The reason they sell sets is because the people who buy these are parents, uncles, grandmas, and other people. The sets make it easy for them to identify something that seems like kids would love it and possibly intersects with some brand the kids like, such as the Marvel crossover sets.
Once the bricks get in the kids' hands, they can do whatever they want with them.
Unless they’ve changed drastically, the sets are always just the beginning of what you want to do. If it’s an object you build the object and add it to another landscape that you may have built.
If it’s a castle you build the castle and then add a whole bunch of custom features to it.
You could build the ALIENS PNEUMATIC LOADER in Lego Technic. Coolest thing ever.
Anyway yes creativity is great but also official instructions are great too.
Edit: https://oldinstructions.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/1991-... page 59 thanks Grok.
I understand the complain, but from observing my kids play with LEGO I don't agree with it at all.
The specialty parts from every kit inspire a lot of new builds with their growing part collection.
> The sets my kids are playing with look much more "realistic" to what the set is trying to model, but very difficult to build something entirely different, such as building a house from a car kit.
I guess I just don't see this with my kids at all. Every small set we buy or that someone gifts them grows the range of things they can build. They remember every single different part and will go searching for it in the bins because they want to put it to use.
As a family, we have a couple of the ninjago city sets, those are largely intact, but the kids play with them.
The minifigures can be a little bit of a problem, they seem to trigger an instinct to collect unique items. My kid will ask for a set so they can get one (or more) of the minifigures in it.
In those bulk sets, there are now way more colors than just the primary and secondary colors that original sets came in, way more flat tiles and wedges with stickers or screen-printed imagery from the branded product lines, but kids don't seem to mind.
My 9yo has a bunch of bulk bricks as well as planned sets - Minecraft in particular - and when he gets a new set, he builds it to the instructions, brings it out to the living room to show off his creation, and then before he's walked back to his room he's in the process of adding new stuff or taking it apart to integrate into the rest of the jumble of bricks. I think there are only two builds (both from this Christmas) that are currently intact, and they probably won't last long...
LEGO has over 500 sets available every year. It's a crazy number, coming from someone who grew up reading every LEGO catalog I could find.
You're probably only seeing those few flagship sets because they get advertised and shared on social media. There are literally hundreds of small sets out there now.
For the adults here, the number of LEGO sets available to us as kids was a fraction of what's available today. The number of sets out there is staggering.
On the plus side, there are so many sets that it's now easier to find sales. As a kid saving up money it felt like sales never happened. Now I grab small sets on sale for 30-40% off all the time to keep as easy gifts or for my own kids.
fx with a box of 1000 bricks, instructions for 2 or 3 things that can all be made from the bricks in the box (maybe not all at once)
edit nevermind I can't find anything on the second one, maybe my cousin combined two or more sets to build something custom but it speaks to other points about parts being more universal in the past.
Unfortunately ended this somewhere around 2014 it looks like.
https://www.lego.com/en-us/service/building-instructions/110...
While it might look marginally better, everything is 3x the parts and the building time, and you can just sit down and slap stuff together any more, in fact with the rise of things like Arduino, and 3D printing, I think it's easier to just do electronics + CAD (even with kids) than to work with this stuff.
Which is a shame, because older sets used to be cheaper and contain much less parts for the same amount of functionality, and something like a crane truck set that could do all the tilting and motor stuff was categorized as suitable for kids 2-3 years younger.
A prime example of this are the flower sets they sell. You'll get, like, 90 purple flippers. What are you supposed to do with that besides make flowers? It's an excessively overengineered and wasteful jigsaw puzzle.
Even their line of Technic stuff is super watered-down. It's really hard to get useful components, and they have changed the design of their motors and controllers several times (no cross compatibility, obviously). People are moving to buying bootleg components.
Ngl, I enjoy my fair share of Lego sets from my favorite fandoms.
Every time we go by Lego Land when we're on a road trip we make a stop and gets to pick out a bunch of stuff from the "random brick wall" and he just adds a bunch of stuff to his pile.
He got a Minecraft set for christmas a couple years ago. I was the one that built it but he just uses the blocks and minifigs for whatever he wants now.
There’s no creativity in it.
To wit, I’ve bought some kits for my nephew cause his mom asked for them for Christmas, he assembles them while we are still unwrapping gifts, then never or hardly ever goes back and touches them again. They just stay built and untouched on a shelf. Like a model kit.
I remember 20-30 years ago when you’d just get a bucket containing an assortment of pieces and if you were inclined to build a house then you’d have to get creative with the pieces that you had.
The fun part was playing with a friend, agreeing to build a house but having too wildly different designs. Then learning from the experience and tearing it down and building it again but bigger and better.
With that said, one thing I remember seeing in older kits is instructions for more than one build, which could serve as a kicking off point for someone to reapproach a bundle of bricks in multiple ways.
My own guideline is that once something is built, after a little while it has to be either modified/evolved, or disassembled and put into the bucket-o-bricks for reuse (well if I'm honest, it's several very well sorted craft/hardware bins)
You are remembering wrong. The kits about building specific models existed back then, and the kits that are just a bucket of blocks are still sold today.
Lego has been selling specific "build a house" sets for like 50 years.
Whether you only build models and display them or tear everything down and make what you want has always been a choice, and most people do both some amount.
There's even the entire world of designing your own "Models". When I was a kid I would build models that represented real things like planes even though I didn't always have the right parts, but nowadays you can digitally design such a model and bulk order the pieces and instructions yourself!
I also had tons of extra bricks that I'd use for free-form play. I loved both aspects.
As an adult, I don't really have the time or interest in "playing space explorers" or "driving" little cars and trains through lego "city" towns. But I still love building the prettier models and having them on a shelf.
Lego still sells buckets in various sizes (10696, 10698, etc). If you want to encourage that kind of play, perhaps these would make a better gift.
The huge amount of specialized parts that are pretty useless for basic building. They're basically adornments.
Prices are insane. I.e. quantity and often quality (as in: how good is the set play-/ construction time wise) is just shite.
I usually buy competitors. Here in Germany Blue e.g. bricks have opened some stores so that's where I take my nephew.
Their sets are much more like the Lego I grew up with. Using more basic parts that exist in creative ways so the specialized/adornment meaning is derived from context, not the part itself/its shape.
Which also requires more imagination from the kids playing with this.