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Comment by liendolucas | Hacker News Reader

When I was a kid I used to spend entire days building and creating new stuff once I built the designs from the booklets.

Today when I see a Lego kit is kind of another toy: is designed to build one and only one design, compared to the generic kits that were sold and also popular many years ago.

All these new kits pieces are just to accomplish one build. The Lego spirit of ever combining and creating with same pieces over and over again is gone.

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My kids have a ton of legos, it's their favorite thing. However, and this is the important part: you have to let go of the concept of a set.

Keep new assembled kits out, let them play with it as built from the instructions. But then as it falls apart with play, and the kids don't fix it the same way it was originally built, it eventually goes into a big box of former kits that are all jumbled together.

We did this, and without prompting to do so, the kids started building their own things out of the box, exactly as you did with your kits.

You just have to learn to let go of the set, and it becomes exactly what you want.

Edit: I'm not sure if a $800 set has that same property, but for the everyday $5-$40 sets, absolutely treat them as temporary collections, and life is great.

I have an anecdote about doing exactly that. Always was a LEGO kid (first set I got was bought 3 months before I was born) and slowly over time collected a giant bin of pieces from all the various sets. Now as a much older adult, I actually find myself going back to that bin on occasion to sort out the parts and try to rebuild the sets. Much like how that big bin of parts let me build stuff from my imagination when I was younger, as a form of therapy, now resorting those pieces and reorganizing them is a new form of therapy for myself, and it all comes from the same toy.

I find it particularly endearing how a single system of toys can provide decades of experiences to a single human. I don't think I've ever encountered another toy that is like that on such a massive scale. Yes there's other construction toys out there that strive to do the same, Knex was another one that I was into for a while, but there's nothing that quite scratches that same itch that Lego does.

This is exactly how it happens at my house. I purposely stick to to the $20-$40 boxes for this reason. Over $100, that's not a toy anymore for me. That price range becomes a collectors figurine.

Yes. I got somewhat stuck on the idea of the sets being kept together, partly because I thought it would be good to pass on used ones with the manuals.

But I found that if the builds are out they will be played with and fall apart and eventually become loose legos and that’s all fine and good.

Loose Legos on the floor making random things is fun. But building with sets and instructions is a different skill set and is entertaining in its own right.

The newer Friends series has a short reward video at the end of some builds which sort of puts the cherry on top of the set builds.

Yes this, I bought sets like the Arctic Ship and police bases thinking they'd be like dioramas. They quickly became components that they build other things on top of. It took some time to mentally un-anchor from the $500 spent on the sets lol.

I have almost all of the $400+ star wars sets (and lotr, and star trek, ...), but relatively limited shelf space.

They only stay on the shelf for a couple years before I take it apart, rinse the dust off, sort it into ziplock bags, and add it to a box in the closet. Then I pick an old one I disassembled before, but hasn't been seen in awhile, or remember having fun building it, and spend a weekend or week building it again.

My favorite part is building them, so I get to enjoy doing that several times per set, often while having the corresponding movie on in the background.

> When I was a kid I used to spend entire days building and creating new stuff once I built the designs from the booklets.

Kids still do this.

I don't know why this idea persists. There have always been sets with custom pieces. My kids go crazy over the custom pieces because it sparks new ideas for their other builds. My kids know every custom piece from every set they've ever built and will describe them in great detail so we can search through the bin until we find it.

> The Lego spirit of ever combining and creating with same pieces over and over again is gone

For you, maybe. The kids are still doing this and having a great time.

A lot of the Lego builds we did when my son was little was exactly this: A set would spark an idea and there'd be endless castles that started with piece of a castle set but went in totally different directions and incorporated all kinds of other stuff, for example.

I can't but help think that people who assume that the big sets take away that haven't touched Lego in decades.

My sons sets got built "to spec" once, got played with like that for a few hours, and then never looked the same again ever, even though we still have the manuals in a box somewhere.

I find most of my kids friends don't mix sets, each set stays in its own box/bag

That's borderline crazy, lego is meant to go into a big box/bag/container and be mixed so you use your own imagination to create your own stuff, like the lego gods intended. Ideally also passed down generations/between relatives, so you can visit your nieces and nephews in the future and recognize pieces you once received from some cousin or something.

Did the parents grow up with Lego? The "each set stays in its own bag" thing was what my wife wanted to do for the longest time, not having grown up with the beautiful chaos of a giant tub of pieces, and the oddly reassuring sound of swishing your hand through all of it.

That sounds really sad, and not Lego's fault...

You can still buy bulk Legos to mix and match from Lego. And similarly pricey and collector oriented Lego sets existed 20 and 30 years ago as well.

Legos releasing single build sets that are clearly targeted for adults (look at the 18+ age statement) does nothing to harm you - it's targeted a different consumer demographic.

It's like Taco Bells now serving alcohol or Costcos now selling Asian groceries. Companies will not stay stagnant and will look at additional opportunities to expand to new buyer demographics.

Exactly, and like, if one literally looks up "Lego catalogue" and actually read it you'll get a bunch of sets - even the brand tie-ins, which aren't new at all - and these are basically the same types of sets I grew up with and would happily build and then take apart as a kid to do other stuff with...

Lego also has "3-in-1" sets that come with dedicated instructions to build different possible configurations out of the exact same pieces, which seem like a cool way to encourage kids (or anyone :P) to then veer off into their own building experiments.

There were also two 20-in-1 sets recently, both very reasonably priced. Those were huge hits in my house.

Same here much to my parents chagrin - they thought buying me Lego sets would teach me to follow written instructions but joke's on them.

That seems to be somewhat of an exaggeration. These $800 models are obviously not for kids. The creativity is still alive in the price brackets that aren't targeting collectors. Custom builds that involve scavenging other kits for pieces still go viral pretty often.

I'm not very tapped into it, but last month I saw a DIY Lego Rocky from Project Hail Mary going viral. I think this week I saw a very detailed jellyfish model doing the rounds.

There's a recurring theme on the Lego subreddit where people build the millennium falcon out of any arbitrary lego set, so the spirit is not COMPLETELY dead, fwiw

All new kits? Gone? I'm not so sure about that. I don't think the target audience of an $800 kit is a 10 year old, sure. There are still plenty of kits at the $100ish and below price range that are targeted for that sort of play.

Weird perspective. When I was a kid (I'm 41) we were given sets - pirate ship, submarine, police sets. They were designed as a kit... and once we built the kid we'd pull it apart and use the parts for all sorts of things. Now my kids do they very same thing with modern kits. I'm not sure why you think today's lego is different?

Yes and no.

There's a lot of re-usable parts even in new LEGO sets along with the custom pieces designed for the model. I just built the new LEGO Road Bike (https://www.lego.com/en-gb/product/road-bike-11380) and obviously it has a bunch of new part numbers for the wheels (it's the biggest tyre they've produced and they are the biggest tyre manufacturer in the world). Other than the wheels, there's some clever re-use of custom parts from other sets such as in the handlebar or brake calipers. I was impressed by how they've put together a build with things at strange angles and hardly any exposed studs.

you could not be more wrong

https://rebrickable.com/sets/alternates/

you just enter the number to find alternate builds, some sets can be built into dozens various creations

These are toys for adults, to be put on the bookshelf once complete.

There was a period that was very true when Ninjago were a thing. But in the last decade while they sometimes still come out with new pieces there is still a tonne of reusability and creativity in Lego pieces.

I mean yes, there are kits like this that are clearly meant for one kind of build, but nothing stops someone from just getting bulk kits or taking apart other sets? There's lots of other stuff on their catalogue which look just like the stuff I grew up with.

I swear every lego-related post you see people dooming about this when all they look at are the giant sets clearly targeted towards adults that _want_ this sort of thing and not the plethora of other stuff.

yes, this, thank you. just wrote a comment lamenting about this specifically.

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