Lego price per part over the years | Hacker News Reader

Lego price per part over the years

brickinsights.com

352 pointsjanandonly176 comments

I made a script last year that scraped LEGO pricing data from their website. Besides finding out that the Bugatti Bolide Technic set is a pretty good deal as a parts bag, I found that there's only a weak correlation between set size and PPP. The Dots sets throw a wrench in things, of course, and large Technic sets often have expensive electronic and pneumatic parts that must be considered.

My conclusion was that PPP is useful as a bargain-hunting tool, but not as a model for broad price analysis.

Here's that for anyone interested:

https://old.reddit.com/r/lego/comments/1328f52/detailed_lego...

Just like the article, you really have to correct for outliers to make PPP work. It's more of a "rule of thumb" that you can use to determine if something is, as you said, a bargain worth getting even if it is outside your main area.

Bricklink's "part out" tool is more accurate, but some pieces get priced "wrong" and you have to know enough to determine that.

Epic! thank you!

I loved going to Valley Faire Mall in San Jose and scooping parts by the pound.

I didnt see any of the lego store by-the-pound model.

An interesting method for sus-ing up what parts they had would be looking into the shipments to-from lego entities in NL and USA - sea shipping bills of lading can be found on import yeti (now obviously unless someone has digitized historic bills of lading, etc (and we all know that ship hands (pirates) and long-shoremen (mob) have famously been the definition of corruption - so we can hardly ever trust any bill of lading...

So with that in mind though:

Lets look at the shipments of LEGO https://i.imgur.com/HgLlBuF.png

Nathan appears to be a top importer of Lego https://i.imgur.com/xYDvko5.png

Ships mostly a container a month to LA. https://i.imgur.com/7ZALaMi.png

LegoLand is his customer: https://i.imgur.com/I0oS1wu.png

But I cant find out contents of shipment .... AH Check this out: https://i.imgur.com/7CjqVBW.png

So you can see that they are ~1,000 lbs per shipment... rounding up - then remove ~30% for weight of packaging and basically you have 750 pounds of plastic bricks - then apply part existance probability and you can see how much of each part is being imported and a costing idea...

We could probably map out all lego sets and shipments with some dilligence.

Should also look at the environmental impact of lego long term. its a LOT of plastic.

Part existence probability changes every couple of months, probably not enough time for you to be able to make good estimates.

LEGO tends to get hoarded, resold or donated, not thrown away. I believe I have more than 99% of all the LEGO I or my parents ever bought, going back to 1976 or 7.

I have lost all mine sadly.

And I had so much given to me. But my life took me in a path that separated me from all my Lego. :-(

> LEGO tends to get hoarded, resold or donated, not thrown away.

I doubt this. Outside Lego enthusiasts, most people see it as a children's toy which is probably disgustingly covered in saliva and in no fit state for anyone else to touch. It's one of the first things to go into the trash when more space is needed in the attic.

You can put them into a pillowcase and wash in a washing machine.

Given how expensive Legos are many people will gladly pick them up from your place, especially if you live in a city. You can look up Buy Nothing and similar groups in your area on FB.

Sure, but most people don't know that. So they chuck them out with the rest of the dog-eared teddy bears.

I'm not convinced you're correct in your belief that most people are like you in this respect. But I don't have evidence to disprove you either.

Tell that to my Mother. She threw away all of our 1970s and 1980s legos, transformers, Star Wars, He-man, etc. toys after we left home. Didn’t even donate them - straight to the landfill.

One day an archeologist is going to be grateful.

Unfortunately, this was in South Florida. The landfill will be underwater at some point.

I was surprised by how complete some sets of mine where when they came over. I don't doubt the 99%, although in my case they are not mine any longer as such, but my five year old son's.

Lego stashes do indeed get hoarded for a generation at a time; a lot of it is kept as valuable for the next generation (lucky bastards).

> large Technic sets often have expensive electronic and pneumatic parts that must be considered.

On the other hand, Technic sets contain large numbers of pins, which are basically worthless.

Exactly. And motors are massively overpriced compared to what is in them.

I had no idea this was even a thing. I always just think “would this set make me $x happy to have?”

Of course, the answer is never “no” so I think I probably am not very bargain conscious when it comes to LEGO. And I may have a problem.

Any advice for someone developing a problem?

But seriously, the cost is so worth it for me. As someone who has attention span challenges from time to time, LEGO puts me into a flow state like almost nothing else. I love a good 2-3 night session putting together a big set.

If you want to experience true frustration, try buying one of those 3d metal kits which require a set of pliers to assemble. The instructions are incredibly sparse and an incredible amount of precision is required.

If you want a bit of an increased challenge, Gundam models tend to be a bit more difficult than Lego while still feeling stimulating and fun.

I've built a few metal earth models. It is not very easy, but if you have a good plier set, perfectly doable! It puts you in a flow, just like with Lego, and the result looks nicer than Lego, for less money.

It doesn't work for me, I do have ADD and lego puts me into flow, but after that I kust feel bad that I spent time and money on something without actual value. Thinking I could have spend that time on chores, home improvement or side projects...

But what do you mean without value you said it makes you feel good that's the best value ever.

Money is not like time - if you don't spend money you get to keep it. If you don't spend time, you waste it. You can't do chores all the time so instead of just doing nothing why not doing something that makes you feel good just for the sake of it

I have sort of got out of lego because of this very issue. Some of the end sets look cool but do not feel 'lego' anymore to me. Take something like the latest millennium falcon. I have the previous version of that behemoth that someone gave me. Most of the set is 'filler'. Basically empty void with a fragile shell on the outside that looks cool and incredibly tedious to put the gribblies on. The worst of these was the star wars star destroyer. It was huge. But mostly empty void on a frame and hundreds of very tiny decorative parts. The newer incarnations look a bit better but, I feel sort of ripped off. The Lamborghini looks very lego'y. I just do not want a lime green one. Precisely because of that detracts from the lego'y bit of it. Those pieces are pretty much only good for that one set. Lego has leaned hard into the model style of 3d puzzles with their sets. It probably saved their company. But it at this point is getting rather silly price wise. I can get the knock off brands and have a much more interesting selection of models if I want to go that way.

This is really cool. Thank you.

LEGO is indeed pretty expensive these times. Not every set is that bad, but the most cars are not only expensive, but not even the best sets on the market...

There is a lot of comparisons, but the most convincing one maybe the LEGO Ferarri (42125) vs. CADA Italian Super Car (C61042W) video[1] of "Held der Steine" (german youtube channel). The LEGO is "parts only" - the CADA is remote controlled with led lights near double the parts of the lego one for the same price.

Many of the newer manufacturers are 100% compatible and provide near double the part count for a similar set. Even if some of them are shameless rip-offs and illegal to have in some countries, most of them are smaller companies with great part quality, prints (no stickers) and innovative designs (see CaDA® C61503W AMG One).

There is also the world of Trains or Tractors, where LEGO tends to fail every time.

There are

  - CaDa
  - BlueBrixx
  - Cobi
  - fischertechnik
  - Unico
  - Mould King
  - burgkidz
  - Wange
  - Sluban
  - Q-Bricks

Just to provide you some alternatives :-)

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXphWMPWsZw

I don't think you can compare LEGO with not-LEGO...

Firstly it feels a little sacrilegious, but religion aside quality is often uncomparable and there was this common meme from my childhood that your parents did not love you if you got knockoff LEGOs. Part of the reason why we buy LEGO is because it's LEGO. Buying some other brand (regardless of quality) does not hit the same way.

But that's a learned behaviour, and one learned specifically thanks to decades of marketing. Sure, LEGO is quality, but it's not some unbeatable gold standard. At some point it simply becomes one of those things where people ask for Coke instead of Pepsi, even if they can't tell them apart - brand loyalty trumping the desire to simply get the product.

That's what I think. And even if the quality of the parts was less good, it's just not worth the LEGO price in many cases.

The video I linked shows the difference.

I think the "LEGO tax" is as much about consistency as marketing inertia. With name-brand LEGO, you know what you're going to get quality-wise. Alternative brands can be unpredictable. I would know; I still have all my LEGO from when I was a kid, and since my family isn't made of money, a lot of them aren't actually LEGO.

Alternative brands can VERY hit-or-miss, and when you miss, you can end up with some truly atrocious pieces. When I was a kid, Mega Bloks was the most common LEGO alternative (in the US, at least), and all of those pieces are terrible. The colors are washed out compared to LEGO, the plates aren't as rigid, and some of the bricks are a mess of scratches and dents.

Consistency is even a problem within individual sets. I also had a couple of LEGO-compatible sets that were made by Hasbro in the mid-2000s, and the part quality is excellent. The pieces have held up really well over the years, and Hasbro's yellow pieces are indistinguishable from LEGO's yellow. Hasbro came correct... except for their wheels, which are the sort of hideous dirt-cheap abomination that even Mega Bloks never stooped to.

Some brands are awful. Some brands are great. Some brands (like Hasbro) somehow managed to put "awful" and "great" inside the very same box. A brand's quality may change wildly over time. Some brands come out with their own extensions to the LEGO "standard," and then never provide a complete system of compatible parts. Sticking to name-brand LEGO offers a much more predictable experience.

> But that's a learned behaviour, and one learned specifically thanks to decades of marketing.

I am not sure this is an accurate assessment. Lego has a reputation because it built that reputation over decades of solid and reliable delivery. Pseudo-Lego brands built a reputation of competing on price while trading off quality and reliability.

The real question is whether the price delta between Lego and pseudo-Lego can justify the quality delta. That's surely subjective up to a point.

> Lego has a reputation because it built that reputation over decades of solid and reliable delivery.

Really? I'm not sure about that. I think LEGO built a reputation, because it was patented until 2008 and competitive products were not even a thing.

Mould King was founded 2012, also more than a decade ago.

> Pseudo-Lego brands built a reputation of competing on price while trading off quality and reliability.

This maybe true for chinese rip-offs, but the more modern approach is innovative, even with licensed models (see CADA MASTER Mercedes-AMG ONE 61503 or Mould King 12025 Orient Express). Features like LED lights, remote controls, remote controlled doors or REAL steam have not been approached by modern LEGO sets.

Where did LEGO have a patent? It certainly wasn't the US. Mega has been here for decades. LEGO tried to sue them under copyright law but lost. My experience with non-LEGO bricks has been extremely mixed, averaging negative.

Show me a lego ripoff that has the same quality and thoughtfulness in parts and we can discuss.

My experience with the 5 brands I tried has been horrendous: parts don't stick together, parts are too small, parts are incorrect.

A local toy store here has one set of shelves filled with Sluban (about ⅓ the size of their Lego offering), and it's just bleak to see. The shop focused their Sluban offering on military hardware for some reason (perhaps because Lego doesn't do any of that), so you end up with drab boxes of greens and browns, in addition to looking just off in terms of accuracy of the parts.

There's also a bunch of the 'fake' stuff on AliExpress, where you can tell the quality of the bricks is crap just by looking at the low-res photos. Getting the fit of bricks right is apparently quite hard to do if you want to offer lower prices than Lego does.

The problem is, that the GOOD part sellers (like CADA) are always put into the same spot as these cheap aliexpress rip-offs...

I think LEGO has done a great marketing job here... never buy something that is not LEGO, it might be bad quality or scam.

You have to choose wisely, but if you've found the good stuff, you probably won't go back.

> I think LEGO has done a great marketing job here... never buy something that is not LEGO, it might be bad quality or scam.

I don't think that was LEGO. I think that was just the off brands being pretty university awful and people caught on.

I'm going through a bucket of loose parts right now, separating the off brands from the LEGO. There are at least 6 different brands in there. The difference is almost always obvious.

And when it's not and the part sneaks its way into my main collection, I can instantly tell when I use it because it either doesn't fit, or fits incorrectly.

That’s a cope. It comes from the same factory. It’s just small mass produced plastic, it’s not exactly complicated.

In general, their brick quality isn't on par with Lego. The clutching of Lego bricks is finely weighed and consistent. The colouring is brighter. They don't have nasty toxic smells and paints. The set catalogues are more diverse with many more themes. Set designs are original and matching the age group. There is also historical significance and nostalgia for certain sets and themes, and they can be re-released as new sets with modern building techniques and new parts.

Is this based on your own recent experience? I recently got into the mood to build some LEGO again, after not having done it since childhood, but I recoiled at the prices of current LEGO sets. Got something from BlueBrixx instead and am really happy with it. The bricks look great, feel satisfying to put together and I can't tell a difference from how I remember it from all those years ago.

I definitely remembers seeing some Mega Bloks some 15-20 years ago and they were really really bad like you described but from what I can tell, other competitors have actually caught up to LEGO nowadays.

I don't have any experience with BlueBrixx. It looks like a German brand on the higher end of the price scale. It's not available in my country.

I have some recent limited experience with Chinese knock-offs like Lepin and Panlos, and they are bad in the ways I described.

That's good to know, then I'm gonna avoid those two for now.

They really aren't that far off these days. Certainly no 'nasty toxic smells/paints'. Brick fit/clutching can be a bit sub-par on certain parts, but is generally not far from the real thing.

Lego does a much better job of instruction books than the 'fake Lego' sets I've seen, though. Also, Lego has higher standards for the model designs themselves, whereas some of the 'fake Lego' model designs can be rather more fragile than anything Lego would release, which adds to the impression of poor brick fit/clutching (e.g. the Xingbao Xenomorph)

(Haven't seen any of the Technic clones, though. They're likely to suffer more from loose or poorly-fitting parts)

> Certainly no 'nasty toxic smells/paints'.

There are manufacturers that provide laboratory analysis of their bricks to prove the quality.

I’ve seen how much attention Lego puts into designing and making their bricks and sets, as well as their general outlook, so combined with their better quality, fake Lego bricks is not something I want polluting or diluting my/my kid’s Lego.

Why are you so sure that the other bricks are of lesser quality?

Empirical evidence. I've tried some fake brick sets, most of them were obviously not as good. The QC is worse for sure, but it's the little things - sometimes it's weight, sometimes it's texture, sometimes it's color that is slightly "off".

Those "other bricks" are quite useful when you want something that Lego won't produce. For example gimp figurine for your Pulp Fiction diorama.

I don't think that LEGO is better. They also have slightly off color, non fitting parts. Especially the "glass" parts are worse than Cada or BlueBrixx, but I'm not trying to convince anyone.

I think that everyone can pick whatever liked. However, the term "fake LEGO" is a bit weird, because the other manufacturers also have well designed parts LEGO does not provide...

Well, simple: we have some

Just one "Datapoint", but I have a colleague that works in injection molding. Granted, he works on the "other end" of the size scale (complete car underbodys in one part), but he always said it was more or less a given fact that the two companies wo had "dialed in" their molding processes to near perfection and quality were Lego and Games Workshop in the UK.

So, this is something LEGO is desperately trying to preserve: The opinion that LEGO's prices are reasonable due to better quality and more creative design / higher quality engineering.

The quality in all terms is not better at all... they may be CAPABLE of better quality, but they don't provide it just to reduce costs. That's why they provide stickers instead of prints and holed out plastic parts instead of solit ones. It's cheaper in production. If you compare LEGO parts from 20 to 15 years ago and todays parts, you immediately notice the difference.

There ARE indeed manufacturers and brands that deliver bad quality, but if you pick the non-ripoff brands, the quality may even better.

LEGO has always had that rep as the injection molding MVP but I have to say I've been really impressed with bandai. They really dominate the model kit space and I find myself noticing how high quality they feel. I've built a bunch of gundams, Star wars, Pokemon, and one piece kits and they were all super fun. I also like how they kind of inspire me to customize them which I don't feel as much with Lego kits these days (I still love Lego but the kits are so good oob I just leave them as is)

The Cada cars definitely look good, the Amg one and Alfa Romeo f1 car are licensed too. Has anyone here actually built them? The interiors seem to be all black parts which could be a headache to get the right piece. Technic sets have good instructions and helpfully colored pieces which makes for a great build experience. Just wondering what it is like to actually bulls a Cada set.

If you are not afraid of german content, you can take a look at "Held der Steine" Twitch channel and Youtube Channel... he does build most of his reviewed content.

Technics is badass though. Still remember my set.

> Many people quote that a set should be priced at around $0.10 per part to be worthwhile. Is this the average?

This has been the average, and it's so "perfect" that it has to be that Lego has been aiming for it. They've accomplished this by having more and more detail (read: smaller pieces) in newer sets.

They appear to have been forced (or trying) to jump to $0.20 per piece in some sets (e.g., https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/cinderella-and-prince-cha... )

I have a new metric when it comes to lego kits these days. How many stickers are in the kit? And honestly it's too damn high. I have been pretty vocal to lego about this in the past and current times. If they can mass produce an uncountable amount of minifigs with detailed paint schemes; they can do the same for bricks in the set.

I have a hard time believing it's nothing more than a cost cutting measure. And to add insult to injury; I have noticed their quality control slipping over the years. For example: in the past 40 years or so, I might get a kit with a piece missing once a decade? Within the past 10 years I have had at least 7 kits missing pieces. And the frequency keeps growing. As a long time lego enthusiast; they have been slowly losing my trust.

How many sets do you buy per year, out of curiosity? I got into Lego during the pandemic and bought around 50 sets in the past three years. Over that sample, the number of missing pieces was precisely zero.

I go on some wild stints. But if I had to average it out; somewhere around 10-20 kits a year.

My experience is in fact the opposite. I usually buy the larger sets, and have nearly always had left over smaller pieces. It made me worried the first time it happened and I spent the time tracing back through the model only to find I didn't miss anything.

I wish I could say the same. The extra little guys is to be expected. I am talking about key pieces to the puzzle.

They do precise weighing of bags as a quality control measure. The tiny 1x1 type pieces are more likely to get missed by the weighing so they often add an extra of those pieces to offset a potential loss that might not get noticed when weighing them.

That is why you always get two helmet visors for example when you buy a speed champion. The machine is actually just designed to give you two, because that way if it breaks and misses one, you still have one that you need and it costs them almost nothing to do that. But a missing helmet visor is easy to get missed by the quality control scale. So if you ever buy a speed champion and only get one helmet visor, it is because you lost one or the machine broke. But that's why there's an extra. They do that by design. That's just one example. You see it with magic wands in Harry Potter sets, you always get two, and a lot of sets with 1x1 pieces will always have 1-2 extras just because they are cheap to add in and more likely to get missed in their QA process which weighs the bags.

Every tiny 1x1 piece always comes with an extra. That must be by design.

I think that’s calculated in their cost of doing business. Add one extra of each 1x1 probably eliminated most of the missing parts issue at a fraction of the cost.

> and have nearly always had left over smaller pieces

Almost every Lego set I've ever owned (going back 30+ years to when I used to get Lego) and now my son's Lego recently have all had at least one leftover piece.

you and bleepblop should probably just correspond more often

I've also always questioned this. I have purchased about 60 sets in the past 4 years. I have a friend who has purchased well over 100 (he runs a Lego YouTube channel - he spends > $6,000 a year on Lego by his estimation).

I have never had a missing piece. There have been two times when I thought I was missing a piece and then found it stuck in a bag or hidden under another piece. I've never had to write to Lego to get a replacement (which I've heard they are really easy to work with if it does happen).

Out of curiosity, I just texted my friend to get another sample from him and he said it happened to him one time, but also admitted his kids might have been to blame.

So when people claim that every other set they buy has missing pieces, I always feel like I am either the luckiest person to ever live, or maybe the pieces are there and certain people are just more likely to misplace or lose them in the building process.

Perhaps set size is a contributing factor? I've bought two sets over the last few years, and both of them have had a piece missing. One was 1969 pieces (no prizes for guessing which set that is!) and the other 1222 pieces.

Both occasions the pieces weren't structurally important, and were small decorative elements.

The Saturn V was a fun build :)

I have opened and built hundreds of lego sets over the years, and the only missing pieces I’ve ever had were in the Saturn V set. I think they had a QC issue on that set specifically.

I've put together probably 50 sets over the past 5-6 years. I pretty much only buy the largest sets they make, especially Technic. I doubt I have many sets under 1500 pieces.

I've yet to find a single missing piece so far. Many times we thought a piece would be missing, only to find it trying to escape somewhere. The plastic bags carry a pretty heavy static charge in dry winter conditions, and the tiny pieces love to stick inside those in the corners where they somehow turn damn near invisible.

To be honest the quality control is pretty unbelievable. If someone tells me they had 6 sets with missing pieces over the past 5 years my initial reaction would simply be to not believe them as it's so easy to misplace a piece during a 2,000+ piece week-long build. I've misplaced dozens to the point of having to order replacements from ebay or whatnot - only to find the pieces lurking around my house before the new parts even arrive. The joke of the household is you need to order a replacement part and then you'll find what you're missing a few hours later by complete accident.

I've found pieces in the strangest places. If you accidentally sit on one they will basically become one with your flesh, and I've found random pieces floating in the tub completely unexpectedly.

Knocking on wood my luck (and Legos QC) continues.

> If you accidentally sit on one they will basically become one with your flesh

But in the dark they become savage. Stand on one or even worse, kneel on one when trying to find the tv remote. I might have cried.

I have the exact same experience as you. I have build 50+ sets, 10 of them 1500+ piece sets and a few over 3000. I have never had a missing piece. I have had small pieces that was hiding or I dropped on the floor, but never missing. There is always some additional pieces in the set, and I assume it's because they err on the side of being sure.

I don't have children and I do all sorts of kits besides lego; with even smaller pieces. Either I have bad luck or I am careless. But you'd think with multiple decades under my belt I'd eventually find the "missing" pieces. When it's like a 4x12 left wing, or a 2x1 it starts to get suss.

The only time I ever had a large piece like that missing, it was pretty clear (on afterthought) that the box had been opened in the store before I bought it.

And I've had to return a set or two to Amazon because they'd clearly been opened and returned (and usually all the minifigs stripped out).

Understandable. I am pretty selective when it comes to a kit. Dare I say autistic? Box condition is a consideration, along with down to how I open them. It's noticeable.

I bet it's more likely that a given Lego set that is missing pieces was produced, packaged, shipped, and sold, nearby other piece-missing sets.

In other words, I would not expect the distribution of Lego sets that are missing pieces to be evenly or randomly distributed.

Yes I was thinking the same thing. Certain factories may have worse quality control, and those sets end up in different regions from sets that come from better production facilities

Are they really producing the same sets in different factories? It would surprise me.

One thing they do on the big sets is give you extras of the small stuff. Like if you need 10 of a 1x1 tile of a certain color, maybe they give you 11, or even 12.

The biggest limitation to that is that the selection of extra pieces is probably not as random as the set of missing pieces, especially since they focus on smaller pieces - presumably to accommodate the ones you lose after buying a full set.

Probably not, but it seems I tuitive that the smaller pieces are the most likely to be lost.

Same. I keep pictures of each box I get for the family. About 130 now in the last 10 years. Zero missing pieces.

For me, 100 percent of the sets with over a thousand pieces have been missing at least one, during the pandemic. Now that’s only 4 sets, admittedly.

The smaller sets have all been fine, tho.

I wonder how many pets/kids they have because my experience mirrors yours. No missing parts over maybe 15 sets (between my wife and I).

I've probably spent £3000+ on Lego over the last decade. Mostly fairly large sets. Mostly Technic, Creator Expert, and Star Wars. Zero missing pieces.

(Also zero shelf space left to display any more Lego...)

It's kind of funny, I got into buying random Lego knockoffs from alibaba, and they get around not missing pieces by putting a totally random amount of extra pieces in instead. I can usually make a small random person or statue with the random pieces left over from the actual model.

> I have a hard time believing it's nothing more than a cost cutting measure.

It's a "keep bricks interchangeable" measure. Every LEGO set designer gets a budget of a few new piece suggestions per year. This includes color and paint schemes.

From a Verge article on how a new set happens: https://www.theverge.com/c/23991049/lego-ideas-polaroid-ones...

> And those teams came up with one simple idea to stem the tide of complexity: “frames.”

> Want a part in a different color? That costs designers a frame. A new piece? Spend some frames. Bring back an old out-of-print piece? That’s a frame, too. Every year, design leads like Scott are given a limited number of frames that they can spend on their entire portfolio for physical pieces that aren’t readily at hand. “If I have five products or 10 products coming out, I need to allocate where those frames go,” says Scott.

> How many stickers are in the kit? And honestly it's too damn high.

I know I'm going against the grain here, but I love stickers. Many of the sets my kids got were "sticker infested" but as they only re-bricked it, we just did not put the stickers on some of them and got just more fun out of it.

> Within the past 10 years I have had at least 7 kits missing pieces. And the frequency keeps growing

I never had it. Also if you do, Lego will send you any piece (that is not a minifig) no questions asked. My kid threw my glob down and one of the parts got a bad indentation and looked ugly. I got a replacement part in the mail no questions asked.

I am fully aware of the customer service side of lego. That's why I still use their stuff. But I suppose that is where our agreement will lie. Knowing what they are capable of and where they are now is noticeable.

I don't know. It very much depends on what you are into. I feel like a lot of the stuff that Lego does got way better in recent years. For instance the manuals in the app are a step above and beyond of where they were, and the build together element means that my kids are playing together and rebuilding old sets.

I am totally on the same page with you. It definitely boils down to what are you doing. There are a ton of cool pieces these days that would've been a pipe dream when we were kids. And lego's MO has always been imagination and creativity. I feel like the addition of stickers in essence sort of rules out the variable, but forces the builder to use it if they are following the kit by the book. Where as with a printed brick the person gets to choose whether they use it or not.

It's really splitting hairs at that point, but ascetically speaking it doesn't fit their ethos.

LEGO needs to pull a KIA.

First, they need the LLM instructions AI thingy to look at your pieces and instantly come up with inspiration. Gamify that.

But they need to pull a KIA in that they hired the young designers away from GM and gave them some room.

There needs to be a revolution in LEGO with the following:

A device which is communally owned - at a Library or an Elementary School.

Throw in plastic bottles and plastic waste.

It molds LEGO bricks.

And you can program different sets.

And kids can create sets and have the device spit out the bricks for that set they designed.

In grad school I knew a guy who was reeeeally into the idea of building benches out of reused plastic and cob. The basic design was plastic bottles stuffed with plastic bags acting as bricks, which are then cemented together with cob.

Cleaning the bottles and bags was incredibly difficult, even at the scale needed for a single bench. Just a massive amount of effort... The difficulty was that any residual bacteria would multiply and off-gas, eventually causing structural problems.

Likewise, I expect the biggest problem for a home-LEGO-recycler would be dealing with the many random impurities in the input stream.

LEGO is mostly ABS so its mechanical properties are a LOT better than the cheap stuff used for bottles.

Strongly disagree on your mold idea. LEGO’s stringent quality control is one of the things that makes it great. My childhood legos are all at my parents house, and my kids love to play with them when we visit. They still work perfectly 30 years later.

That level of quality is impossible with your local library mold idea. It would inevitably churn out low quality bricks due to (1) bad inputs and (2) molds not being replaced regularly for wear and tear, which would be accelerated due to (1).

You can’t just throw whatever plastic trash you have into a machine and expect it to produce good or even useable bricks.

"First, they need the LLM instructions AI thingy to look at your pieces and instantly come up with inspiration. Gamify that."

That exists, though it's not from Lego: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/brickit-app/id1477221636 https://www.forbes.com/sites/barrycollins/2021/07/03/got-a-b...

I can't help but think back to my childhood in the 1980s... there were always stickers included. In the Lego idea books they always showed those same stickers in use, making the association and relevance clear. So how many is too many? I mean, I'd say the more the merrier if that gives the set another dimension of play.

I was stoked to find the new Eldorado fortress to be an improvement on the original and free from stickers. I got plenty of extra pieces too.

In my experience they tend to add extras for the smallest pieces and have never missed a piece.

I envy that you have never experienced missing "key" pieces.

I just wish the stickers were high quality plastic ones, so you'd have a chance in hell of removing and replacing them immediately if you mess up.

I've never had a confirmed piece missing (the few cases had obvious open boxes, etc), but then again I've not bought as many in the last ten years.

Every set I have bought for my kids comes with extra pieces. And we have bought enough over 100 sets over the past 5 or so years.

I've only had one missing piece and that was in a 3696 piece set. Luckily it was non-structural so we could finish building it. Then we went on the Lego website - you can report missing pieces and they will send you a new piece in the post - it took about a week to arrive. Which was fine... I guess if it had been a structural piece we may have been less impressed.

Yeah, but Lego inflates its part counts with lots of smaller pieces now.

The licensed sets are also a big hit. The best sets Lego makes are the creator ones, some of them I've bought multiple of so my kid could have the alt builds at the same time.

So it should be price per 100g or something unless you want these 5mm parts, or some blend of price per piece and price and weight.

It looks like the new D&D set is about $0.10 per piece, including licensing, but it's 3745 pieces so there is economy of scale.

The set you link is much smaller and has Disney licensing, which I suspect is of the "how much money do you have?" variety.

One thing that is not captured accurately in a simple price over parts count computation is the fact that parts complexity is wildly different between shapes. There's a huge difference between a 1x1 plate and a Technic baseplate with holes pointing in every direction, to pick extreme examples.

I believe that even factoring in the extra handling costs and margins, the prices on Pick a Brick give a decent approximation of the actual price span (<$0.10 to >$2.00 per piece).

Top tip. Buy used Lego cheap from ebay (or similar) and stick it in the dishwasher in a string bag. Try to avoid Lego from a smoker's house or that has been heavily gnawed. And keep the dishwasher heat low, unless you want Salvador Dali Lego.

Hotter tip - if you live near a Goodwill auction site, you can pickup "in store" and so you can bid for their bulk Lego without shipping.

In case you never read this at the time - he's talked about it on HN a few times:

Sorting 2 Metric Tons of Lego https://jacquesmattheij.com/sorting-two-metric-tons-of-lego/

The Persistence of Playtime

Another tip: the quality difference between a Lego brand piece and its doppleganger from an AliExpress shop exists, but is usually negligible.

I never saw a piece that doesn't fit, and the difference was mostly color and durability, where the no-brand technic bricks would fail earlier than the Lego ones when (ab)used for mechanically straining purposes, like a coat hangers, cup holder etc.

The more interesting part: this opens up access to more original and specialized parts that Lego doesn't want or cares about, like a go pro mount for instance.

How about regulations on plasticizers and chemicals that your kids will put in their mouth ?

Or the environmental impact, for which an EU company will care much more and be regulated for ?

Technic bricks (or really pins, axles, wheels) are a nightmare for any house with small kids either way, I think food grade plastic is irrelevant on that side.

On the environmental impact it's a good point, especially EU regulations. I'm not sure yet how much Lego's stance is marketing and how much it actually makes a difference, especially as they also have a factory in China and the bricks I'd get would come from there, but one can hope.

I'd love Salvador Dali Lego, as long as the pieces still clicked together.

I feel like low heat would be beneficial to bacteria, instead of killing them...?

Dishwashing and clothes washing are not designed to kill bacteria, even at high temperatures. They are designed to wash away bacteria. Detergent is a surfactant, it lifts bacteria/stains/dirt out of the material and then we wash them away. They are not usually anti-bacterial unless you buy a specific detergent that is

5 years ago I did a similar analysis of price per part because I remember there being a big controversy around the price of the new Star Destroyer set. I analyzed price per piece but also price per gram, estimated in a few different ways. I was surprised to see that price per gram was stable through the 2010s on an inflation-adjusted basis and that it went down fairly significantly over the 1990s.

I did this before I learned how to finish projects, so it's been sitting in a private repo the whole time :)

I just made the repo public. Perhaps the author or someone else can make use of it: https://github.com/iechevarria/lego-price-analysis/

The plots and code are in this file: https://github.com/iechevarria/lego-price-analysis/blob/mast...

> I did this before I learned how to finish projects

Very curious about this. As do many people I struggle to finish projects.

How does one learn this skill?

1. Pick something small that you know you can finish.

2. Finish it.

3. Feel the rush of actually finish something!

4. Repeat.

Ok, not that easy but that is how I got around to it eventually.

Another factor is that Lego is using more greebling than in the past. So you have more "parts", but they're all small pieces used for detailing rather than larger structural components of the build.

exactly, that's been my concern as well - more and more parts now are very specialized and hard to reuse in other projects.

Makes me sad for the kids - this limits creativity...

Well, yes and no. Look at the Ninjago City sets where the designers have used special parts in very creative ways!

Otherwise, I too prefer sets without special parts. The Minecraft and Creator series are excellent for that.

There’s actually less specialized parts these days, that’s what put Lego in trouble in the 90s, I think what GP commenter was referring to is a ton of the studs and cylinders and 1x1 diagonal parts that Lego includes, that are “fluff”. These parts are extremely cheap to produce, so you may have data that looks like price per part is flat, but in reality that’s because more of your sets are now from cheaper detailing parts.

having collected through the 90's, I can attest that there are a lot less specialty parts now, but in recent sets that number appears to be growing again. almost every fairly large set I've purchased in the last 2 years have had 10-12 new-to-me parts in it, and the other sets continue to include those same parts as well.

mostly, they've been pieces to make some change for SNOT, but there seem to be so many of them now that it feels like we're going back to that 90's mentality.

some of those sets:

    * batman shadow box (with my first ever missing piece!)
    * dune ornithopter (great build)
    * loop rollercoaster (not counting those loop tracks)
    * orient express (my least favorite build in the last few years)

It's quite dishonest to advertise "# of pieces". They should advertise "$ of studs".

I'd say yes and no. I find very few parts that are custom shapes for a single set these days. Most part shapes are very generic, but there is an absolutely wild variety of them now. There is an enormous number of SNOT, tile and slope pieces, for example. These can make slick looking builds, but getting a decent and useful collection of those for MOCs is hard.

Where Lego gets tricky is the combination of shape and color: the color palette has been growing over the years, too, but most of the weirder shapes are only available in specific colors and not always the colors you would intuitively expect them to have. I guess it happens because manufacturing/stockpiling the whole outer product of shape x color is just infeasible at this point. So the available colors are just whatever is used in the current sets, however weird it may seem.

So buy Lego Classic.

They're not like 80s-era simplicity, but they definitely reuse peices.

They're not rare; they're on every shelf. (But they're not Harry Potter, Star Wars, etc.)

But they're not Harry Potter, Star Wars, etc.

Isn't the point of Lego that every set can be Harry Potter, or Star Wars, or whatever you want?

/Haven't Legoed in 45 years, but have fond memories.

I guess if stormtroopers are some yellow-headed guy with a red hat...

Do you have some example? My kid uses "popcorn" parts to make chimney smoke, he uses "wolfverine claws" to make thatch roofs. Yes there are more parts created all the time, but you can still use them in very creative ways.

I didn't see any mention in the cost of licensing impacting the price of sets. That's a huge factor. Kits from Lego's own IP such as Ninjago, etc can offer a better PPP value because they aren't cutting in Disney or some other media brand.

This. We know for a fact that there's a huge gap in PPP between licensed and unlicensed sets. Unfortunately, without this distinction, the data is basically worthless.

> Observation 4: Licensed IP isn't always expensive...

> Piece count and part size have a much larger effect on PPP than licensing royalties. There isn't a huge difference between licensed themes and Lego's own internal themes. This makes a bit of sense- Lego is big enough that their own IP can command markups on a similar level as big-name entertainment franchises. Ninjago and minifigs are great examples of this.

> Observation 5: ...except for Star Wars

> Despite averaging over 1000 pieces, Star Wars sets rank near the bottom in PPP. Every theme below Star Wars features low piece counts and/or lots of electronics. Long-time Lego people already knew the Star Wars sets had a heavy markup, but it's interesting to see how Star Wars compares to another Lucasfilm franchise, Indiana Jones.

From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39760878

Is it just me or does the data aspect of the site feel horribly designed? E.g, the main graph is hard to read since most of the data points are in the $0.10/part range but the graph's y-axis is overwhelmed by the right side with it's $3.11/part train set. And if I click on that, https://brickinsights.com/sets/categories/26 shows 4 data points and it's overwhelmed by a single outlier from 1991. And the time-sequence chart near the bottom uses a line graph rather than a scatterplot which overwhelms the useful data.

A better graph would be a time-sequence scatterplot of price/part on a log scale like https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/5oanki/leg...

Of course very few people are experts in visual display of data, but this one is so horribly bad. Log scale please? The title of the post should be a simple chart, and there are charts on the page, but it's completely impossible to get the useful data out of the charts. Sheesh.

You can turn off some of the series to make it easier to read.

What happened with Legos? They used to be simple. Harry Potter Legos, Star Wars Legos, complicated kits, tiny little blocks. I’m not saying it's bad. I just wanna know what happened.

Extremely profitable licensing happened. They're much better these days at making everything reusable than they used to be, though, and it's rare for anything beyond prints/stickers to be set-specific. Even prop pieces like Harry Potter wands or Star Wars blasters regularly get reused in unrelated sets as part of the bric-a-brac.

Their patents have expired, so now anyone can make the simple kits and compete with LEGO. LEGO avoided this by building lots of exclusive IP partnerships: https://iposinternational.com/resources/articles/the-buildin...

I wonder how much the trend towards smaller pieces has affected this. There seem to be many more very small detail pieces in the kits now, which makes for lovely detailed models, but increases the part count without increasing the size noticably.

One of my frustrations with trying to get my kids into lego is the proliferation in these one and two stud pieces in relatively small kits that are otherwise perfect for kids. Those tiny pieces can be pretty hard for smaller children to put in place properly, and make the build instructions harder for them to follow on their own. They result in higher detailed models at the end of it, but both my kids found them very frustrating when they were smaller.

> One of my frustrations with trying to get my kids into lego is the proliferation in these one and two stud pieces in relatively small kits that are otherwise perfect for kids.

With my 5-year-old, we keep groups of sets in separate stackable plastic boxes. In one plastic box, we have only City vehicles (vans, tractors, cars, SUVs) which are mostly in an assembled state. He would play with them on the ground and would occasionally want to disassemble one. He then builds his own wacky wheeled creation, pridefully shows it to me and then asks "daddy, can you give me the instructions so we can build the original tractor again".

We also have another box with mostly gray rectangular bricks from 31120 "Medieval Castle". We would both stand on the ground for hours, doing stuff like small towers, houses, or just wacky things resembling real-world objects he has seen.

Regular LEGO sets are not intended for small kids, Duplo sets are. Every LEGO set comes with suggested age range or suggested minimum age on the box.

I'd love to see a chart of lego part prices over the years. Instead, what I saw was a couple charts showing only the outliers of the most-expensive parts over the years.

Data visualization fail.

Someone should figure out how to quantify how “creative potential” a piece has so you can measure how reusable pieces in a set will be for building unique things.

I suspect you could do something quick and dirty with "connectors" - a 1x1 brick would have two connectors, a 2x4 brick would have 16.

Apply some form of modulo by piece count (8 1x1 bricks are more "creative" than a single 2x4) and you'd be close.

I suspect you’re right, and would like to add that perhaps the physical weight of the piece may also provide some insight. Small light weight pieces with many connectors likely have large amounts of use cases. Big pieces with small amounts probably not as much.

The axis upon which connections attach to may be another important variable.

Lego is a plastics company; they're trying to become net-zero, but, unfortunately, being a plastics company, this is extremely hard:

https://www.ft.com/content/6cad1883-f87a-471d-9688-c1a3c5a0b...

Why? As long as people don't burn the bricks....

Plastic is made from upstream oil and gas companies. Kind of hard to be net-zero in that sector

Why? It's effectively a recycling progrsm for waste.

The creation of plastic products causes significant emissions, which is something that I don't think is widely understood.

ft link: https://archive.is/20230924232054/https://www.ft.com/content...

> The world’s largest toymaker announced two years ago that it had tested a prototype brick made of recycled plastic bottles rather than oil-based ABS, currently used in about 80 per cent of the billions of pieces it makes each year. However, Niels Christiansen, chief executive of the family-owned Danish group, told the Financial Times that using recycled polyethylene terephthalate (RPET) would have led to higher carbon emissions over the product’s lifetime as it would have required new equipment.

I just thought that particular issue around new equipment was interesting.

Lego may be the most "eco-friendly" plastics company in existence. Not because their factories and materials are special, but because they are among the most durable plastic items there are.

Lego last essentially forever. 50 year old bricks are still in use today, I don't think I have ever seen people trashing Lego. They are actually quite valuable and very easy to sell. I think the only significant losses beside a few accidents are sets that end up, unused, in attics. But they are not really lost and may get a second life as they get rediscovered.

This may be the ultimate sustainable toy. I mean, name another toy that is still usable and didn't get obsolete after nearly 100 years. The most surprising part to me is that they are still selling. Maybe that thanks to adults, I don't know how long it will last.

As for their packaging, it is mostly cardboard, they use less plastic than almost everyone else. In fact, they are going towards no plastic packaging at all.

> name another toy that is still usable and didn't get obsolete after nearly 100 years

Lincoln Logs are just over 100 years old. An original set, if any exists, should still be usable.

I also have a hard time imagining Lego didn't inspire Minecraft and similar games, at least a little. An even more sustainable resource.

I never understood Legos. For kids, they are quite expensive as a toy. For adults, why don't you build something actually useful. For example, learn to build electronics projects, or mechanically useful objects, or simple woodworking.

The higher PPP is well explained by the fact that the actual blocks are bigger. Plus, younger age targeted sets have more figurines and less small pieces. For example, the duplo train set I bought for my daughter has several very large train car bases.

As a kid I did the math on all the lego sets, and came to the conclusion that the 500 piece bucket was the best bargain, beating out the 1000 piece bucket by a decent amount. Most other sets were an awful value in comparison.

As an adult, I realized buying new was idiotic when I could just buy used. I ended up buying a former lego employee's collection for $60, selling the monorail it contained for $1000, and keeping the massive washing-machine sized rest for myself. Too bad deals like that come once in a lifetime!

The first data point in the time series seems to be from 1991, yet the x-Axis starts at 1949. Why? I'd have a better overview of the price changes if the actual data had more space.

Would also be interesting to see how zhe PPP changes with the amount of pieces in a set. i.e. if small sets with a tiny piece count have a higher PPP than larger sets with hundreds of pieces.

At a rough glance, that does appear to be the case.

Be interesting to see median or quartiles instead of just average; licensed sets probably skew the average up.

I'd like to see it per pound. I suspect (based on my feelings) that licensing is less per set than you might think, and that the price per pound has been trending up as piece size trends down.

I'd expect 2 small pieces to weigh more than 1 big one.

So I'd expect you to see the weight go up faster than the part count.

Not sure if that would confound or exagerate the trend.

They’re not replacing a 1x4 with 2 1x2s, they’re just designing sets with more pieces per pound (by having smaller pieces for decoration).

I love the idea, but the year axis starting so early makes the days more difficult to read, esp. on mobile.

You can buy bulk lego compatible parts from AliExpress that are basically identical to real lego pieces.

Reminds me how much I love the Power Miners sets -- hate to see the prices, though

I can’t read your chart labels. There’s not enough contrast.

What happened in 2010? Spike in both system and electronics.

Brand partnerships are a part price multiplier

Don't kids want 3d-printers these days?

Sure, but if they're anything like my friend's kid they're not really computer-savvy, just reasonably proficient at driving apps. Thus, when he plugged in his 3d printer and was confronted with some driver or configuration problems he threw his hands up, said it was junk, and went back to roblox.

Trying not to sound too much like a 'kids these days!' rant, but that is what happened (yes, in this one anecdotal case). I think we're doing everyone a disservice by abstracting away all the underlying layers to the point that people don't have to interact with the filesystem, but that's a whole different subject.

this is too complex , i just wanted the price per brick over the years

like year -> price

this is too enterprisy

That is one slow chart

This doesn’t take into account for the large amount of parts you can get from eBay .

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