title correction: 9 ways lego has researched and expanded it's product line to increase profits while continuing to sell less popular traditional products
Largest toy manufacturer in the world. Can't really argue with that.
I do miss the old, simpler lego from the early 1980s, but those things still exist in the Classic and Creator lines. Buy them. I love Lego Star Wars, but Classic and Creator are the soul of Lego.
That dark pattern where a website gives you the next article it thinks you should read does not work well here on this older article. Below the Lego article I get “Hate math? Then don't help your kid with their homework” — which it proceeds to load hundreds of times (a search for the word 'homework' yields over 1000 hits now) below each iteration just because I tried to scroll to the bottom. Somehow its recommendation engine ended up recommending the same article, recursing endlessly.
Stupid me, why would I expect to be able to just scroll to the bottom of the article for the website's footer?
Are your surfing without protection? Scrolling to the bottom for me works perfectly. I tried disabling uBlock, then I got the behaviour you mentioned.
I always have uBlock on to disable scripts and fonts. Quite a lot of sites work perfectly well that way and I enable the minimum scripts and fonts for those that don't.
Almost every single website, especially anything involving articles, is completely unusable without an adblocker. I don't know how those who don't use adblockers do it...
A more interesting comparison would be to put the core themes of the 1990s (Castle, Pirates, Space, Town) against the modern popular themes (Ninjago, Creator, Star Wars, City). The old sets had less specialised parts and less colour variety, which allowed kids to combine sets from the same theme easily. The buildings (castles, fortresses, harbours) almost always had a big baseplate (flat or 3D). Minifigs were themed and textured, but weren't cartoonish with facial expressions.
Nowadays, most of the sets are some imaginary vehicles with Creator-style builds. You can probably build a new vehicle out of the same set, but combining different sets from the same theme is much less enjoyable. The few sets with buildings rarely have baseplates and feel very airy and unharmonic.
The number of specialised parts is one thing I dislike about modern Lego sets. They do look great and have really smart building techniques, but I just want to build a brick house with my kids.
There is always Lego classic sets, and smaller creator houses do have a lot of regular bricks too. But it is a bit annoying once you amass a few sets from other lines.
Still, I'm glad they are in business. I will take whatever they do now Vs them going bust, which was a risk a decade or so ago (or maybe longer, I can't remember the details).
My brother and I got the first two grey castles in the 1980s (the first castle yellow; grey was a fairly new colour back then). Those castles mainly relied on fairly large castle wall pieces. At first, even as a kid, I felt that was cheating; we should have gotten bricks to assemble all those walls. Later I discovered what a boon they were, because they allowed me to rapidly design new and different castles. Sure, I couldn't build a spaceship out of them, but just exploring the space of all the possible castles you could build was amazing.
Some of these specialised pieces inspire creativity. Especially with spaceships.
But I do agree that many modern sets just invite you to build this one thing out of them. We did actually turn out Millennium Falcon into an X-Wing and a TIE-fighter once, but we did eventually turn them back into the Falcon. It feels more wrong than it used to to build something else.
I don't think we ever had the yellow castle, although I do remember that flag. And we definitely had a set with a horse in the style of the yellow castle. So either we did have the yellow castle but lost the instructions, or I knew someone who had it, or that flag also appears in another set.
But I really have no idea. It was a long time ago.
The reason those flags are so rare is because the grip of the 1x1 round brick at the bottom is much stronger than the strength of the flagpole so if you would remove it by pulling on the flag you'd break it.
So these commend ridiculous prices for small pieces of plastic (about 8 euros or so last I checked).
If you look at Lego Space during the 90s it is a long list of new versions (almost yearly) each with their own specialized parts.
Personally I don't feel like this narrative about a substantial shift in Lego sets fits with reality. To me it feel like people conflates it with the rise of licensed sets.
For what was a very small and cheap set at the time, you are getting 3 minifigs and a small building on a baseplate. The bulk of the parts are yellow- and white-coloured bricks for walls and architectural elements. There is a specialised yellow-coloured edge panel with a red brick texture, but it plays very nicely with the rest of the parts architecturally. You can easily combine this set with the bigger forts and harbours. The colours are compatible, the parts are compatible.
This is not certainly the case with modern Lego sets.
Weird ski bricks, seethrou chain saw, antenna, big arrowshaped structural piece, etc.
I'm not surprised the one you linked is from 91. Noone is disputing that the complexity rose from the 80s. But the complexity we are seeing now is not a new thing. It started in the 90s.
The ski bricks are standard technic skis. The chain saw and is found in the entire series of kits. The arrow shape plate is a very common piece in all space kits back to the 1980, though the usually were grey or black. Often used for wings with hinged plates. I have literally dozens of those in my childhood lego collection. Antennas were on each an every space piece, though the thin and slender ones only started showing in the early 90ies. They’re still around.
Some of the late Ice Planet (dunno the real name) space stuff from that same series, and some of the underwater exploration sets from IIRC about then or a year or two later, are specifically what I think of when I think "where did lego start to go wrong?" I kept getting them for Christmas and kept building and playing with them but the 80s (through very early 90s) themed sets were peak for those, IMO. I never did as much combining and modifying/expanding with those later sets as I did with earlier ones. I was still playing with the earlier ones and changing them to other things and combining them when I had those later sets, but the later ones could only really fit in if they could do it whole and as-is, that is, the earlier sets had to change to fit them, they couldn't really do the reverse.
... I don't think that era was especially complex, though, and in fact when I think about the worst sets from that era they were ones that were built with like half a dozen huge pieces for the bulk of the structure (there was some kind of Ice Base from that same series you linked that stands out, in particular).
Complex is the modern sets. Fiddly, even. Look at the size of a finished largish modern set (for kids, not one of the adult stick-it-on-a-shelf models), and its part count, and look at similar-sized sets from the 80s through, I dunno, maybe '95, and see what their part count was. The modern sets have so many itty bitty pieces. 500-something piece sets used to be really big when assembled.
Afaik, lego went through changes. They had period when then introduced a lot of special parts (I think nineties or so) and then period when they simplified again.
They introduced special parts at the height of popularity and money success. Simplified when they had money issues - simple parts are cheaper to manufacture. Now that they are popular again, they are having more special parts again, but still less then used to be.
> Nowadays, most of the sets are some imaginary vehicles with Creator-style builds. You can probably build a new vehicle out of the same set, but combining different sets from the same theme is much less enjoyable. The few sets with buildings rarely have baseplates and feel very airy and unharmonic.
“Most” doesn’t feel right to me - my son’s mostly had City sets and they’re all repurposable, buildings use large flat pieces with configurable roads so it’s not quite as big but also allows more combinations than “large square”, etc. There are definitely specialty pieces but I’m skeptical that they’re that much more common given all of the pieces I had as a kid which were pretty specialized, too.
> I still broke down all the elaborate sets, put them all together in a big box [..]
In a box?!!
Our kids store piles of bricks on more or less every horizontal surface in their rooms.
> the elaborate sets
Our kids will always build each elaborate set once, according to the instructions, wait a day or three, then it's fair game to be cannibalized for their latest homespun supermegagiga-jet, -spaceship, -car or -house.
Honestly I think people also underrate how fun it is to add on to existing sets. This is harder to do with technic sets, but for the traditional block stuff it was easy enough to build the set to instructions and just keep building.
I've been doing more of this recently as I picked up some knock off mech based lego sets and adding more arms/building them more weapons/other things is fun way to make them look better.
I would love to know what percentage of Legos revenue is now from adults buying the incredible large, complex and expensive sets to build themselves. Lego is so associated as a toy for children just as computer games are, but gaming is a larger industry for adults than children.
My wife and I now regularly buy these large lego sets for each other (birthdays, Christmas and anniversaries) and do them together in the evenings after the kids are in bed. Its such a lovely way to relax.
I think 1980s kids who grew up and got well-paying tech jobs are their largest customer demographic now. Kids play Minecraft instead.
That's what my oldest son said, at least; he doesn't see the point in Lego now that Minecraft exists. Breaks my heart. I mean, Minecraft is fantastic, but it's not Lego.
Overwhelming majority (but not all) of kids I know have parents that limit how much they can play on computer or tablet. They play with legos regularly (among other things).
An alternative viewpoint: Minecraft is Lego, and Lego isn't.
When there were fewer themed Lego sets, Lego was a sandbox. You had a mish-mash of generic pieces and your creativity. Modern Lego sets are extremely tailored, both in theme and with sets having bespoke pieces - even if you throw all of your newer sets together in a pile (which people tend not to because each is supposed to be a thing), the pieces aren't as modular, allow for less extension of your imagination.
Minecraft is blocks and what you do with them. Minecraft isn't a digital extension of Lego, it's serving the experience Lego did a few decades ago but no longer does.
There are a lot fewer bespoke parts than you might think. Creating new molds is expensive and if you look closer you'll see that odd shapes are reused for different purposes in different sets.
For some firsthand examples, I have a few of the "botanical" sets, and they have things like Technic wing/fin pieces for leaves, flowers made out of car hoods and trunks, and pink frogs used en masse for cherry blossoms.
They're very creative at reusing pieces. One of the Lego Mario sets has a bomb on a parachute, but the parachute is made out of a white version of the old 3-flower-stem piece.
> I would love to know what percentage of Legos revenue is now from adults buying the incredible large, complex and expensive sets to build themselves.
If you have a Lego store nearby, stop in, and it's mindboggling how many $100+ sets they carry. Not great for shopping for a Lego Friends set for my daughter, but if I wanted to drop $300 on a Ninjago set they'd be able to help.
Exactly, thinking though what lego we have brought each other and the kids (3 and 7) in the last year we could easily be spending twice as much on "adult" lego than on the kids, and we get it for them even more regularly.
Lego is working hard to make it an adult thing too. See the many Lego Masters tv programs in many countries, were it is mostly adults competing. I would say the have unlocked the adult market, and this is why the had such good results lately.
I'd also wonder if their cost per part on the bigger sets is higher or lower.
I've been building the adult sets over the last few years and you're right it's a nice nondigital way to unwind. Unlike my job everything works, has a place, and is all neat and organizable.
Interestingly my mother who is retired has gotten into lego. Initially she got into it because she decided to resell all my childhood sets which were stored in a large bins. I had kept all the instructions so she just build lego sets one at a time and sold them off. It got her hooked, and now she regularly buys used or new sets, assembles, and then resells them. It's interesting to see someone get into lego rather late in life with no childhood nostalgia of them what so ever.
There was an average price by piece comparison a few years ago but I can't find it back.
The gist of it was that price by piece didn't change that much, while sets are getting bigger and more complex. I'd also wagger that we now have a lot more smaller pieces that make these kind of calculations more flawed.
It is not even that sets would be universally bigger. You can buy middle sized, small and super small sets still. Lego sets literally start from small bag for 5e that builds something super small.
> I would love to know what percentage of Legos revenue is now from adults buying the incredible large, complex and expensive sets to build themselves.
I don't have a number for you, but I recently read an interview of their head of the "adult division". He basically said that it was their fastest growing segment. All the IDEAS sets are targeted at adults and they seem to be doing very well.
In this day and age, I would be surprised if the Lego Friends line, which was created with girls in mind, were marketed explicitly to girls. My guess is that the girls stratify themselves by what type of toys they are attracted to. There's evidence that the preference is biological:
I think the point is capitalism gives people what they crave. Not necessarily what they need. But any alternative is unimaginable in individualized minds of modern people.
Oh, it does give them what they need, plus loads of other needs they didn't even know they had - and sometimes these other needs take priority regardless of whether that should be the case. I.e. they will sell you milk, which you likely need, but also all possible types of cheese and yogurt and cream, which you really don't but might actually end up consuming more than milk.
Perhaps the reinforcement of arbitrary culture-specific gender stereotypes is not the point of all toys? There are plenty of other ways parents impose programming.
I liked Deborah Tannen's remarks in the afterword of a reprint of "You Just Don't Understand".
The book is about her observations that some conflict between men & women resembles inter-cultural conflict; i.e. men would talk with a different set of cultural attitudes than women.
She said that people asked her how much that came down to nature vs culture. If nature, then the differences are what they are, and culture doesn't need to (and cannot fundamentally) change. If cultural, then inequality would reduce by ironing out the differences.
As I understand it, worry about gendered-for-girls toys comes from the latter view. (Differences lead to inequality).
(FWIW, Tannen's suggested solution is that differences as they are now should be recognised and worked-with).
I for one am glad that LEGO provides the girls series to get my daughter interested in building things with it.
The photograph of the girl building things with the universal bricks is just marketing, not a report from the 60ies. It does not imply that girls actually did that en masse.
Personally I remember building houses with Lego (so walls and a roof), but not much more. These days the Lego toys may actually be more fun.
That study doesn't show what most people think it does. Monkeys have no idea what a firetruck is, so how could a monkey have any preference towards it? The only thing they managed to show is that there is a flaw in the experiment. In a sense it is the ideal control question: do the monkeys distinguish based on something they cannot know? A more charitable reading which is mentioned is that male monkeys prefer hard shapes with wheels, but I doubt that is very relevant.
And yes, companies absolutely do market towards boys and girls. They don't write "for girls" on the box, but they consciously produce two product lines. Often it is one unisex line and one that is "forbidden for boys", i.e. it has pink and glitter and you would be teased as a boy of you bought it. This way, they can create artificial market separation and increase sales.
A monkey doesn't know what a firetruck is, nor is it influenced by cultural pressures, such as glitter and pink are for girls. The difference in gender preference is that the females prefer people, such as faces and social interaction and boys prefer objects such as trucks.
This preference was also shown in studies where female new born babies tend to look at faces more than male babies.
> I would be surprised if the Lego Friends line, which was created with girls in mind, were marketed explicitly to girls. My guess is that the girls stratify themselves by what type of toys they are attracted to.
Lego themselves talked about lego friends being meant for girls, publicly and loudly. Also, all characters are girls. The kids in ads for lego friends are all girls too. It could not have been more clear that it is for girls.
The other legos at that time and few years before were very very clearly for boys. They used colors used for boy toys. Toy stores are clearly separated to boy and girl section by color. They also used themes that literally any kid over 2 identify as boys.
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As side note, claim that they are less about building then other lego sets for same age brackets is untrue. I dont know why the article felt the need to claim the difference is character vs building.
Actual differences against other themes are colors, fight vs life, indoor vs outdoor, gender of characters.
I have a boy and girl, I purposefully made the effort not to push them into gender specific things, but hell they still ended up pretty stratified.
They even play minecraft differently!
I'm convinced there is a major biological underpining after watching these two grow up.
Really weird you just jump to "biology," as I assume your kids have access to media and at some point interacted with someone else other than you (children and adults).
I didn't learn gendered behavior or thoughts from my parents but I learned them from everyone else and society as a whole. I learned from a very, very young age that some of my interests were very much not acceptable for girls and I internalized a lot of it.
There is no problem buying the parts separately needed to build such model. Of course, some exotic parts were discontinued. Lego provides instruction as pdf on their website.
Edit: the other brick manufacturers have problems replicating brick quality with injection molding machines. I assembled thousands Lego parts with my son and their fit was exactly the same - perfect. The Chinese kits have one in hundred parts that doesn’t fit well. However it was one in ten some years ago, Chinese learn fast.
I doubt one can 3D print anything as Lego replacement.
Competitor brick quality is on par or better than Lego at least for some. You need to do a little research on which competitors use which brick producer, but for example the bricks I’ve had in the Mould King sets were absolutely indistinguishable from Lego bricks in quality.
Building Mould King right now. The difference is almost gone. Cada is worse than Mould King. Anyway with 5x price difference I can live with a bit lower quality. Lego pricing is just sick. Even used sets from not that distant past.
You can make Duplo blocks. I printed some nice adapters that let you build a bridge for wooden Brio railroad tracks, with Duplo stands. And it think you could make specialty parts, like it excavator arms. But for regular Lego pieces, printing is too expensive and not accurate enough (don't know about resin, but I can imagine it is not flexible enough or too toxic?).
What's really holding us back is copyright. I wish there were high quality Ninjago or especially Star Wars clones.
There are two counterpoints that mean that this is unlikely to be what happens:
Lego bricks are made to micron tolerances. When you add up tolerancing errors over 10 or 50 bricks in a row the differences can add up and things don't fit. This is a big part of how Lego saw off the cheap competition - they were generally not satisfying to build. This is achieved with very careful injection moulding, and the only rapid prototyping tool at that level of precision is 3D CNC.
There is more to the sets that pieces of plastic. Look at Warhammer - the figures are all plastic, they could easily be 3D printer, they might not look quite as good but they'd work just fine. Yet, Games Workshop sells set after set. Lego sets are also designed, come with instructions etc. There's more than just the components.
This should probably read "competition". Some of the stuff secondary brands offer puts shame to Lego, both in creativity as well as in pricing. Bluebrix and Xingbao both have models that are a lot more playable than anything Lego has ever offered.
> Now you don’t have regular Lego cops and robbers—you have Batman and the Gotham criminals.
You also still have regular Lego cops and robbers. Cops and robbers is still by far the largest sub-theme of the City theme. Almost every set, even some sets that aren't about cops and robbers at all, will have a cop and a robber in there.
That was a particularly weird gripe, considering some of the themes that have in fact been replaced by licensed stuff (looking at you LEGO Space/Star Wars) but the cops and robbers is definitely not one of them. The LEGO City theme has always been packed with cops and robbers and still is to this day.
While Lego Space may have been replaced by Lego Star Wars, Space has also come back as a sub-theme of City, but now much more realistic, with bulky space suits and realistic space shuttles. I love it.
I think traditional Lego died when they introduced the parts separator tool - back in my day, you destroyed your fingernails (and sometimes even used your teeth) separating parts. Attaching two 2x1 thin bricks was considered horrific, because you knew you'd never be able to separate them anymore.
Most of the now & then examples are both true now. The classic sets still exist and how children play with Lego depends on their personality and what they have available (and how it is stored). Children are individuals and Lego allows a larger variety of play than most other toys on the market.
My kids have a mix of classic & branded sets and the play area is a mix of designed builds and improvised creations. The favourite and larger sets stay in their own bags when deconstructed but most others are added to the common boxes, which are sorted by rough shape based on what we’ve seen stimulates free building. There are a lot of complex shapes but many of those are useful in free building. I’ve purposely bought some sets with multiple complex flats & bricks as they allow more creativity than just the basic bricks.
But I know other children who just like to follow build instructions or just like to play with the characters and that’s OK. That’s the flexibility of modern Lego.
> The classic sets still exist and how children play with Lego depends on their personality and what they have available (and how it is stored). Children are individuals and Lego allows a larger variety of play than most other toys on the market.
Yes. And also, many if not most kids combine approaches. Start by building based on manual, then they play with it and it gets gradually destroyed, then just use it is as material.
Have few favorite sets they keep, the rest gets destroyed and used as bricks when in mood.
I'm pleased you said that, because we also have a mixture, but most of the sets that were built were broken up and are now in communal boxes. This seems pretty unusual compared to most parents, I guess it's mostly because the parents don't want things to get mixed up. In theory we could rebuild according to the instructions, but in reality it's never going to happen as it would take so long to find all the pieces. Almost every day my kids (Boy 6, Girl, 8) do free play with the mixed lego, sometimes for hours. I'm really pleased with it, as it makes a good break from Youtube etc.
I wish my kids were more into free play. When their sets inevitably get broken and end up in the communal box, that's usually the last time they play with it. I should stop buying them more sets, but as an avid collector myself I enjoy getting sets as much for my own enjoyment.
For them I think Minecraft scratches much that creative itch that Lego used to bring me.
Necessity is the mother of invention. I played with legos a lot to try and build a toy I didn't get. When I didn't get a Megazord action figure one year for Christmas, I tried the best I could to build something like it out of legos.
Bingo. I think this comment nails it.
Minecraft is the digital lego for alot of kids these days.
My youngest daughter is 9 with autism, and she is always talking about minecraft.
She just absolutely loves it to death.
This is absolutely the correct way Lego intends you to play. They even make the boxes flimsy and cheap on purpose to not encourage saving them. There are some Lego employees on TikTok that speak of their training and "secrets" if interested. Not a source of truth, but interesting none the less.
Personally, I enjoy the modern Lego in that there is parental choice. As a company, they cater to all audiences without a strong opinion either way. This is the way.
Yes, I think a proper Lego setup for young children requires the parents to set up the right environment. We devote quite a bit of space to Lego so that it’s always on hand and I’m a bit fanatical about Lego organisation. That helps both when starting a free build and also finding the pieces for an official manual. Flip side is the classic pain of stepping on Lego!
My kid is only 3, but I am already contemplating time boxing and auditing gaming and YouTube time. It seems significantly more difficult than it ought to be, thanks to all the brain hijacking dark patterns out there.
Do so, no question about it! Once most children disappear down a YouTube rabbit hole of unboxing or gaming they're lost. It's scary to see how addictive our modern passive entertainment is. In my experience, the best thing to do is start limiting from early on. My kids are still under 10 and it's 1 to 1:15 hours of gaming + same of TV on each weekend day, never on a school day. They are hardly aware that YouTube exists, they only watch it with us.
This takes up a lot of our time, as we're their entertainment, but the times that I let go and let them watch more typically come back and bite me as they haven't had enough time to play & be creative and that leads to tantrums and bad bedtimes. We use Google Family to control their tablets and it's the timer on there that stops them playing, not us, which feels fairer to them.
I haven't really followed recent Lego developments, but I'm relieved to see the "classic" sets still exist - although it's understandable to not be aware of them, because all of the advertising goes into the branded sets, probably because the margin on them is much better (ok, they probably have to pay some license fees to Disney, Warner or whoever, but still...)
most others are added to the common boxes, which are sorted by rough shape based on what we’ve seen stimulates free building.
I inherited a bunch of legos from older cousins when I was a kid (and I've since donated them to a school). My parents did get me a tackle box to go along with them, and sorting/putting them away is as much part of the play/learning as building, I think. Just like you can't really go fishing if you can't find the right lure, you can't really build that spaceship if you don't know where the cone piece is.
My childhood memory with Lego was the big box we had where all was mixed together. This ment lomg search firnthe "right" piece in the "right" color and the often resulted in finding some different piece and changing plans.
On the side I had precious models, which were not to touch.
Some of the items here read less like lego changing, and instead as the person growing from a child to a parent, and their point-of-view changing (#2 and #3). Also the "now" in #5 does not even mention the modern advertising in it.
All in all, this article from 2014 seems have not other reason to exist but to attract hate-clicks.
In my head, Euros are worth basically the same, maybe a little bit more, than USD. But the US version of that set is only $40 (although it's sold out, so maybe the EU version is higher in price due to scarcity). https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/space-shuttle-adventure-3...
Legos are still one of the most satisfying toys to buy your children. Yes they are expensive, yes it's annoying that a lot of them are built just once. That being said when you look out at the competition the bar is low.
I have a 5 and 3 year old and watching them patiently page through the instructions and put together something complex that they really care about is incredibly satisfying. Some of the sets have relatively complex mechanisms in them as well (I'm thinking specifically of the Lego Friends Shopping Mall and the Minecraft sets) and the kids are forced to understand them at least on some level.
I don't know that my daughter would be interested in classic Legos, it's Lego Friends that caught her and will keep her in front of a 200 page instruction manual for 4 hours and in my mind there's nothing wrong with that.
Doesn't the actual injection molding happen in China anyway? Wouldn't it be more surprising if the Chinese didn't learn the tricks of the trade by now?
No, for Lego the injection molding is strictly headquarter business. To the extend that the old molds/tools are literally encased in concrete beneath the buildings (you can see examples if you go to "Lego House" museum at the headquarters in Billund, Denmark).
I am a big Bluebrixx fan but the quality is a bit shite at the moment.
Their medieval sets are stunningly beautiful. Probably the best looking set on the market.
They are great for experts but definitely not great as a casual first buy for people that try Lego alternatives. They love to use insane build techniques that are fun for experts but not really suited for beginners.
The Star Trek series has been a huge disaster for both design issues but also quality of pieces. They have serious stability issues and barely hold together. I am unironically considering plastic glue for my models.
They are constantly improving and I am sure the kinks will get worked out but currently I can only recommend them for people that like a challenge. Again, they have some stunningly beautiful sets and are worth keeping an eye on but do not buy them for children or inexperienced people.
interesting, the reviews that i saw about the star trek models pointed out some issues but were not as bad. and besides that i have not seen any other star trek set that was better, with the exception of the mega bloks one, but their way to connect the warp nacelles i would consider cheating.
Yeah, some things are really difficult to do any better with standard pieces but honestly that can't be excuse. The quality of pieces that xingbao can deliver is simply not up to the task and they should have expected that.
Plus the pressure that is put in the pieces by the weight of the models might cause them not age well. So the benefit of using standard pieces might not be that great in this case.
As for the reviews, Held der Steine is sadly very biased towards towards Bluebrixx. Look at the comments under the last video where he shows the big Enterprise. They are extremely negative.
Also quality is very inconsistent. Some people are very lucky and get good pieces while some others have less luck. So you can't really know if you get a good batch.
Honestly they are still OK display pieces but the price is not really justified by the quality.
i have read through the comments. most complain about the price and the hanging nacells. none of the commenters have built this model yet. most sound self righteous and they were never going to get this thing anyways. i'll wait until i see more reviews from people who actually built the thing.
maybe i am biased towards lego alternatives, but i don't think that the same model with original lego bricks is going to be any better. i highly doubt that the quality of xingbao bricks is the problem here.
rather this model is at the limit of what plastic can hold, and unless you cheat, like mega bloks, i don't think it is possible to do better.
in my personal opinion, if the model doesn't fall apart, then the quality of the bricks is good enough. yes, there are issues with inconsistent quality, and i have seen models that actually do fall apart. if that happens, then criticism is justified. but for the model as presented in the video, i didn't see such quality issues, and hence i don't agree that the review was biased.
I had my own mid-sized Enterprise-A falling apart multiple times when I tried to pose her for photos. I dread having guests over that want to take a closer look/touch it so even as a display model it does not work for my personal need. I could just have had bad luck though.
My point is not that it is a bad model for people that know what to expect. I had fun building her but that people that just like Star Trek and might buy their first Bluebrixx set might have a very bad time.
I hope they will introduce sets that play more to their strengths, that is architecture. Mini figure scale bridge and all.
Again, I love Bluebrixx and I hope they succeed but no need to sugar coat them. They have serious issues when it comes to quality control and professionalism. You can tell from their videos where they are as surprised by the set they are reviewing as the viewer. Zero preparation and the sets are sometimes not even properly assembled. Even had signs upside down for the Chinese modular buildings.
the most expensive part of any video is the salary for the work time of the employees. professional preparation would easily multiply the cost of each video, which will force bluebrixx to charge more for their products.
in the spirit of the original topic "lego has changed since we were kids": the biggest change is that now many alternatives exist. those alternatives are cheaper and offer more choice.
more professionalism would be nice, but i for one prefer that the prices stay low. the added benefit of more professional videos is not really worth the extra expense. better to spend that time on resolving quality issues on the actual products.
Haven't tried those specific brands (and they tend to change brand every time they get sued), but I had a bunch of Lepin and whatever else.
You can tell the difference if you start mixing pieces. The official ones SNAP together, the cheapo copies just smush and don't really stick. They tend to get loose way faster too.
They're good if you want to get that 5000 piece car, build it and put it on a shelf. But if you're looking for something you can give to your kids and grandkids, get the real deal. I still have the same lego sets I got when I was a kid and now they're with my kids.
Competition has made huge quality leaps in recent years. They can not be compared to Lepin anymore.
Cobi, a Polish Company, has actually better quality than Lego and is the only one producing in the European Union.
The Chinese brands are already at 95% percent there, especially as modern Lego is actually getting worse (and probably producing in the same factories anyway). Sadly the remaining 5% can make all the difference and can be a bit frustrating at times but we should hopefully see parity soon especially a those brands try to go into the quality segment more and more.
As an adult, I don't see a reason to pay Lego prices when I can have nicer and bigger sets for much cheaper. I can cope with a little bit of frustration and some pieces not being perfect.
quality of alternative bricks has improved remarkably over the last few years.
and the reputable importers of chinese brands pay attention to not import cloned sets and make sure that the MOC sets they get are properly licensed from the MOC designers. so what you get is much better than what it used to be.
bluebrixx is a german brand btw. they import many chinese brands but also design and produce their own sets. they recently started producing officially licensed star trek sets.
I got some of the Lego Elves sets for my daughter, but the line was later discontinued and prices skyrocketed. I ordered some Communist Bricks / "Illegos" from Ali Express, and the quality was decent if you wanted them to sit on a shelf. Some of the parts, though, did not hold up to "play time" and I had to buy a few critical components from bricklink to put the dragon's wings back on.
My daughter loves the intricate Friends sets, but dislikes the Friends minifigs.
> yes it's annoying that a lot of them are built just once
how is this a point people are hung up on. nobody is telling anyone they can only build a set once. hell, Lego has even started offering "alternative instructions" for certain sets to encourage you to take it apart and rebuild it.
You can do whatever you want with LEGO after you buy it and it has never been a better time to be an enthusiast.
People just like complaining about now vs. the Good Old Days (tm)
I can speak to this a little, the issue is that the sets are designed to not be as friendly to rebuilding. The walls and floors to buildings are made out of very specific pieces that aren't easily reconfigured into new structures.
Honestly some of it is so weird that I think they do it on purpose specifically to discourage re-use.
I don't think this is true at all. I recently built the Saturn V and the Mario Question Mark Block and neither had _any_ notably unique pieces in them and certainly not in any excess quantity.
> Lego did extensive research and found that girls preferred to play with the characters rather than build sets. So they created the Lego Friends line where the characters own beauty salons, pet boutiques and can be news reporters working on stories about cakes. The sets do not come with hundreds of pages of instructions because most of them are fairly simple to build. The Lego Friends line is immensely popular.
1.) Majority of lego sets kinds have characters in them. That includes Star Wars sets, Ninja go sets, knights sets and what not. Lego Friends having characters in them is not something unique.
2.) Also, lego sets marked for similar age brackets have similarly complex manuals. It is just not true that Lego Friends for 7 years old would be much less complex them Minecraft for 7 years old or City for 7 years old.
3.) The actual study lego made and wrote about distinguished "indoor vs outdoor" as differing preference between boys and girls. And I think "a lot of details" in that indoor (not sure about this one). This is the first time I hear about the difference being "character vs building". Which does not even match what sets lego makes. Knights series are all about characters.
> Last year, Lego created a female scientist set on a limited run. It sold out quickly.
The special thing about this was that they were based on actual real world scientists. It was very much collector item.
I went through an experience of picking up LEGO Christmas gifts for my little cousins (boys and girls, age 6-11). It was very difficult to find anything that wasn't a promo for a massive Disney franchise. After filtering by the age group and removing all comic book/movie/cartoon tie-ins on LEGO website, what was left was just several options for each child.
I may be misremembering, but when I was a kid in the 90s there was a much larger variety of sets to pick from. As a space nerd I love their ISS, Shuttle and Apollo themed sets, but it's still disappointing how limited are their kids' options these days.
When I was a kid I always wanted to build a doll house because of the intricate details you can see inside the house. It was so hard I gave up and just bought scale model planes then use firecrackers to blow them up during new year. You will never experience the freedom of a kid once you're an adult.
When my daughter was about 3 years old,I went on Ebay and bought a huge bag of used Lego. I think it was 10KG or so. My wife nearly got a heart attack, especially when I poured all those little pieces into the bath and filled it up with water,so I could wash them a bit. Then ended up catching the smallest pieces when I pulled the plug. We poured all those pieces in the living room. Took like 3 days to dry out. We built so many things since then. There are lots of sets mixed together,I don't care nor does my daughter. It's still nice to build something, especially when all you do at work is sending emails and writing some code here and there.
Glad to get this advice. My parents sent me all my old LEGOs a while ago and I’m still in the process of disassembling all the sets, though at least organized into plates, bricks, etc.
Fortunately I know they’re not truly dirty, though they’re still pretty dusty so a good wash will help.
Dishwasher (on low temp) also works fairly well, just don't use any (or a very small amount) of detergent. I like to put about 1kg or so in the "delicates" laundry mesh bags when I have a lot of used legos to wash.
Also need to reiterate do not heat dry or use hot cycles if you go this route :)
They're made of ABS, which doesn't begin to soften until a bit over the boiling point of water (~104-105 C). It's a bit close to risk it, but even the hot cycle might be fine as long as it doesn't go much past boiling off the water.
Definitely avoid cleaning with acetone though; that'll turn it into goo.
I've run duplos through the dishwasher many times with no problems at all. On the regular cycle with dishes. Our dishwasher (Bosch) doesn't have a heating element for drying, it just makes the water really hot and waits for the water to evaporate from the hot dishes.
Fair enough, I've used quite cheap dishwashers in the past for this - where the heating element is used to heat the water up. Due to general cheapness, I'm sure there were hotspots.
That said, under hot loads with an old/cheap dishwasher I've only had issues with the large baseplates and very large/thin elements typically found in Technic sets - everything else has turned out fine.
I started reading disagreeing with many points of the article, I did realize that she is from a different generation then me, so her "then vs now" is very different from my "than vs now". But still, when I look at what sets were available when she was a child I would say that her points "1. The instructions", "2. The sets", and "The building method"; were based mostly on what specific sets she happened to have, and no on what sets were available at the time.
Yes, up until the 60s (before even that author's time), Lego sets were mostly generic bricks with just a small set of specialized pieces (just some wheels, doors and windows), for example sets of the "Universal Building Set" family [0] like the one pictured early in the article. But by the time of most of our childhoods (the 70s or even 80s), Lego had already introduced sets with plenty of specialized pieces. Also at that time they already introduced some more complex sets tailored for a specific build, some of them, the kind of set some people may chose to build only once (as if it was a glue-on plastic model kit).
The thing is, most rants about old Lego being better more generic, are just misguided rose-tinted nostalgia talking. Lego still sells awesome generic sets, even better than the ones we used to have when we were kids. They just happen to also sell some hobbyist sets. For example, my son's big box consists of a mix of my old 80s era (e.g. [1]) plus my niece's 00s era (e.g.[2]) Legos, and I have to say that the 00s era is much more generic and full of bricks, allowing for much more varied imaginative play, than my old 80s spaceship sets full of large single-use pieces.
I find the act of building a set and putting it on a shelf to gather dust a bit sad, but big piles of similar shaped blocks are also a bit uninspiring.
So I was pleasantly surprised to find the BricQ Motion sets aimed at classroom use. They come with lessons plans and videos to give some direction, but even without them it's a great self-contained box with very carefully selected pieces to encourage learning about physics and a pile of more "silly" pieces to add character. There's a good selection of wheels, springs, weighted blocks, "ropes" and Technics style pieces. They come in a segmented tray and are colour coded to make finding particular blocks and experiment with related blocks easier.
I think they're the best of both - experiment, solve a challenge, learn something, build nonsense and then break it all up and put it away neatly ready to do it again. Big hit compared to sets.
The main difference is that the sets and instructions got way more complicated and elaborate. So much so that they stifle and discourage the creativity instead of feeding it.
There were 6-step instructions [2,3] AND there was a separate page with what else was buildable from the set [4]. That was the Lego magic ingredient, the most crucial part. It forced one to look and think and imagine how those extra models were put together. That, in turn, kick-started the process of trying other things. Above all, all of it was simple. So when you got more sets you'd look at the instructions as a starting point only and then dive right into building the alternatives.
Modern sets have none of that. If anything, they basically demonstrate that you can't possibly come up with the thing you are building on your own. No way. And whatever you can put together will be so inferior in comparison that it's not even worth trying. It's really sad what Lego did to itself, because it was something magical :-/
> It would appear that, in the 1970s, equality of the sexes and creativity was the end goal for Lego
No. Saying you can buy your daughter a spaceship and your son a doll house doesn't mean that was your end goal. More likely, having to come up with fewer differentiated toys to sell, i.e. broadening the market, was.
I'm not saying that equality (although playing with nontraditional toys isn't synonymous with that) be an aim, but it's not the most obvious "end goal" explanation.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 392 ms ] threadI do miss the old, simpler lego from the early 1980s, but those things still exist in the Classic and Creator lines. Buy them. I love Lego Star Wars, but Classic and Creator are the soul of Lego.
Stupid me, why would I expect to be able to just scroll to the bottom of the article for the website's footer?
I always have uBlock on to disable scripts and fonts. Quite a lot of sites work perfectly well that way and I enable the minimum scripts and fonts for those that don't.
I still broke down all the elaborate sets, put them all together in a big box, and built my own things later.
Nowadays, most of the sets are some imaginary vehicles with Creator-style builds. You can probably build a new vehicle out of the same set, but combining different sets from the same theme is much less enjoyable. The few sets with buildings rarely have baseplates and feel very airy and unharmonic.
There is always Lego classic sets, and smaller creator houses do have a lot of regular bricks too. But it is a bit annoying once you amass a few sets from other lines.
Still, I'm glad they are in business. I will take whatever they do now Vs them going bust, which was a risk a decade or so ago (or maybe longer, I can't remember the details).
Some of these specialised pieces inspire creativity. Especially with spaceships.
But I do agree that many modern sets just invite you to build this one thing out of them. We did actually turn out Millennium Falcon into an X-Wing and a TIE-fighter once, but we did eventually turn them back into the Falcon. It feels more wrong than it used to to build something else.
But I really have no idea. It was a long time ago.
So these commend ridiculous prices for small pieces of plastic (about 8 euros or so last I checked).
Of course if you had a kilo of them the price would crater :)
Lego started pulling back from that a long time ago because they were too expensive.
They had a leadership change in 2004, Jorgen Vig Knudstorp came in and one of the first things he did was halve the number of different parts.
Personally I don't feel like this narrative about a substantial shift in Lego sets fits with reality. To me it feel like people conflates it with the rise of licensed sets.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lego_Space
6259: Broadside's Brig [https://brickset.com/sets/6259-1/Broadside-s-Brig]
For what was a very small and cheap set at the time, you are getting 3 minifigs and a small building on a baseplate. The bulk of the parts are yellow- and white-coloured bricks for walls and architectural elements. There is a specialised yellow-coloured edge panel with a red brick texture, but it plays very nicely with the rest of the parts architecturally. You can easily combine this set with the bigger forts and harbours. The colours are compatible, the parts are compatible.
This is not certainly the case with modern Lego sets.
Weird ski bricks, seethrou chain saw, antenna, big arrowshaped structural piece, etc.
I'm not surprised the one you linked is from 91. Noone is disputing that the complexity rose from the 80s. But the complexity we are seeing now is not a new thing. It started in the 90s.
... I don't think that era was especially complex, though, and in fact when I think about the worst sets from that era they were ones that were built with like half a dozen huge pieces for the bulk of the structure (there was some kind of Ice Base from that same series you linked that stands out, in particular).
Complex is the modern sets. Fiddly, even. Look at the size of a finished largish modern set (for kids, not one of the adult stick-it-on-a-shelf models), and its part count, and look at similar-sized sets from the 80s through, I dunno, maybe '95, and see what their part count was. The modern sets have so many itty bitty pieces. 500-something piece sets used to be really big when assembled.
They introduced special parts at the height of popularity and money success. Simplified when they had money issues - simple parts are cheaper to manufacture. Now that they are popular again, they are having more special parts again, but still less then used to be.
“Most” doesn’t feel right to me - my son’s mostly had City sets and they’re all repurposable, buildings use large flat pieces with configurable roads so it’s not quite as big but also allows more combinations than “large square”, etc. There are definitely specialty pieces but I’m skeptical that they’re that much more common given all of the pieces I had as a kid which were pretty specialized, too.
In a box?!!
Our kids store piles of bricks on more or less every horizontal surface in their rooms.
> the elaborate sets
Our kids will always build each elaborate set once, according to the instructions, wait a day or three, then it's fair game to be cannibalized for their latest homespun supermegagiga-jet, -spaceship, -car or -house.
My mother wasn't too happy to step on the bricks, so I had to put them in a box.
I've been doing more of this recently as I picked up some knock off mech based lego sets and adding more arms/building them more weapons/other things is fun way to make them look better.
My wife and I now regularly buy these large lego sets for each other (birthdays, Christmas and anniversaries) and do them together in the evenings after the kids are in bed. Its such a lovely way to relax.
That's what my oldest son said, at least; he doesn't see the point in Lego now that Minecraft exists. Breaks my heart. I mean, Minecraft is fantastic, but it's not Lego.
When there were fewer themed Lego sets, Lego was a sandbox. You had a mish-mash of generic pieces and your creativity. Modern Lego sets are extremely tailored, both in theme and with sets having bespoke pieces - even if you throw all of your newer sets together in a pile (which people tend not to because each is supposed to be a thing), the pieces aren't as modular, allow for less extension of your imagination.
Minecraft is blocks and what you do with them. Minecraft isn't a digital extension of Lego, it's serving the experience Lego did a few decades ago but no longer does.
If you have a Lego store nearby, stop in, and it's mindboggling how many $100+ sets they carry. Not great for shopping for a Lego Friends set for my daughter, but if I wanted to drop $300 on a Ninjago set they'd be able to help.
I've been building the adult sets over the last few years and you're right it's a nice nondigital way to unwind. Unlike my job everything works, has a place, and is all neat and organizable.
Interestingly my mother who is retired has gotten into lego. Initially she got into it because she decided to resell all my childhood sets which were stored in a large bins. I had kept all the instructions so she just build lego sets one at a time and sold them off. It got her hooked, and now she regularly buys used or new sets, assembles, and then resells them. It's interesting to see someone get into lego rather late in life with no childhood nostalgia of them what so ever.
The gist of it was that price by piece didn't change that much, while sets are getting bigger and more complex. I'd also wagger that we now have a lot more smaller pieces that make these kind of calculations more flawed.
Small enough that I still can drive envy from every child in the store when I buy big Technic sets. Like the huge CAT Bulldozer (https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/app-controlled-cat-d11-bu...) from last year.
In this day and age, I would be surprised if the Lego Friends line, which was created with girls in mind, were marketed explicitly to girls. My guess is that the girls stratify themselves by what type of toys they are attracted to. There's evidence that the preference is biological:
Male monkeys prefer boys' toys https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13596-male-monkeys-pr...
The book is about her observations that some conflict between men & women resembles inter-cultural conflict; i.e. men would talk with a different set of cultural attitudes than women.
She said that people asked her how much that came down to nature vs culture. If nature, then the differences are what they are, and culture doesn't need to (and cannot fundamentally) change. If cultural, then inequality would reduce by ironing out the differences.
As I understand it, worry about gendered-for-girls toys comes from the latter view. (Differences lead to inequality).
(FWIW, Tannen's suggested solution is that differences as they are now should be recognised and worked-with).
The photograph of the girl building things with the universal bricks is just marketing, not a report from the 60ies. It does not imply that girls actually did that en masse.
Personally I remember building houses with Lego (so walls and a roof), but not much more. These days the Lego toys may actually be more fun.
And yes, companies absolutely do market towards boys and girls. They don't write "for girls" on the box, but they consciously produce two product lines. Often it is one unisex line and one that is "forbidden for boys", i.e. it has pink and glitter and you would be teased as a boy of you bought it. This way, they can create artificial market separation and increase sales.
This preference was also shown in studies where female new born babies tend to look at faces more than male babies.
Lego themselves talked about lego friends being meant for girls, publicly and loudly. Also, all characters are girls. The kids in ads for lego friends are all girls too. It could not have been more clear that it is for girls.
The other legos at that time and few years before were very very clearly for boys. They used colors used for boy toys. Toy stores are clearly separated to boy and girl section by color. They also used themes that literally any kid over 2 identify as boys.
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As side note, claim that they are less about building then other lego sets for same age brackets is untrue. I dont know why the article felt the need to claim the difference is character vs building.
Actual differences against other themes are colors, fight vs life, indoor vs outdoor, gender of characters.
I'm convinced there is a major biological underpining after watching these two grow up.
I didn't learn gendered behavior or thoughts from my parents but I learned them from everyone else and society as a whole. I learned from a very, very young age that some of my interests were very much not acceptable for girls and I internalized a lot of it.
Pls explain
It's a shame that a new 8880 kit costs an arm and a leg.
For regular bricks, however, Lego's manufacturing process is incredibly precise in a way that I don't think 3D printing will ever be.
Edit: the other brick manufacturers have problems replicating brick quality with injection molding machines. I assembled thousands Lego parts with my son and their fit was exactly the same - perfect. The Chinese kits have one in hundred parts that doesn’t fit well. However it was one in ten some years ago, Chinese learn fast.
I doubt one can 3D print anything as Lego replacement.
What's really holding us back is copyright. I wish there were high quality Ninjago or especially Star Wars clones.
Also it releases fumes that are extremely bad for children. There are quality resins but costing $100 per litter or so.
Today with 3d printers you just can print connectors and connect aluminum beams and wood boards to do whatever you want.
I teach children to cut wood boards with a fret saw and to mark holes that we drill super fast with a column drill machine.
They also know how to create basic shapes with the FDM machine, and print standard connector sets.
They have today way more advanced options that Legos.
Lego bricks are made to micron tolerances. When you add up tolerancing errors over 10 or 50 bricks in a row the differences can add up and things don't fit. This is a big part of how Lego saw off the cheap competition - they were generally not satisfying to build. This is achieved with very careful injection moulding, and the only rapid prototyping tool at that level of precision is 3D CNC.
There is more to the sets that pieces of plastic. Look at Warhammer - the figures are all plastic, they could easily be 3D printer, they might not look quite as good but they'd work just fine. Yet, Games Workshop sells set after set. Lego sets are also designed, come with instructions etc. There's more than just the components.
1. Massive online community
2. Virtual simulators
3. Part numbers and 2nd hand retail
4. Computer and phone interfaces
5. Patent expired so more community
This should probably read "competition". Some of the stuff secondary brands offer puts shame to Lego, both in creativity as well as in pricing. Bluebrix and Xingbao both have models that are a lot more playable than anything Lego has ever offered.
You also still have regular Lego cops and robbers. Cops and robbers is still by far the largest sub-theme of the City theme. Almost every set, even some sets that aren't about cops and robbers at all, will have a cop and a robber in there.
Kids these days have it too easy.
Back in the 80s some "minifigs" may have had sad faces, but never angry/violent ones. That changed a lot over time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violence_and_LEGO
And this is going to be my only comment on this topic because I'm too traumatised by people pluralising "lego" with an S.
My kids have a mix of classic & branded sets and the play area is a mix of designed builds and improvised creations. The favourite and larger sets stay in their own bags when deconstructed but most others are added to the common boxes, which are sorted by rough shape based on what we’ve seen stimulates free building. There are a lot of complex shapes but many of those are useful in free building. I’ve purposely bought some sets with multiple complex flats & bricks as they allow more creativity than just the basic bricks.
But I know other children who just like to follow build instructions or just like to play with the characters and that’s OK. That’s the flexibility of modern Lego.
Yes. And also, many if not most kids combine approaches. Start by building based on manual, then they play with it and it gets gradually destroyed, then just use it is as material.
Have few favorite sets they keep, the rest gets destroyed and used as bricks when in mood.
For them I think Minecraft scratches much that creative itch that Lego used to bring me.
Personally, I enjoy the modern Lego in that there is parental choice. As a company, they cater to all audiences without a strong opinion either way. This is the way.
Amazing. My kid just wants to get the build over with so he can get back to gaming or youtube, where he watches other people gaming.
This takes up a lot of our time, as we're their entertainment, but the times that I let go and let them watch more typically come back and bite me as they haven't had enough time to play & be creative and that leads to tantrums and bad bedtimes. We use Google Family to control their tablets and it's the timer on there that stops them playing, not us, which feels fairer to them.
I inherited a bunch of legos from older cousins when I was a kid (and I've since donated them to a school). My parents did get me a tackle box to go along with them, and sorting/putting them away is as much part of the play/learning as building, I think. Just like you can't really go fishing if you can't find the right lure, you can't really build that spaceship if you don't know where the cone piece is.
On the side I had precious models, which were not to touch.
All in all, this article from 2014 seems have not other reason to exist but to attract hate-clicks.
I went looking for a spaceship lego set. Just a simple rocket or something.
Instead it's heaps of adult themed/Star Wars/NASA licensed stuff. The alternative seems to be a bucket of standard bricks.
The adult orientation of LEGO these days makes me hesitant to buy it.
I don't mind Adults having LEGO sets, I do mind if that becomes so lucrative it stops kids being able to enjoy it.
https://www.lego.com/en-be/product/space-shuttle-adventure-3...
https://www.lego.com/en-be/product/lunar-roving-vehicle-6034... (cheaper, similar play value)
https://www.lego.com/en-be/product/lunar-space-station-60349 (slightly more expensive, bigger)
https://www.lego.com/en-be/product/lunar-research-base-60350 (more expensive, but much bigger)
The space sets are definitely there in general, they're just a sub-theme of "City" now for some reason.
There's also a few space fantasy sets under the Monkie Kid line, like https://www.lego.com/en-be/product/chang-e-moon-cake-factory... and its rabbit-piloted moon mecha.
I've got 3 young kids, and trust me, that's nowhere near happening. Kids love lego.
I have a 5 and 3 year old and watching them patiently page through the instructions and put together something complex that they really care about is incredibly satisfying. Some of the sets have relatively complex mechanisms in them as well (I'm thinking specifically of the Lego Friends Shopping Mall and the Minecraft sets) and the kids are forced to understand them at least on some level.
I don't know that my daughter would be interested in classic Legos, it's Lego Friends that caught her and will keep her in front of a 200 page instruction manual for 4 hours and in my mind there's nothing wrong with that.
Bluebrixx, Cobi and Xingbao are probably much better.
Their medieval sets are stunningly beautiful. Probably the best looking set on the market.
They are great for experts but definitely not great as a casual first buy for people that try Lego alternatives. They love to use insane build techniques that are fun for experts but not really suited for beginners.
The Star Trek series has been a huge disaster for both design issues but also quality of pieces. They have serious stability issues and barely hold together. I am unironically considering plastic glue for my models.
They are constantly improving and I am sure the kinks will get worked out but currently I can only recommend them for people that like a challenge. Again, they have some stunningly beautiful sets and are worth keeping an eye on but do not buy them for children or inexperienced people.
Plus the pressure that is put in the pieces by the weight of the models might cause them not age well. So the benefit of using standard pieces might not be that great in this case.
As for the reviews, Held der Steine is sadly very biased towards towards Bluebrixx. Look at the comments under the last video where he shows the big Enterprise. They are extremely negative.
Also quality is very inconsistent. Some people are very lucky and get good pieces while some others have less luck. So you can't really know if you get a good batch.
Honestly they are still OK display pieces but the price is not really justified by the quality.
maybe i am biased towards lego alternatives, but i don't think that the same model with original lego bricks is going to be any better. i highly doubt that the quality of xingbao bricks is the problem here.
rather this model is at the limit of what plastic can hold, and unless you cheat, like mega bloks, i don't think it is possible to do better.
in my personal opinion, if the model doesn't fall apart, then the quality of the bricks is good enough. yes, there are issues with inconsistent quality, and i have seen models that actually do fall apart. if that happens, then criticism is justified. but for the model as presented in the video, i didn't see such quality issues, and hence i don't agree that the review was biased.
I had my own mid-sized Enterprise-A falling apart multiple times when I tried to pose her for photos. I dread having guests over that want to take a closer look/touch it so even as a display model it does not work for my personal need. I could just have had bad luck though.
My point is not that it is a bad model for people that know what to expect. I had fun building her but that people that just like Star Trek and might buy their first Bluebrixx set might have a very bad time.
I hope they will introduce sets that play more to their strengths, that is architecture. Mini figure scale bridge and all.
Again, I love Bluebrixx and I hope they succeed but no need to sugar coat them. They have serious issues when it comes to quality control and professionalism. You can tell from their videos where they are as surprised by the set they are reviewing as the viewer. Zero preparation and the sets are sometimes not even properly assembled. Even had signs upside down for the Chinese modular buildings.
in the spirit of the original topic "lego has changed since we were kids": the biggest change is that now many alternatives exist. those alternatives are cheaper and offer more choice.
more professionalism would be nice, but i for one prefer that the prices stay low. the added benefit of more professional videos is not really worth the extra expense. better to spend that time on resolving quality issues on the actual products.
You can tell the difference if you start mixing pieces. The official ones SNAP together, the cheapo copies just smush and don't really stick. They tend to get loose way faster too.
They're good if you want to get that 5000 piece car, build it and put it on a shelf. But if you're looking for something you can give to your kids and grandkids, get the real deal. I still have the same lego sets I got when I was a kid and now they're with my kids.
Cobi, a Polish Company, has actually better quality than Lego and is the only one producing in the European Union.
The Chinese brands are already at 95% percent there, especially as modern Lego is actually getting worse (and probably producing in the same factories anyway). Sadly the remaining 5% can make all the difference and can be a bit frustrating at times but we should hopefully see parity soon especially a those brands try to go into the quality segment more and more.
As an adult, I don't see a reason to pay Lego prices when I can have nicer and bigger sets for much cheaper. I can cope with a little bit of frustration and some pieces not being perfect.
For children though, yeah Cobi or Lego any day.
bluebrixx is a german brand btw. they import many chinese brands but also design and produce their own sets. they recently started producing officially licensed star trek sets.
My daughter loves the intricate Friends sets, but dislikes the Friends minifigs.
edit: you may find this interesting -- https://brickset.com/article/38929/a-survey-of-communist-leg...
how is this a point people are hung up on. nobody is telling anyone they can only build a set once. hell, Lego has even started offering "alternative instructions" for certain sets to encourage you to take it apart and rebuild it.
You can do whatever you want with LEGO after you buy it and it has never been a better time to be an enthusiast.
People just like complaining about now vs. the Good Old Days (tm)
Honestly some of it is so weird that I think they do it on purpose specifically to discourage re-use.
1.) Majority of lego sets kinds have characters in them. That includes Star Wars sets, Ninja go sets, knights sets and what not. Lego Friends having characters in them is not something unique.
2.) Also, lego sets marked for similar age brackets have similarly complex manuals. It is just not true that Lego Friends for 7 years old would be much less complex them Minecraft for 7 years old or City for 7 years old.
3.) The actual study lego made and wrote about distinguished "indoor vs outdoor" as differing preference between boys and girls. And I think "a lot of details" in that indoor (not sure about this one). This is the first time I hear about the difference being "character vs building". Which does not even match what sets lego makes. Knights series are all about characters.
> Last year, Lego created a female scientist set on a limited run. It sold out quickly.
The special thing about this was that they were based on actual real world scientists. It was very much collector item.
I may be misremembering, but when I was a kid in the 90s there was a much larger variety of sets to pick from. As a space nerd I love their ISS, Shuttle and Apollo themed sets, but it's still disappointing how limited are their kids' options these days.
Though that route can only take quite a bit less than 10kg at a time.
Fortunately I know they’re not truly dirty, though they’re still pretty dusty so a good wash will help.
Also need to reiterate do not heat dry or use hot cycles if you go this route :)
Definitely avoid cleaning with acetone though; that'll turn it into goo.
That said, under hot loads with an old/cheap dishwasher I've only had issues with the large baseplates and very large/thin elements typically found in Technic sets - everything else has turned out fine.
Yes, up until the 60s (before even that author's time), Lego sets were mostly generic bricks with just a small set of specialized pieces (just some wheels, doors and windows), for example sets of the "Universal Building Set" family [0] like the one pictured early in the article. But by the time of most of our childhoods (the 70s or even 80s), Lego had already introduced sets with plenty of specialized pieces. Also at that time they already introduced some more complex sets tailored for a specific build, some of them, the kind of set some people may chose to build only once (as if it was a glue-on plastic model kit).
The thing is, most rants about old Lego being better more generic, are just misguided rose-tinted nostalgia talking. Lego still sells awesome generic sets, even better than the ones we used to have when we were kids. They just happen to also sell some hobbyist sets. For example, my son's big box consists of a mix of my old 80s era (e.g. [1]) plus my niece's 00s era (e.g.[2]) Legos, and I have to say that the 00s era is much more generic and full of bricks, allowing for much more varied imaginative play, than my old 80s spaceship sets full of large single-use pieces.
[0] https://brickset.com/sets/theme-Universal-Building-Set
[1] https://rebrickable.com/sets/6971-1/inter-galactic-command-b...
[2] https://rebrickable.com/sets/31025-1/mountain-hut/
So I was pleasantly surprised to find the BricQ Motion sets aimed at classroom use. They come with lessons plans and videos to give some direction, but even without them it's a great self-contained box with very carefully selected pieces to encourage learning about physics and a pile of more "silly" pieces to add character. There's a good selection of wheels, springs, weighted blocks, "ropes" and Technics style pieces. They come in a segmented tray and are colour coded to make finding particular blocks and experiment with related blocks easier.
I think they're the best of both - experiment, solve a challenge, learn something, build nonsense and then break it all up and put it away neatly ready to do it again. Big hit compared to sets.
The first set I had was a minuscule "mineral detector" from the space set - https://media.brickinstructions.com/06000/6841/001.jpg
There were 6-step instructions [2,3] AND there was a separate page with what else was buildable from the set [4]. That was the Lego magic ingredient, the most crucial part. It forced one to look and think and imagine how those extra models were put together. That, in turn, kick-started the process of trying other things. Above all, all of it was simple. So when you got more sets you'd look at the instructions as a starting point only and then dive right into building the alternatives.
Modern sets have none of that. If anything, they basically demonstrate that you can't possibly come up with the thing you are building on your own. No way. And whatever you can put together will be so inferior in comparison that it's not even worth trying. It's really sad what Lego did to itself, because it was something magical :-/
[2] https://media.brickinstructions.com/06000/6841/002.jpg
[3] https://media.brickinstructions.com/06000/6841/003.jpg
[4] https://media.brickinstructions.com/06000/6841/004.jpg
https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/bricks-and-houses-11008
https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/creative-suitcase-10713
third-party extra models: https://rebrickable.com/sets/alternates/
This is excellent, thanks.
No. Saying you can buy your daughter a spaceship and your son a doll house doesn't mean that was your end goal. More likely, having to come up with fewer differentiated toys to sell, i.e. broadening the market, was.
I'm not saying that equality (although playing with nontraditional toys isn't synonymous with that) be an aim, but it's not the most obvious "end goal" explanation.