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Comment by brazzy | Hacker News Reader

It has almost 4 times the number of pieces, but is only about 50% longer and wider - there's just way more smaller pieces. Price per piece is very misleading when comparing older and newer sets. The newer ones have more details, look slicker, but have a lot less "meat". Which is not that great for creative play.

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I bought a set recently which was definitely padding its piece counts. The interior structure of a solid shape was constructed out of dozens of small 1x2s and could easily have been a handful of much larger pieces with no downside. I didn't consider the "more pieces = more perceived value" logic until this comment.

I always charitably assumed that they designed models to utilize surplus pieces for the internal structures, pieces that might be hard to use elsewhere.

They may do that (designers have a "part budget" they can spend in various ways) but the real reason for weird colors inside models is to make it easier to build; especially since many of the models consist entirely of various shades of grey and black.

Various piece size also makes it easier to see if you got the wrong piece.

For a while the complaint was that Lego was making too many big, specialized pieces, so I'm amused that the current complaint seems to be that they're using too many small generic ones.

They're not saying that they should be using big specialized pieces, they're saying that they should be using bigger boring standard pieces.

I had a weird build recently with the Luxo Jr model. There are a couple of cavities in the model that are partially filled in with very small parts. These parts don't connect in a way that makes then structural. I'm still puzzled why these parts are there.

That's the one I was building too!

Are they the pieces that are colored like Pixar characters? https://jaysbrickblog.com/reviews/review-lego-21357-disney-p...

It was this: https://jaysbrickblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/21357-D...

The symbolism was entirely lost on me. It's too subtle as a reference, and annoying to build when you can obviously see it's just a big square.

Alright. Now I feel extremely dumb amd embarrassed for not picking up on ANY of this!

Definitely agree on the reduced usefulness for creative play. My kids got a lot of Lego sets as gifts when they were younger. Which is great, I love them playing with Legos. But once they're done with the instructions that's just kinda it. A Star Wars or Frozen or Minecraft themed kit ends up being all weird one-off specialty pieces. They are necessary to make an extremely detailed replica of the Millenium Falcon. But they have no place if you just want to grab a handful of bricks and start building whatever your imagination comes up with. We have a tub full of thousands of pieces and it never gets used. I think it's a bummer that they've pivoted to pushing these intricate $120 kits to adults rather than designs featuring more reusable components. You need to go out of your way to buy tranches of generic bricks if you want to have free play.

The Creator 3-in-1 sets are basically what you're looking for, they just don't get advertised much. A lot of them are more generified and rebuildable, sometimes even more refined versions of more expensive sets or parts of more expensive sets. Maybe the most obvious are the 3-in-1 dragon and dinosaur sets, which to me feel obviously like more generic reworks of D&D and Jurassic Park builds respectively, and have a lot more in the way of generic tiles and bricks than the licensed sets they're derived from.

A 50% increase in dimensions doesn't directly transform in a 50% increase in volume.

>The newer ones have more details, look slicker, but have a lot less "meat"

I presume that the 2022 model has as target audience nostalgic adults, but otherwise I agree, the new sets seem far more fragile then the ones released a decade ago. I think this is due to a recent focus towards adults from LEGO.

It's the other way around - because pieces cost roughly based on their size (amount of material) modern Lego sets are "denser" and heavier on average than similar sized sets of the past, because as piece count (and detail) goes up, piece size has been going down.

The discussion is about price, not cost. Lego is keeping the price per piece somewhat stable because they know people look at that, but as pieces get smaller (and thus cost less to make), their margins go up, and sets get smaller for the same price.

The set that started this subthread is very much an outlier in that regard. Usually it looks like this: https://www.reddit.com/r/legostarwars/comments/1lpuz4d/lego_...

It is a set for nostalgic adults. In fact, it is 50% larger so a grown up can hold it in their hands and feel it massive, like kids did in the 80s.

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