaged in a log cabin".

What's interesting to me is that the 60s and 70s had some very interesting (and now quite sought after) parts that were discontinued.

Minifigs really were the main demark where it went from "plastic building blocks" to "modeling toy/dollhouse for boys".

And it is not only the variety of pieces, but also that the number of colors has exploded. Lego is becoming more like Playmobil, with the advantage that you have extra fun putting your sets together, and with the disadvantage that they will disintegrate and be hard to put together again.

I find myself "helping" my kids keep their built sets whole after playing with them, as once the sets become pieces it is too tedious/frustrating for the kids to find all the pieces to put them back together again amongst the pile. Also because the manuals are very much step by step, it is very clear what piece you need for the next 1 step, but not what you need for the next 10 steps. So searching ahead is not so easy for the kids.

But regardless of all my opinions, the kids are huge fans of lego. I have also noticed that as the sets are much larger, it is quite nice to buy a set second hand, build it once and then sell it again. I found out there are even people renting out the top sets for like 10€/week. So these sets are more like puzzles to me, where the joy is in building them. Such a contrast with when I was a kid; I never kept my sets built, I was always building my own designs.

Recently my kids got something called plusplus. A 3d building block where all blocks are identical (shaped like ++) and in limited colors. They were having fun building their own designs from the start. Limitations really spark creativity

> there are so many special pieces that it does not spark your own creative fantasy (in my opinion) but limits it.

Those pieces aren't anywhere near as limiting as you think. The Saturn V model uses the 64951 tub/barrel pieces as thruster nozzles. The LEM uses the 64644 telescope/spyglass piece for the legs. That's the immediately visible bits in the model I have handy, I remember seeing a bunch more of those on my friend's Millennium Falcon, and just in general.

The 31129 Majestic Tiger uses a 1x1 pink flower plate as a butthole.

In thought you were joking but I looked it up and this is 100% true. I applaud their commitment to anatomical correctness.

My son gets the sets, builds the one thing, then starts heavily modifying it. Eventually pieces from other sets will be incorporated into this set and it into other sets and eventually the Death Star has become a castle. So, it’s more of a mindset thing than a LEGO thing. If you insist that the one thing is all the set can become, that is fine, but it can also become many other things if you let it go.

That trend has been going on a decades. When I was a kid in the late 80s, I always grabbed the annual Lego catalog from the local toy store. Every year, there were more and more big colorful special-purpose parts that were required to build that one cool object. But there were never enough of them in the boxes to really use them in my own designs.

I've stumbled over Rebrickable recently where you can enter a LEGO set number and get alternative models (MOCs) and build instructions for them (among other usages). For my children there is lots of fun in taking apart the car again and building a plane from the same parts. This also has the benefit of keeping the sets together (for now), so the original instructions can still be used without having to hunt for two 1x1 tile rounded in dark blueish gray in one of the two big boxes of parts.

It varies by set/model. Some of them are built and then played with, some are built, razed, built differently, demolished again. Some are built and then put on display. The pieces, even the specialized ones, are rarely the problem in building something completely different from what I can observe. They are, however, a problem when you have to find them again if you want to build the original model.

I'll make a weird analogy, i feel the same about modern games. The old limitations gave a different feel to the incredibly realistic rendering of today. Even when styled.. it's not the same.

I like the groove of simple blockiness and a few dedicated parts.

That's on you, I'm afraid. If you buy the big boxes of pieces, you can be just as limited as you want to be.

I recall as a kid a sense of scarcity with my lego, even though I had quite a bit because it was one of the few reliable presents for me.

We couldn't afford the expensive sets, so I was always doing a little bit of the calculus about what interesting parts I could see on the box, whether they were in a color that I favored (if you want to build something mono- or dichromatic you have to have a lot of pieces in one or two colors), the state of disrepair of my minifigs (the helmet chinstraps back then were always breaking) etc.

It wasn't the first choice usually, but often once I'd narrowed it down to a couple in my price range, it mattered.

As an adult I happened upon a lego expo a couple times in a community center, and one that stuck out to me relates to your story. For a while there were sets with very long, spindly, curved pieces that always annoyed me, but the centerpiece of this exposition was a suspension bridge of Lego about ten feet long. The trusses that held the road bed were made almost entirely by chaining together those curved, spindly bits. God knows where he got that many of them and all the same color. And how much that cost.

Nah dude, you are plain wrong. The truth is that Lego has so much variety, they make an experience for everyone.

They have sets with multiple builds and more flexibility. They’ve got stuff for adults who want a pretty object in their house that they built. They have Lego Friends for the girly girls. They have every licensed property imaginable for people who are into that. They have Minecraft which has more build flexibility of being voxel themed in the first place. They sell classic bins with assorted parts. They have Duplo for toddlers. They have train sets for train people. They have roller coasters and “fast” sets. They have a robot/programming product. They have construction and technic. They have car sets for people who like model cars. They have city and creator sets for people who like to build realistic model towns and worlds. They have space and aviation stuff. They have products created by fans that are voted on by their fans. They have a custom model set builder.

They literally make everything. You can get whatever experience you want, including all the old experiences.

You are right, there is a fine balance between just enough variety to be able to achieve your vision without leaving Minecraft-style jagged edges and too much variety and specialisation so that you cannot build anything novel at all. But we also live in a time where you can easily buy boxloads of generic Lego bricks second-hand (some of it probably 20 or more years old) for almost nothing at yard sales or on a local buy-and-sell website. Lego bricks are good for 2 or 3 generations of children.

Ok, so maybe LEGO is becoming more like Apple. Apple is going against general purpose computing, and LEGO is now going against general purpose construction.