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There is a Frankfurt-based toy store owner who has been very vocal on Youtube about the quality and value problems in recent Lego sets. Lego has sued him multiple times but Streisand effect set in and he has gained a large audience.
If anybody who understands German langauge is up for some great irony from a charismatic toy professional on this topic, you should have a look.
WARNING: You will waste some hours on this..
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V9OKWm_x2RI&t=1504s
AFAIK the lawsuits were mostly about him using "Lego" as a part of his brand (Legoheld). He had to rebrand and now exclusively uses the generic term "Klemmbaustein" (press-fit brick) instead of the name Lego and also now mainly promotes other brands.
The story is pretty well known on the german internet.
You recall it wrong, his brand is "Held der Steine Inh. Thomas Panke" (hero of the bricks, owner Thomas Panke) and his old logo contained a 4x2 brick, but without "LEGO" marks anywhere. LEGO claimed it could be confused with their bricks.
More info (in german, but deepl/google do pretty decent job at translating):
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Panke#Kontroverse_mit_L...
Lego's legal team uses every possible angle under every possible IP registration method and in every major jurisdiction. They are similar to Apple in this regard. Their attitude is one of maximum aggression down every possible avenue of attack. No defendant is too small, no infringement too petty.
Trademarks are in a weird place for IP law. They don't expire like copyrights or patents, but failure to defend them can cause the trademark to be invalidated, so if a trademark holder doesn't engage in this sort of behavior, they could end up losing all rights to the trademark. From the outside it seems like bullying and aggressive behavior, but for better or for worse, that's how things are set up.
"It's not our fault that we're assholes, it's just that being an asshole is to our advantage!"
Uh-huh.
IP law is the cudgel of choice when a company doesn't like what an individual is doing. It's loosey-goosey enough that they can always stir up a somewhat plausible complaint, and they only need a somewhat plausible complaint plus money to make a small person's life a living hell.
Understanding the mechanism does not make it good or right.
If you tried to call yourself Applehero, made videos about electronics, tried to trademark that term and sell merchandise with it, with a logo referencing Apple’s apple... well, you’d end up sued as well.
Lego is already close to losing their trademark, they can’t let anything like this slide without risking their IP.
A 4x2 press-fit brick is more like using a rounded rectangle in a phone repair shop logo, not "Apple" itself.
for the uninitiated: rounded rectangles as a shape for phones is an apple design patent, they sued samsung for that
They have one for their charger shapes as well among many other things.
A patent is for products not for logos
Yes design patents are different from trademarks and the apple rounded rectangle phone design is a US design patent while the 2x2 lego brick is registered in the EU as a 3d trademark. Filing for a trademark on a shop name and logo may not be as easily challenged with only an existing design patent and no matching trademark.
So yes, the metaphor in the parent is faulty in that small detail when it picks up the metaphor created in the grandparent to better explain what is going on.
First, he called himself _Legoheld_ and then he tried to trademark that name and his logo, specifically an image trademark for any visualization containing a 4x2 or 2x2 brick.
Only one company can hold that trademark, Lego currently holds it, so if his trademark claim had succeeded, Lego would have lost theirs.
> _he called himself Legoheld and then he tried to trademark that name_
can you give any citation for that? Because i can find zero sources for that claim. Sources for the conflict around the logo design are ample, see his filing for the logo (1) and the one from the corporation (2). I can find no filing for your claim about the name in the official database and no media reports supporting it anywhere, only that in 2013, years before the first conflict with the corporation, his brand was already established as "Held der Steine".(3)
1:
https://register.dpma.de/DPMAregister/marke/register/3020182...
2:
https://register.dpma.de/DPMAregister/marke/registerHABM?AKZ...
3:
https://www.welt.de/regionales/frankfurt/article121164920/Ve...
> _if his trademark claim had succeeded, Lego would have lost theirs._
no. The marks would be seen as reasonably different. As others have noted the corporations ability to sue in similar cases might be reduced if they create a history of tolerating such "reasonably different" marks, but they would not have lost their design trademark, especially because theirs is a 3D design mark and his was word+logo mark and they are filed for different things. I personally think his mark would have had little to no effect on theirs and he might have had an actual chance of winning in court, albeit a phyrric victory. He cancelled his filing and filed the same name with a different image.
For the whole "invalidating of design patents" there is a far more interesting case that has nothing to do with him: Delta Sport Handelskontor GmbH vs LEGO A/S where the former tried to have EU design patent 001664368-0006 invalidated so they can print and sell the exact same plastic piece under the PLAYTIVE® brand on the market. They lost in court during appeal.
> especially because theirs is a 3D design mark and his was word+logo mark and they are filed for different things
Lego has a design mark for the silhouette of a 4x2 or 2x2 brick for clothing.
Held der Steine tried to obtain a design mark for the silhouette of a 2x2 brick for clothing for his merchandise.
That’s an obvious conflict.
This is wrong, he called himself _Held der Steine_. To suggest that because a solitary small time shop owner uses a fully generic image of a toy brick will cause the mighty Lego brand to get lost is bizarre. To be sure Lego does not have a copyright, trademark or patent on generic click-to-fit toy bricks and this has been ascertained by a high German court after one decade of strenuous litigation. Lego acts as though they had won that case but the didn't.
> To be sure Lego does not have a copyright, trademark or patent on generic click-to-fit toy bricks and this has been ascertained by a high German court after one decade of strenuous litigation
Lego actually won that case for clothing and merchandise. Only for actual bricks they lost it.
He tried to get a trademark on merchandise for his line of clothing, which conflicted with that.
He has never called himself "Legoheld"! He had a Logo with a structure similar to a lego brick on it. You can google the image...
It would probably be like, if a company uses an apple symbol with their company name on a logo. There are by the way many apple juice producers which use an apple symbol in their logos...
Your attempt to paraphrase comes across as snide and insincere. It also would seem to indicate that you didn't comprehend the point being made regarding the current framework of trademark law and enforcement within which companies must operate.
Don't hate the player hate the game.
> failure to defend them can cause the trademark to be invalidated
This is a myth
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/11/trademark-law-does-not...
> if a trademark holder doesn't engage in this sort of behavior, they could end up losing all rights to the trademark
[citation needed]
Other trademark owners aren't asshats like this about their marks and haven't lost them, have they?
Yes you need to enforce your trademark. But not against reviews of your very products, even if those reviews make their authors money through YT ads.
[Add.: and not in this way. I've read up a bit more, and they had a "valid" problem in that he used "LEGO" to refer to plastic brick systems in general. They do need to enforce that so the term doesn't become generic. But they could've just sent a message or letter first.]
Iirc the argument bind this would be along then lines oft precendes. I.e., you didn't defend your TM against person A so why are you sueing person B.
I wasn't implying a choice in _who_ to enforce it against. I'm saying there's a wide spectrum _what_ to try to enforce against. LEGO here even tried to enforce their trademark because the logo "looked like a LEGO brick". Apparently that didn't fly.
(The "using LEGO as generic label" one was a separate instance and did cause the guy to remake a bunch of videos.)
According to the wikipedia link, both of you are correct. One was about his own brand, the other was about him using "Lego" to refer to the bricks of other brands (which he only started doing after they sued the first time).
In Germany that's very common though. Basically small is called lego, big is called duplo. No matter who it's from. It's kinda how people I google things, no matter whether you search on duckduckgo or google.
It's also common to say "just google things", but I'm fairly sure (and the domain is even free!) that if I buy justgooglethings.com and setup my own search engine there that Google will find issue with that sooner than later.
The same goes for something like Lego, just because people commonly call similar plastic bricks "lego" doesn't mean that they'll get away with it if they open a store to sell those bricks.
I seem to recall that the problem with "just google things" or LMGTFY is that if "google" becomes a verb (to google) it can't be trademarked once it becomes of common use. That's the reason many companies often issue official statements discouraging the use of their names as verbs when they see them used as such.
I think Google themselves did this many years ago.
> if "google" becomes a verb (to google) it can't be trademarked once it becomes of common use.
That ship sailed years ago.
Maybe someone ought to tell Google.
> if I buy justgooglethings.com and setup my own search engine there that Google will find issue with that sooner than later.
Well, LMGTFY has been a thing for as long as I can remember, but it's not a new search engine, it's just a way to snarkily direct people asking questions to Google for their answers. It's also not critical of the Google brand (and although the URL doesn't have the Google name in it, the website title does), so who knows if Google would find more issue with it if it was.
It actually is a search engine now. (It uses Google Search via
https://programmablesearchengine.google.com/about/
)
>just because people commonly call similar plastic bricks "lego" doesn't mean that they'll get away with it if they open a store to sell those bricks.
But the 'store' isn't like your offbrand Google is it? It's actually probably closer to LMGTFY. They sell Legos and other blocks... and when you buy the other blocks they aren't actually called Legos.
Yeah that’s probably why Lego sued. If they don’t take action to prevent that they can lose their protection of the term.
Lego is a great toy produced by a very shitty company with a _long_ history of fraud and legal aggression. All the way back to day #1 when they ripped off the Kiddiecraft toy, packaging and marketing materials and passed them off as their own.
I was just going to ask, how does Lego possibly have a claim on the brick design when they ripped that design directly from Kiddicraft?
They tried to whitewash their crime by acquiring Kiddiecraft _long_ after they ripped them off and HP committed suicide. Essentially they have already been told they have no patent on the bricks so this is just scare tactics.
See:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lego_clone
HP == Hilary Page, Kiddiecraft founder and inventor of Self-Locking Building Bricks.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilary_Page
When I was a kid and full of enthusiasm for Legos, I bought a very small pirate set---a rowboat, a canon, a pirate and a soldier---with money I'd earned, because my friend had a larger set with the canon, and it fired a piece via a spring mechanism. To my great disappointment, Lego had changed the design and the canon wasn't functional. I wrote them a letter (pen and paper, back before the Internet), and when they replied it was legal-speak about liability concerns if the small piece ended up in someone's eye.
On top of my disappointment, they criticized me for having written "Legos" and told me that their products should be called Lego bricks or Lego toys... great way to give an elementary-aged boy a poor impression of Lego's customer relations.
Up to about 1990 pirate legos had shooting cannons. Then there were a few years in the early 1990s where the cannons had the necessary plastic parts to fire cannonballs, but you had to first disassemble them and add your own ballpoint pen spring. I’m not sure when they switched to non-shooting cannons. From a web search it seems like they have since switched back to shooting cannons.
Amusingly, the resulting pen-spring cannons I made were much more powerful and “dangerous!”
I remember having shooting cannons, and I must’ve had sets after 1990.
Seems like this may have been a thing only in the US?
In America, kids are only allowed to play with real guns.
I was born at the start of 90s and I definitely had sets with shooting cannons and they were bought new.
I have shooting cannons from post 2000 (New Zealand)
That's sad-funny because the cannons nowadays fire pieces again.
Your use of word "Legos" in the first sentence is pure gold. :)
Wow, are you me? I had exactly the same frustration for that specific cannon after seeing a friend's shoot across the room. I wrote them a letter also, my parents helped me, and I included the "defective" cannon in the envelope. They sent me it back with the same reasons (safety concerns). Hah!
In Denmark there's Galleri Lego (an art gallery) named after the owner Louise Lego. LEGO sued her but the lawsuit went all the way to high court where she won the right to use the name. Presumably people don't easily confuse art with toys.
We have a long and proud history of big brands suing the little guy over names in Denmark.
It never results in what the big brand wants, some have even gone bankrupt on the wake of it.
Over all it’s more a capitalism thing though. Companies simply become inherently evil entities when they reach a certain size, and on the odd chance they don’t that is not the norm.
We’ve sort of solved it here in Denmark, by having co-operative ownerships where the profits all go back into the companies, which tends to keep their investor based competition in check, but there is no competition to Lego.
Trademarks seem kinda abusive in a language like German with a tendency to make compound words. Farwell Lego Hero.
Mentioning the Streisand effect. I would claim that the original post had the same but still opposite effect on me.
Now i really want an AT-AT set!
Edit: oops the price tag.
Classic Lego price tag. I've long assumed I grew up in a small house because my parents bought me so many of those bricks.
Edit: And that looks a good deal more complicated than what I grew up with, wow!
> Now i really want an AT-AT set!
> Edit: oops the price tag.
That's a fairly good summary of the state of LEGO. Add what some call slipping quality or simply cheaping out, while the competition is rapidly catching up in quality for lego-compatible brick models (and in some ways surpassing LEGO), and you have a perfect storm.
>> Now i really want an AT-AT set!
>> Edit: oops the price tag.
> That's a fairly good summary of the state of LEGO.
And it's been the state of LEGO since I was young enough to wait excitedly for the print catalog/magazine to show up so that I could lust over a bunch of Technic and UCS kits my family couldn't possibly afford.
So when you say "competition" you mean these various crappy Chinese companies that create sets by copying almost every single LEGO brick in existence, right?
The patent on the original LEGO bricks was filed in the 50s and has long since expired. Reproducing them is not different from producing generic drugs. The innovation is in the models you design, and how well it is executed. And while production quality of the bricks is only now approaching levels comparable to LEGO, model design is an area where LEGO provides a wide opening for competitors.
I'm talking about 100% direct copies of 0-20 year old designs of e.g. studless Technic bricks.
Lepin copies the sets, including the licensed ones.
This article has a good photo illustrating what we’re talking about.
https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1199653.shtml
The Lepin brand is out, it was "raided", with plenty of photos of said raid published by chinese news agencies to show how committed the PRC is to IPR.
But then of course other brands took their place, pretty much immediately.
Probably off the same production lines too.
As well as make their own sets, and then sell those sets for 25-30% of the price, at 95-90% of the quality.
More like 30% of the price at 60% of the quality (and that's generous).
Maybe you haven’t purchased them recently, but the quality is much higher than 60%.
That's still the Streisand effect. No publicity is bad publicity, etc.
That guy is kinda entertaining, but you shouldn't take him too serious. His complaints are often not much fact-based and very one-sided. He is quite infamous for this. And let's not start talking about his political rants...
If you really care about the little bricks, you should also watch other channels to get a more rounded picture.
That kind is quite entertaining and you should take him serious. His complaints are as a rule fact-based as he has sets he discusses right in front of him to show and tell. He does highlight what there is to highlight in the products of the involved companies. He is widely famous for this. Since you refuse to talk about his political rants, I will not get started on those either as I have never seen a clip with a political rant from him.
Definitely watch his channel (
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=held+der+steine
top result), also observe he gets quoted quite a bit and has collaborations with other people interested in similar things.
I had a lot of legos when I was a child. I kept them and gave them to my son a few years ago. They still mostly work just fine. I also bought new legos for my son, and the quality in the newer pieces is degrading at an alarming rate. A few pieces got too lose and simply don't connect anymore. Some arms from minifigures are extremely loose and will soon not be able to maintain a pose. None of my old legos are loose like that in the arm, although some traditional pieces are indeed barely sticking. Things are getting to the point where some of the newer pieces are already in worse quality than pieces I bought in 1992 and used for years and years. I'm sad, I don't think his son will be able to inherit his legos.
Haven't spent a lot of money on Lego sets over the last two years, that hasn't been my experience at all. Every piece has been high quality. It's the old pieces from mine and my wife's youth that are cracking and breaking, which isn't unexpected.
I am only here for fellow pluralism fail fanatics to say the plural of lego is Lego.
This youtube guy had me at "Die saufen Lack, ich kanns mir nicht anders erklären".
"Lack saufen", or "chugging varnish" is a common German (internet?) saying for people who are just crazy.
The closest English equivalent then might be sniffing glue (intentional) or maybe huffing paint (unintentional)?
Wait, is that what that set is supposed to look like? The cacophony of colors makes it look almost like it was built from a random bin of parts lying around.
They do that to make it easier to find the bricks, make it more interesting to look at while building and because they likely produce more bricks in those basic colors (last one may be outdated).
Yes, this is common in modern sets. Quite a few have the color puke shining through, even if it's fully assembled, which is a common complaint.
It's a bad time to cut quality. Lego has never really had serious contenders in its decades of existence, but the Chinese knockoffs are getting pretty good from what I can tell. They are producing knockoff sets for 1/3 of the cost, and the quality is reaching lego-levels.
And this isn't low profit margin. Lego has gotten the Chinese to raid several of these guys (Lepin) and it didn't slow them at all.
The real gauntlet just got thrown down recently. Remember the UCS Millenium Falcon? Well a MOC builder made a UCS but with an interior model of the Falcon as well. Guess where you can buy that? Well, NOT Lego, and I think that's a problem in Lego management.
With the internet there should be FAR MORE Lego-provided sets. Sure, have the Harry Potters and Star Wars sets. But we are talking about a company that (granted to very good tolerances) is charging a LOT for very cheap plastic. They should be exploiting far more of the long tail.
Why can't I buy from Lego a complete set of old-school Classic Space? Or Castle? Why do sets go "out of print"?
They are leaving money on the table, and the Chinese/Malaysian/etc companies will happily fill the void.
From what I can tell, the fake Lego industry has already structured itself into a somewhat legal resistant form. The base legos are manufactured by one set of companies, which they can do 100% legally.
Those companies sell the blocks to the companies that produce the knockoff sets. If you raid those companies, well fine they lose some stock and they just setup somewhere else with the exact same sourcing.
> With the internet there should be FAR MORE Lego-provided sets. Sure, have the Harry Potters and Star Wars sets. But we are talking about a company that (granted to very good tolerances) is charging a LOT for very cheap plastic. They should be exploiting far more of the long tail.
Lego now has infinitely more models than when I grew up, and they seemingly increase the catalog every year, so this is a very strange criticism. They have Marvel stuff, Friends, Harry Potter, Star Wars, Simpsons, etc etc etc. The number of sets is truly bewildering. Obviously they can't produce everything forever.
Also, they are not selling "cheap plastic" anymore than Netflix is selling "cheap electrons". The plastic bricks are just the medium, the product is the design, the Lego brand, the licensed brand (if any), the whole experience.
I haven't had a close look at Lego bricks for years until a few weeks ago and got a chance to compare that with copycat set. That made me extremely aware of the high level of quality that a Lego set has: the bricks are extremely well made and durable, the sets are working and (more or less) exciting and the build instructions are designed meticulously to make it clear where everything needs to go. The instructions are broken into smaller steps for kits aimed at younger children.
One thing they seem to have lost over the years is the flexibility of the kits: I remember many kits having instructions for several alternate models, encouraging you much more to take things apart again after building. Newer kits are mostly a single model and that limits the fun that you end up having with them. The invitation to tinker seems gone.
There is an excellent and extensive range of Creator 3-in-1 sets, as well as the entire Classic line which encourages specifically this. For the themed sets, they stopped including ideas on the back of the box because people would complain that instructions weren't included.
> For the themed sets, they stopped including ideas on the back of the box because people would complain that instructions weren't included.
This is why we can’t have good things _sigh_
Yes, the re-build aspect is almost gone. As I kid I got maybe 5-10 original sets over a 10 year period, and a few bags of random bricks, and I played and played with that. Nowadays the idea is more build and forget. If you're lucky they'll play a bit with the finished model, but they don't seem to be making their own.
One fun fact about the instructions, I recently learned from a Lego designer that the reason they use many different colours on the inside of most models is to make it easier to see what's going on while you're building. That explanation never occurred to me, but maybe it's obvious.
I still have a collection of original instructions from the mid-70s onward: I'm guessing they are potentially more valuable than the actual bricks that my kids have now outgrown.
1000% agree. My wife is into Lego creator/expert sets, in particular buildings. So I typically buy her a new one at least twice a year, for her birthday and Christmas. I'm having to work harder now to find sets she hasn't already built, and having to pay more because they're out of production already and Lego isn't building new ones too often.
I accidentally bought a Chinese knock-off set, and it was surprisingly good. The brick quality was totally comparable to Lego. The part that was lacking was the build methodology -- it was damn near impossible to build successfully the way the instructions said. But there's more variety in the knock-off sets, more accessories like lighting and such, they cost half as much (and probably still have a ridiculous margin). Lego should be worried, and they should step up their game. Becoming known for collectibility seems to be their strategy right now, but it is going to make people like me look elsewhere.
_The part that was lacking was the build methodology -- it was damn near impossible to build successfully the way the instructions said._
How much does good documentation and designing models costs? You can’t just copy pieces of plastic.
I have a Creality 3D printer. The hardware itself was good. But the tinkering needed to get it working was a lot. All the useful help came from the community. The official support is useless and every time I contacted them they are incapable of telling me if something is in spec, out of spec, or even point me to documentation.
Imagine giving a child a physical toy that you need to consult the internet for instructions because the included ones are incomplete or wrong. Maybe you have a piece missing and the instructions are wrong.
Even if Lego is charging too much, they may have head room. When they feel they are being threatened, they can lower prices and still have the best kits and we’d all flock back.
> How much does good documentation and designing models costs?
I agree. This is probably the most difficult part by a good margin for the Chinese companies to effectively copy. The documentation itself was surprisingly good (they basically copied the style of the Lego books), what they don't have are people who are the equal of the 'lego master model builder'. Someone who really knows how to engineer the model both for the final result as well as the process to make it.
> Why can't I buy from Lego a complete set of old-school Classic Space? Or Castle? Why do sets go "out of print"?
Unlike digital copies, molds have a limited lifespan. Making a one-off piece for a set needs to be done in the tens of thousands (or more) or not at all.
Meanwhile, if I understand, they have a program to assemble parts lists and instructions for one offs.
> Why do sets go "out of print"?
Injection moulds have a finite life, so _parts_ go out of print. Unfortunately their tendency to use set-specific parts causes this to make sets go out of print.
(Obviously they could make another mould, but that commits them to a whole print run to make it economically viable.)
What is a realistic lifetime for an injection mold used for Lego bricks? Does someone here know the order of magnitude of pieces you can manufacture with one?
https://www.wired.com/2013/02/retired-lego-mold-reddit/
gives an example of 120,000,000 (!), which probably means the "special piece" argument doesn't entirely work.
On the other hand, they quote "one moulding machine working for an hour almost equals one LEGO star destroyer", which does explain why they're so expensive.
That is definitely the first-order engineering answer. However once the concept/possibility enters into executive consciousness all bets on the “why” shift to profit motive.
Why wouldn't they have a "profit motive"? They are a company, not a charity.
Injection moulds do have a finite life, but since set-specific parts are only used in a single set, those moulds won't wear out nearly as fast as the moulds for common bricks.
I should have heeded the warning. I wasted too much time already. Very fun to see someone go off on a Lego set like this. Rightly so I must add.
If anyone is wondering the title of the video is: "700€?? Ernsthaft, LEGO®? Die bunte Pest : Star Wars 75252 UCS Star wars Destroyer Devastator"
He’s getting paid by the competitor. His comments are amusing but take it with a grain of salt. His opinion is paid.
That's wrong.
He was partnered with lego as a store, so he had exclusive access to stuff you can't get otherwise. After he brought up certain issues and they sued him he dropped that.
So he's now selling lego and he's selling stuff from the competition. But he has no more access to the partner exclusive stuff (like lego bags). The only thing you can actually say is that he went all-in on bashing the stuff lego does wrong. I mean, he's living from PR and selling stuff.
Do you have a source for that?
How do you know that his opinion is paid?
It's not.
What if someone is paid for an opinion they already have?
That is a very present question when looking at a lot of think tanks and whatnot.
Personally, I'd say it undermines my trust in a few ways. The broadest is undue weight: if some kinds of opinions are being paid for and others aren't, we're going to hear more of the paid-for opinions. But it also creates more direct incentives to a) say what _might_ be rewarded, and b) once on the gravy train, say what one's sponsors like to _keep_ getting rewarded. And worst, I think, is that money distorts cognition. As Sinclair wrote, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
So for me, any conflict of interest like that undermines the offered opinion. It's somewhere between hard and impossible to know how much influence is involved.
I had a disagreement with a famous (in my country) snowboarder on the internet about this topic. He goes on secondhand gear and beginners snowboarding forums and suggests boards by the brand that sponsors him. I told him he should at least put on a disclaimer on his comments explaining he is paid. His reply was that he chose the sponsor because he likes the product. I still think it's immoral.
This is what all spokespeople are trying to convince you is happening. We only ask people to mention that they're sponsored, not to declare their current opinions are lies.
Did they sue or was it "just" an Abmahnung?
I saw a term in the comments: AFOL. I had to look it up: Adult Fan Of Legos.
I loved legos as a kid and would spend hours building stuff. Now the kits seem more like models to be assembled and put on display and not touched rather than “a paint brush of blocks” where I can use my imagination. It lost my interest. My attention is now on software where I feel I can build anything. I liken it to my lego experience as a child.
I don’t necessarily think there’s a right or wrong thing here. It’s interesting to note how our mind changes as we age and grow older. The ”do anything” mentality get displaced with something else. This would make for an interesting PhD topic. :)
I found another quote from a related article that captured this feeling.
“It’s like a blast to the past, straight to our childhoods,” said Deason, 40, who lives in Connellsville, Pa. “It took me by surprise, but it makes sense: Life is so structured. But with Lego, you can do anything.”
Deason has a few million Lego pieces, which she organizes by type and color. The Star Wars and Architecture sets, she says, are the most popular among adults, who almost always look for the instruction manuals.
“The younger kids come in and it’s all about their imaginations — playing pretend, building zombie towns,” she said. “But at some point that gets lost. The adults seem to value the final finished project. That’s where they get their satisfaction.”
> Now the kits seem more like models to be assembled and put on display and not touched rather than “a paint brush of blocks” where I can use my imagination. It lost my interest.
That's how that whole "kit" malarkey has seemed to me ever since it started. What's the fricking use of a Millennium Falcon, or a motorized excavator for that matter, when it's full of bespoke pieces that only really work for that particular end product? The whole idea totally sucks, IMO.
When I was a kid, "kits" didn't exist; there were _only_ generic pieces, and I think that's the way it still ought to be.
Yeah, yeah, get off my lawn.
They still have the original sets that come with guides to build many things out of the same set of bricks, and a box to put them in. These are the best ones to get kids just starting out.
Plus the lego stores have pieces sorted in buckets like a candy shop, you buy a container and fill it up with whatever you want. I've never used it, but the website lets you choose from 1400 different bricks
https://www.lego.com/en-us/page/static/pick-a-brick
The Sets will sometimes have a unique piece or two, but outside of the mini figs it is way rarer than you might think. And as others pointed out if it's unique now it doesn't mean they won't find a way to reuse it later.
>Now the kits seem more like models to be assembled and put on display and not touched rather than “a paint brush of blocks” where I can use my imagination.
This isn't true at all. You can still buy a box full of bricks. You can even go online and purchase single bricks if you have a specific build in mind. Even the model kits are still just a box full of bricks--Lego abhors creating unique blocks unless they can be used in other sets.
The reason a lot of adults gravitate toward the finished kits is the same reason adults stop picking up cool sticks outside: We just lose our imagination.
> Even the model kits are still just a box full of bricks--Lego abhors creating unique blocks unless they can be used in other sets.
I've heard this again and again, and I believe it used to be true. But is it still really the case? My daughters have been gifted a number of Lego sets in the past few years that are simply full of very one-off looking pieces that are hard to use for much else, with very few standard bricks.
I don't doubt that the molds can be repurposed for some other sets potentially, but as an example look at this set that we have and see if you really think it's "just a box full of bricks".
https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/anna-elsa-s-frozen-playgr...
What bugs me about sets like that is there's very little ability to build something completely different with it, which to me is what Lego used to be about. The most fun I had as a kid (and what my kids seem to enjoy most) is just building random things from a pile of bricks (which is why I buy them the generic brick packs rather than the sets like above).
I just bought and built the relatively recent Lego typewriter set [1], and I had this exact same question: how much of it was going to be purpose built, and how much would be just generic pieces. The answer is: almost all pieces are just regular Lego pieces.
A small number of components (the curved edge just above the keyboard, for instance, or the roller handle) seemed purpose-made for this model, but, like 99% of the pieces were totally generic. And this is in a set with more than 2000 pieces with lots of very intricate mechanics (there's a roller, a carriage, air pistons, and a ratchet/escapement mechanism that moves the carriage), but virtually all of it was made up of standard bricks, rods, connectors and generic components. I was super impressed. Even the keys are just Lego disks with stickers on them. The spacebar is just regular Lego with a smooth surface.
I feel like people have been making this complaint against Lego forever, and it's always "when I was kid, we just got a box of bricks and let our creativity take over!". The harsh truth is that Lego didn't change. We just grew up.
[1]:
https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/typewriter-21327
Lego very very rarely will design a new element for a set, let alone a Ideas/Creator set. For a new part, its in the neighborhood of 300-500k for a new injection mold for a single new piece. That's not going to happen for most one off sets. Sometimes sets do get designed with new pieces in mind, or when they really have a shortcoming. But I don't see anything obvious in the typewriter set that is purpose built.
Reviewing the bricklink entry for the typewriter, the only noticeable new items are the painted key tiles for the typwriter. Painting is a great way to give new life to old tiles. I see some new color options as well, but nothing "new"
https://www.bricklink.com/v2/catalog/catalogitem.page?S=2132...
For good creative play, they have to limit the diversity of pieces and colours within a single theme. Different sets from the same theme need to have similar pieces in the same colour scheme so they can co-exist nicely. Take these 3 sets from the classic 1990s Pirates, for example:
6259 "Broadside's Brig"
https://brickset.com/sets/6259-1/Broadside-s-Brig
6267 "Lagoon Lock-up"
https://brickset.com/sets/6267-1/Lagoon-Lock-Up
6265 "Sabre Island"
https://brickset.com/sets/6265-1/Sabre-Island
Combining these 3 on a big baseplate can give you something completely new and interesting that still belongs to the Pirate theme. The bulk of the parts are white and yellow-coloured bricks for walls and architectural elements.
Was this reply meant for me? I agree overall!
You’re right, I misremembered: the keys didn’t use stickers, they were painted on. But as you say, they were standard Lego pieces, just painted.
> Even the keys are just Lego disks with stickers on them
My set had the letters printed on the top pieces of the keys; did you have to put stickers on them seperately? If so, then that's a major setback in quality: I really dislike Lego sets with many stickers as the stickers always loosen over time.
I find this to be more true in "gift-priced" sets. ~$25 and less.
But once you hit the ~$30+ sets, you see more and more creativity with the generic pieces. I would assume that the cheaper sets need to look good but have fewer pieces, so they reach for bigger pieces to fill in the gaps.
$100+ sets are mind-blowing in how fun they are to assemble and to see the level of creativity the designer(s) used to create the set. I got the recently released Mario question block cube. And I can't get over how fun it was to assemble.
I think the summary is: to really get to the "reusablility" there's a tipping point in those price ranges I listed above. If you buy a bunch of little sets or one big set, you'll hit that point.
The counter argument to this are the Creator 3-in-1 sets. The whole point of these sets is to take apart and rebuild something different, teaching by example the different things you can do. These didn't even exist when we were kids (first released 2003). I remember some of my old sets having supplemental build instructions, but I also recall them never being as interesting as the main build, which isn't true with these 3-in-1's. Plain buckets are also still sold. Both of these are on the shelves of Target and Walmart, and are often featured as Christmas gifts at places that just stock them seasonally, like Costco. Lego has just as many of these sort of sets as it always has, if not more.
First off I don't think the existence of large, expensive adult-targeted "display model" kits doesn't really detract from what is happening in the kids sets.
On the kids sets, Lego is doing a lot more licensed sets than in the past, and these inevitably have more custom pieces. But I think adults really over-estimate the negative impact this has on reuse and creativity. The first thing the kid in me thinks when I see that kit you listed is "How can I build a ramp at the end of that slide?" "How can I extend the slide at the top to make them go faster?". Sometimes pieces having having a purpose can prompt ideas and creativity. Sure those big ice blocks will only every be used for ice/glass, but there are lots of things you can build with ice/glass especially when playing with Frozen characters. Many of the custom pieces in licensed sets are just flourishes (like that snowflake or ice-flame) which are fun things you can add to your model, and 80-90's kits definitely had those as well. I think the biggest obstacle to reuse on that kit is just that it is a small kit - it really needs to be combined with other kits do do interesting things (and for which reason I don't think they should have included those large ice blocks in _this_ particular kit, as that just exacerbates that problem - they would be fine in a larger kit). And again, I remember getting bored with small kits received as a kid after a few days of play (visiting grandparents), and looking forward to getting home and combining some of the cool new pieces with the Legos I already had.
In other words, the licensed kits are the equivalent of the castle and pirate kits we had as kids, with the exact same complaints. I think those complaints were overblown then and they still are now.
I don't see any specialty pieces in there that I would be unable to use in another build. The problem is that the ratio of specialty pieces to generic pieces is too high; you would need a lot of generic rectangular bricks to build anything substantially different from what's in the picture.
I wonder how much the ratio of specialty to generic pieces differs between the lego junior sets like the one you linked vs sets intended for older children.
My parents used to say exactly that circa 1990, and yet I managed (to build my own designs without instructions). Now, I definitely agree that there are more sophisticated bricks than there used to be, but my daughter manages as well. I think it’s just different.
In your example, the ice-looking things can be repurposed. The slide could be anything from an emergency exit from a secret lair to a thing for kids to play on a beach. Plenty of stories if you think a little. The snow flake could be a sign for an ice cream shop or anything decorative in a fancy home, or an exotic rock on another planet. The other bricks look fairly standard. I’m pleased that the chest hasn’t changed, I quite liked it ~30 years ago.
That you're unable to find uses for those pieces speaks to a lack of creativity, ironically :)
Check this out:
https://www.newelementary.com/2017/10/pdc-parts-festival-day...
I only see two bricks in there that I don't recognize from when I was a child. Three if you count the bear, but there have always been animals that aren't actually part of building anything. Yeah, that particular set would be difficult to build anything else with, but not because the pieces are unique, there just aren't that many. It's a cheap set, there have always been cheap sets that you can only really build one thing with.
There are only a few pieces in that set that don't appear in hundreds of other sets:
The baseplate is custom and the most egregious example of what you are talking about, of course.
The slope at the front with the swirl on it is also custom.
There's a round tile with a snowflake on it, that appears in two other sets.
The giant snowflake on top, about two dozen other winter-themed sets.
The slide also appears in only a couple of dozen pieces, but this basically all pieces that include a playground or similar. The slide is functional for play so it can't be trivially made of smaller pieces without compromising that.
There also an ornamental swirly translucent smoke-like piece that only appears in a handful of sets, again, all winter themed.
That's it, the rest of the pieces in the kit appear in literally hundreds of other sets.
It's not so much about whether the pieces are used in other sets - of course Lego is going to want to build molds and use them in multiple sets, dedicating a mold for just this set would not be smart.
I think my concern is more nuanced - if you're a kid and you _only_ get sets like this one, when you get past the "let's build what's on the box" stage and they end up as just a pile of bricks, the number of more generically-useful pieces is low compared to all the specialty pieces. I think in an ideal situation, you have lots of generic pieces and a selection of custom (like the typewriter mentioned in another post), but these sets seem to be the opposite with lots of quirky custom pieces and few generic pieces good for general building.
I'm sure as another poster pointed out that this is a result of "gift-priced" sets, and trying to have something impressive while keeping the part count low. And for my kids it doesn't matter as I've bought them plenty of "just a bunch of brick" sets to go with all these specialty parts. But if you're a kid whose parents aren't willing to drop a lot of $$ on Lego (which have always been on the pricey side), then you're more likely to end up with a collection made only from the $10-25 kits with an over-emphasis on specialty pieces.
When I was a kid (in the 80s), I remember getting lots of Lego sets along these lines:
https://brickset.com/sets/6375-2/Exxon-Gas-Station
Notice the cars - they are very blocky and do not look much like real cars because they're almost entirely made out of generic bricks. The gas pumps and roof and such are mostly just regular pieces, possibly with stickers or screen-printing. Compare it to something like this:
https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/fire-rescue-police-chase-...
Yes, there's still generic pieces in there, but my eye sees a lot more specialty pieces like the hoods, car roofs, fenders, motorcycle, etc. IMHO, the 80s set offers more potential for rebuilding into other things, but maybe I'm wrong and it is just nostalgia or something like that.
They had those style of vehicles by my childhood in the 90's, and I don't think having a few pre-built vehicle pieces really hampered creativity. I would just spend hours working out how to work those car parts into a giant mad-max monstrosity using as many bricks as I could.
I had that gas station!
I agree with you on the blocky -ness of the cars. I wonder how the distribution of sizes changed. As the complexity of the design goes up you need different distribution of sizes, smaller for more detail and larger for bigger structures. I always had a good balance of blocks, never too many of one size and never running out of others.
I believe it's true for some sets more than others. In my experience any sets with Disney on them or sets based on partnerships with other brands are the worst for this however.
This is a textbook example of the widespread "juniorization" issue Lego had for a while 15-20 years ago. You'd get a Town car set, and it would have about 17 pieces, because the entire chassis would be one piece. You have linked a set explicitly in their Junior product offerings, bridging between Duplo and real Legos.
I think things have actually swung too far in the other direction now with their main-line sets. As much as 25% of the part count typically consists of tiny 1x1 or 2x1 plates and tiles, or 1x1 cheese wedges. There are often many cases where they will use more smaller bricks rather than a more structurally-sound brick - 1x3 bricks and the corner L-shaped bricks in particular.
> Lego abhors creating unique blocks unless they can be used in other sets.
Its always my favorite thing to see how some of the semi-unique pieces get re-used. I put together Anakin's Podracer recently and part of the decorative elements on the engine part were the Lego LOTR Orc Swords!
I think the fins on the back of a batmobile set I have are from a dragon in one of the 'castle' sets...
Or the original blasters in the Star Wars sets that were backwards megaphones with a piece on the end.
The Lego Star Destroyer has several “hammer of Thor” greebles (the interesting decorative surface details) in the engine section
When I was building the James Bond DB5 I was amused that the exhaust manifolds for the engine are actually revolvers:
https://brickset.com/sets/containing-part-4211029
bullwhip + lightsabre hilt = ghostbuster proton wand
I purchased the Spring Lantern Festival earlier this year, and the decorations on the corners of the pagoda are blue bananas :-)
And the lightposts used paint rollers as part of their design.
I have discovered a way to reverse that effect of aging, but it's painfully expensive: I have a son in my fifties. It has rejuvenated my sense of play.
I have recently been enthusiastically playing with my daughter and her Duplo sets (Lego for younger children, basically just larger blocks). Now eyeing up various adult sets for myself…
Everything you said is very true.
ANY Lego set you buy lets you arrange the bricks how you want. If you want different parts you can buy different sets.
Why are people saying Lego should be responsible for this? Take your model and drop it on the floor. Start building.
_The reason a lot of adults gravitate toward the finished kits is the same reason adults stop picking up cool sticks outside: We just lose our imagination._
This just isn't true. When you are a kid, lots of sticks seem different: When you are an adult, you've seen _lots and lots_ of sticks and they cease to become interesting. This is the same reason we don't find a lot of joy in children's learning toys. We should be moving on.
Some folks find out they like putting things together, even if there isn't much imagination going on: Cue lego kits, puzzles, cross stitch, home improvement, and so on.
Adult imagination looks different from children's imagination, in part because adults have knowledge and experience that children lack, which is why sometimes an imaginative child won't necessarily be creative in their daydreams. Adults are more likely to put it into things like parenting or making dinner or trying to stretch money to cover everything and still get gifts.
Adults are out there making artwork. Creating new software. Creating music and movies and designing buildings and public spaces and stadiums and playing sports. All of these things require imagination and creativity.
> Lego abhors creating unique blocks unless they can be used in other sets.
true for the most part, but there was a time where that was not true, we had part of the 90's where unique pieces ran wild. thankfully, they've moved back to more generic pieces, but the bioncle years were crazy.
Absolutely! I wasn't into building with Lego growing up, but my 5yo is and we often go to an aftermarket Lego store to buy bricks in bulk that aren't part of a specific kit.
The AT-AT model that they are talking about here is a UCS (Ultimate Collector's Series) set. These are definitely intended for adult builders to assemble a model and put on display. They are more focused on detail and less focused on "playability" as with some other sets that have moving or reconfigurable elements.
This is literally the core conflict driving the plot of the Lego Movie.
I guess I know what I'm watching this weekend...
EDIT: I see someone made a reference to 'This Island Earth' elsethread, so now I've got to pick one of the two
My wife is very much an AFOL. I buy her a couple of the expensive creator/expert sets each year.
We also have several bins of generic legos of all shapes & sizes for the kids. They occasionally get technic sets, too, as gifts.
These are not at odds with each other, Lego is successfully marketing to two demographics that are complimentary to one another. It's a good strategy. What's not a good strategy is their really lackluster pace of creating new sets, or the speed with with they take old ones out of production so they become a thousand bucks on the secondary market.
I mean, it's also an AT-AT... You know, from 1980? It's not just that it's not simple bricks, it's that it's still our generations fantasy, too.
If our generation will be remembered for one thing, it will be our iron-fist clenched around our childhood culture. Our children will have toys, yes, too many to count, but they will be 50 year old references to things kids only see the regurgitation of. New stories? Bleh, give them GhostBusters 19 in 2035, screw it.
I built my own AT-AT back in '81 using mostly red bricks as I only had the articulating flat bricks from various fire engine sets to use for the legs. You built what you could from the pieces you had.
I did buy a lot of Star Wars sets for my kids but it's not the same when you skip the design step.
These kind of lego sets still exist, mostly under the "Lego Classic" brand. Also, many "yes we are making legos but can't use that name" companies exist which produce more of a playset instead of a model to assemble.
It’s been a while, so maybe there are better ones now, but I never found a company that produced bricks anywhere near the quality that LEGO does.
If anyone knows of LEGO alternatives that are high quality I’d love to know.
I believe the current best is Mould King or Decool? At least for Technic sets. But check out r/lepin on Reddit and people will be talking about all of the alternative brick manufacturers, and people will say which ones are the best.
_The ”do anything” mentality get displaced with something else_
I disagree, I think plenty of adults still have that mentality, but for them Legos is not the place to fulfill it. As a kid, Legos are one of the most approachable medium to manifest your imagination. But they are also very limited. As an adult, with more skills, knowledge, and money you might get into wood or metalworking or software instead, where you have significantly more freedom.
An AFOL might be looking for something more nostalgic or meditative (e.g. rock gardens, bonsai?), and so they approach it differently.
I still firmly believe Lego is "one of a kind" in the toys category. I personally still use Lego Technics to prototype stuff from time to time. The thing is, kids (and maybe adults too) do not play Lego as they did before. The less toys you have, the more you reuse, reshuffle, tinker. It may be surprising but kids have no time for this today. Build (following the instructions), play, switch.
I actually find it interesting in a positive sense that it is possible to design something that cannot be taken apart in Lego.
Some of the newer sets have the "issue" in my mind that they aren't balanced. Either they use tiny bricks and build up everything, or they're based on pretty large single pieces.
The mid-size bricks seems less used now compared to the sets I got as a kid 30 years ago. When I pick out Lego sets for my daughter it's often based on the type of bricks included, and sometimes we just get classic brick sets. Building using the 1 - 4 stud piece, especially the flat ones, get boring pretty quickly.
I agree. It feels like most Lego sets on the market have several major/foundational pieces which are essentially useless outside of the model they're built for - some huge chunk of molded plastic. A big part of the joy of Lego sets in the past was that they showed you what was possible with these unassuming bricks. Sure, any big/intricate set would have some funny pieces, but they would mostly lend themselves to many forms of re-use that even a 10-year old could easily figure out. My 4 year-old has had a great time with Duplos, but I'm sort of leary about transitioning to Legos because to me, they've become more emblematic of consumerist collecting than creativity.
> It feels like most Lego sets on the market have several major/foundational pieces which are essentially useless outside of the model they're built for - some huge chunk of molded plastic.
Do you have an example of a one of those pieces?
I haven't had a Lego set in decades, but I do recall feeling that the ratio of fiddly pieces vs "foundational" pieces getting out of whack towards the end of my time with them. When my kids get old enough I suppose I'm going to have to get them one of those "classic" sets, because I'm not sure they'll be able to get enough by just collecting regular sets.
I feel like almost any new kit I look at is composed of big specially-molded bricks that would seem really odd and difficult to find a use for if they were deconstructed in a big box of bricks. Maybe I'm misremembering or am being too harsh on the newer kits, but I feel like the Lego sets I grew up with in the 80's and 90's were more reusable. I had the sense that every Lego kit I bought was also giving me cool new tools to build bigger/wilder spaceships and trucks, whereas these just look like a nice weekend project with no application thereafter.
https://www.amazon.com/LEGO-Legendary-Mountain-Awesome-Build...
https://www.amazon.com/LEGO-Creator-Adventure-Building-Creat...
https://www.amazon.com/LEGO-Champions-McLaren-Building-Piece...
All I'm seeing in these sets is mostly standard pieces, possibly with custom prints or stickers. The waterfall pieces might be entirely custom, but pretty much everything else is something you find in a lot of sets. Most things are made from small & reusable pieces like before, but there are just more kinds of bricks and they are assembled more creatively (especially in more expensive sets like the Creator Expert sets).
> The waterfall pieces might be entirely custom, but pretty much everything else is something you find in a lot of sets.
And stuff like that isn't new. I remember I had a "castle" set that had these wall-with-window pieces [1], which were kind of similar. You could still use them creatively. Also that waterfall set has a lot of pieces that would be good for building stuff like spaceships or planes.
[1]
https://www.bricklink.com/v2/catalog/catalogitem.page?P=4444...
The older pieces fell out of copyright. So Lego differentiated by making new peices, to stay ahead of the knockoffs.
At least that was my understanding in the mid-90s, when I worked in the toy industry.
I'm still conflicted about it. Though I can't deny the creativity on display at any LUG or brickcon, I greatly miss the simplicity. I own too much Lego and I've given up trying to rationally organize loose peices.
This article is due for a refresh, but it's still relevant on this topic:
http://www.realityprose.com/what-happened-with-lego/
They still sell the unassuming legos? And they are quite cheap (compared to the branded ones) and still quite popular
Are you referring to the Chinese clones?
Not the OP, but they're probably referring to the Classic sets:
https://www.amazon.com/LEGO-Classic-Medium-Creative-Brick/dp...
which exist in any possible size, full of bog standard bricks. There's also a _large_ line of 3-in-1 sets, which have the instructions for 3 different models, all using the same set of bricks.
As a kid, I was given a random box of legos with no guidance. I wanted to make things but I couldn't. Didn't know "how". I quickly lost interest.
As an adult, I've purchased a couple of sets and had a great time putting it together. Following the instructions, I can see more easily see how different combinations of bricks, when put together, makes a certain shape. I wish I had something similar growing up.
Some kids can be given a paint brush and develop enough interest by themselves to become an expert. Most kids need guidance. Whether its a coloring book or more formal instruction, having concrete and achievable goals is how most people stay interested in learning a skill. For people who do not have any artistic skills, it's not realistic to ask them to just pick up some paint and a canvas, and just "use your imagination". IMO, what Legos is doing is the right thing for most people.
For the people who can be motivated to learn in a vacuum, they have a valuable gift.
When I was a kid in the 70's we would (more or less) build the "picture on the box" (sometimes with, sometimes without instructions) exactly once after getting a new Lego set, then liberate the bricks to never inhabit that form again.
Can't imagine what the attraction is of having the same boring thing as everybody else.
The kits I got in the 80s and early 90s often came with instructions for alternative builds. It was like they wanted you to know you could build things other than the picture on the box.
The designs of those kits from the 80s and 90s were also very flimsy and would break easily if you started to play with them. So really, the original build falling apart and becoming spare parts was almost expected.
This really changed once they started including Technics pieces as structural parts of builds, rather than as a totally separate product line. Most things I've built in recent years are far more robust than what I built as a kid.
Can't comment on kits from after about '80 but this reminds me, when I was a kid my older brother would labor extensively to build the most elaborate and beautiful spaceships, while I would pack my bricks tight into a minimalist indestructible vessel. When the inevitable clash arrived, my ship almost always prevailed, though I usually had to run away after.
My brother and I used to build space fighters with a pilot inside who could see outside, with the goal of being able to throw them at the wall as hard as possible without them coming apart - our parents were not fans lol. It's perfectly doable if you build around the pilot using nothing but flat grey bricks, wings and horizontal boosters, and ensure almost every piece is reinforced by multiple overlapping pieces above and below.
They still do this. I have a 341-piece LEGO kit of a Space Shuttle on a transport truck from a couple of years ago. It also includes instructions for building two additional models that use nearly all of the pieces: a jeep with a camper trailer, and a flatbed truck with a helicopter landing pad with the helicopter. I don't think the set has any specialized pieces at all.
I loved Lego as a kid. Used to build so many things without manuals. My brother built houses and I built a lot of vehicles.
Now I've got 2 boys and I buy tons of lego's for the three of us. We're trying to get mom involved and bought her the Parisian Restaurant (10243). We still use the 20 year old ground plates from my childhood. You can rejuvenate most lego in a dishwasher (put them in a washer net)
I still think it's great fun. I do focus a little more on the manuals then when I was younger. But most builds inevitably get destroyed and the bricks re-used for our ever evolving lego land.
Pirate Roller Coaster (31084) is inexpensive if you want coaster parts for your DIY city.
Lego sets these days seem geared more towards vapid consumerism than to promote free flow creative building. My kids found a way to fill that gap via knex.
I don't agree that only adults take enjoyment in the final product. It's just that adults and children are interested in different things and have different household decision making circumstances. As an adult, you wouldn't buy a zombie town lego set that consists of random pieces haphazardly thrown together even considering the prospect of build-anything flexibility nostalgia, and as a child, you typically don't have the means to buy architecture sets on an impulse, nor the inclination to stare at a complex lego project with few flexible components.
Having kids helps. Mine likes to build the sets, sometimes with help, but he'll irreverently tear them down for parts. I like that the official builds don't stick around. We do our own thing. Most of the weirdly shaped one-off parts _do_ get repurposed, except, sadly, the dart launchers, because the darts fell victim to the Jaws of ADHD Oral Fixation.
> I don’t necessarily think there’s a right or wrong thing here.
Yeah, I feel like the giant, expensive Star Wars sets are for adults that don't intend to take their creations apart, and are actually concerned about keeping them whole while moving between apartments, condos, or homes. In that regard, I think this is kind of a feature for them.
Most parents are going to buy smaller sets throughout the year for their kids, budget permitting.
> _I had to look it up: Adult Fan Of Legos._
An AFOL would likely tell you that it's actually "Adult Fan Of _Lego_"
Lego still sells basic sets that can used to build everything.
AKA President Business.
I'd say someone earned a free AT-AT for the bug report.
On the one hand that's a minor quibbling little problem there, "I have to use tools on this _one_ part when disassembling it", and then the dearth of such problems during their run is an amazing testament to their engineering process. That they have fans that can catch this issue and explain it so well is another testament to the standards they've maintained.
Can we call "lego instructions" an example of software design? I think we must. Programs designed to run on meat CPUs of unknown specs.
> Can we call "lego instructions" an example of software design? I think we must. Programs designed to run on meat CPUs of unknown specs.
So in this category of software, the vendor / product name _has_ to be a four-capitals acronym? LEGO, IKEA...
Lego instructions are the unparalleled 5-star tier on my "ranking of assembly instructions." No words (at least when I grew up, I haven't made a set in a long time), complicated assemblies, yet it's totally clear every step of the way. Glossy, high-res, colorful diagrams. Modular sub-assemblies. Every step is so clear.
Ikea gets a 4-star rating, sometimes 4.5.
Words? Immediately dock 1 star.
If using a manifest ("part A, B, E used in this step"), which is necessary because not everything is as distinct as Lego bricks, and you don't provide a scale printout so I can sort the M6x10's from M6x12's, dock a point. Another point if you don't label the diagram with callouts and expect me to visually discern two similar parts by their 10pixel wide render.
Using fasteners of very similar geometry (see above) for no discernible reason, dock a point.
Low print quality of diagram with the toner chipping off? Insta fail.
There is a perverse charm to the worst of the worst instructions too. The diagram shows the item, but then clearly the parts list and the instructions are from (at least) two different things completely. "It's a couch! there _are_ no wheels"
We should appreciate the incredible joy given to the world by such phrases as "Make sure the knob is well before screwing. Do not unclockwise the tread backwards."
One of my favorites is the mystery part. It's clearly the same finish and stamping line as the rest of the thing, but it doesn't seem to have a functional use anywhere in the product. it's not a spare... is it an optional bracket for a different thing? did it fall out of the inside of something? is it just included in _my_ particular package accidentally?
Of course occasionally you get really lucky and its an Interociter.
> Interociter
Oh, this thing? I use it to make hot chocolate.
I've only ever had one complaint about Lego instructions, and it goes way back to the first big star destroyer set. Early on you're assembling a triangular frame that is the core of the model. After what felt like 50+ pages, you're finally complete and ready to move on to the next part. Except the last page has a 'x2' indicating you need to make two of the bloody things, only at the end rather than the beginning so you can't build two in parallel as you go along.
Being an excited kid I might have missed it on the first page of instructions for that assembly but I sure was annoyed when I saw it.
I’ve been reassembling my Christmas legos, and I noticed the same thing. Except I went back and checked, and every single time I just missed the 2x on the submodule introduction.
So I am also doubting my childhood memories now. Maybe they were always consistent, and I was just in a hurry?
It's experiences like that that teach me to not just follow the instructions but to think about how I would do it, then follow the instructions. It's a delicate balance of blindly following instructions (which is essential-- oftentimes I think I see a better way and start to do it only to realize later on it's not going to work and there was a reason they did it their way) and thinking for yourself, which in your example would probably have sped things up.
Unfortunately, they've moved to electronic instructions for many of their kids sets that also include electronics. You have to use the iPad/Android app to assemble. For example, the playable Super Mario kits.
Now, as far as I've seen, this _is_ limited to kits that are designed to use their apps for play. Those apps are really cool though, so I am willing to look at it benevolently (all the more complicated steps give you an optional assembly video for that step which makes it nicer for smaller kids).
The app for the Duplo train is really surprising. It lets you mirror your custom track setup in the app and then play games with it while controlling the train.
From what I can tell, for those sets without physical instruction books, you can still get the traditional instructions in PDF form from the LEGO website or in the instructions app. That way you don’t have to use the interactive instructions in the LEGO Super Mario app.
Thanks, I'll look for that. I didn't know you could get a pdf out of the app
Ikea are _really_ missing 1:1 prints of screws and parts I shouldn't mix. See e.g.:
*
https://www.ikea.com/us/en/assembly_instructions/malm-storag...
Page 9, step 3
*
https://images.brickset.com/news/67650_3.png
Ha, I have the Malim!
Yeah, ikea doesn't do the 1:1 (or at least I haven't seen it) but they tend to use unmistakable parts. Like each of the metric cylinder head machine screws are different enough in aspect ratio it's easy (for me) to tell them apart. But I'm good at flatpack assembly (likely due to lego obsession growing up). I can see how that might be confusing for some.
Contrast that with the Anderson door I build last month. Didn't have any scale indication, really small diagrams, lots of nearly interchangeable fasteners, and way too wordy.
That is a genius drawing detail. Many manuals would benefit from assuming the appliance was operated by children ...
You might enjoy this video: Making Fake Directions & Hiring Someone to Build my IKEA Furniture
https://youtu.be/5_FCKzhN_dY?t=334
They make instructions in the style you described that are thoroughly ridiculous and hired people to follow them.
Yup, still no words. The benefit that provides them is probably quite large, so I doubt they'd move away from it.
No, we can't call Lego instructions "software design" because they're simply not comparable to software in any meaningful sense. They're nothing more than step-by-step instructions on how to assemble a fixed set of pieces. There's no varying input or output, no calculations being done. They're the same as the instructions to assemble a bookshelf, just with more pieces and steps.
The inputs are the pieces and the output is the finished set.
What a time to be alive.
This appears to be unintentional, but it does remind me a bit of the somewhat recent trend of "Legacy" board games, where you make permanent changes to core pieces, like putting stickers on the game board or tearing up cards.
That's interesting to me, because "replayability" has always been one of the core considerations in game design, but with a Legacy product, locked-in choices and permanent consequences are one of the selling points.
Its a compromise between replayability and the feeling of achievement that you get from a long running campaign game.
I feel like those are on opposing ends of a spectrum: one the one end you have games like chess, go or even Magic the Gathering that are infinitely replayable but have little to no story.
On the other end you have story driven games (Gloomhaven or even Descent) that can be played only once because the second time through does not offer too much new content.
Somewhat tangential to that are roleplaying and wargame campaigns where new "content" is introduced constantly by the GM or, even better, as a consequence of player interactions.
I feel like there is still some niche for some kind of game that randomly/procedurally generates new content (maps, stats, scenarios) each week that players then print out and use for a session.
[/rambling ... it's time for the weekend]
I played a legacy game with a group of friends and loved it. We got together every week at the same time for about 15 weeks (I forget exactly). Each week, the core mechanics were similar, but the board changed and there were new goals and such.
You put "replayability" in contrast to "legacy" but honestly we played that game more times (15) than a lot of traditional board games.
>You put "replayability" in contrast to "legacy" but honestly we played that game more times (15) than a lot of traditional board games.
You hit the nail on the head. The unfortunate truth is the vast majority of board games get played <5 times, often no more than once or even zero times! There's a long tail of games that get played way more than 5 times but the median has got to be down there. So the legacy games are less radical than they appear. If they're replacing one of those games in the very large bucket of quickly dropped games then they have no downside in terms of loss of replayability. And as you said, they incentivize replayability for my groups at least by essentially forcing someone to say "ok, when are we gonna play again?" because a lot of their value prop comes from the continuity.
Although as you point out the "replayability" is not the main selling point of the Legacy games, but with many of them you can still replay it like a "normal" board game once you reach the end of the campaign. And you end up with a game that is uniquely yours. I know in Risk Legacy this is possible.
There is a really cool Legacy-type game as well (I'm struggling to remember the name, Arcana I think?) where in the Legacy version you basically go through a campaign and develop a character that you can then use as another character to play as in the base game.
Interestingly enough, it might actually be good for replayability because the guaranteed absence of a card can change the optimal strategy in otherwise exactly the same situation.
You could also design the game so that the destroyed cards are intended to be replaced with new editions.
Of course instead of destroying the cards you can always rotate them back into the replacement deck.
That's something that came out of MMOs, by my read.
Impermanence is a tonic to cure obsession.
These days it's common for people into board games to only play a game 4 or 5 times, maybe even less, and move on to the new shiny. It's part of the reason there's so many new board games these days (chicken and the egg effect between buyers and publishers).
In that environment, it's probably a lot more acceptable to sell a game that a group will "only" play 15-20 times until the campaign is completed.
One thing that gives me comfort when looking at “Legacy” games is they are upfront about the lack of replayability. I don’t feel deceived going into it.
With Lego, my expectation is to be able to take things apart, build Model B or create something new. This breaks the design principle and doesn’t do a good job of advertising it’s going to do so.
There are some other games, like escape rooms in a box, where some of the puzzles encourage you to cut up the rulebook or things like that. On the one hand it hurts replayablity, but those sorts of games have next to no replayability to begin with. Once you solve the puzzle, there's not much left.
On one level it bothers me because you should be able to replay stuff, but at the same time it's the experience rather than the game board and there's a lot of ways to spend more than 10 bucks on an hour's entertainment.
I would even go one step further and suggest the title be editorialized with the word "unintentionally" added.
It gives customers a possible incentive to buy multiple copies of the game.
I thought that was the ploy the first time I heard about legacy games, too. But these things cost more than a hundred bucks, and typically offer 40+ hours of play. I don't think they're expecting many repeat buyers.
Can you give an example of what you mean?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0dDTbA1fq8
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/161936/pandemic-legacy-s...
https://www.amazon.com/Pandemic-Cooperative-Playtime-Z-Man-G...
Pandemic Legacy is probably the best known, and I think there's a version of Gloomhaven that is massive, but also single-play.
Risk Legacy is another fun one, although it also suffers from the same "permanent changes" issue (feature?) described above.
You say "suffers from" as if it is not the core intended feature of the game. It's the same way ice cream suffers from being delicious, or baseballs suffer from being hard.
Here's the wiki:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legacy_game
It seems accidental. Instead of "we have a new brick type that only goes together once", what has happened is that there's a configuration of normal lego bricks that can get pinned into place.
It is an accident ... but one which happened already a dozen times. Their manuals are the only thing which separate them from their knock-offs. Material quality is no longer.
A reviewer will see this immediately. Someone screwed up. They should hire an intern to simulate that and run a check in their modelling software.
You're forgetting the set design in the first place. All the knockoffs do is copy the set with their own bricks.
The few other brick manufacturers that design their own sets are clearly inferior in set design. Even Mega has a long way to go.
The smart knockoffs buy creations from fans so called MOC (my own creation). And these can be really good.
But you are right a factor to consider.
As someone who hasn't played with legos in 20 years but who is eagerly looking forward to my son being slightly older so that he can start with legos, did the material quality of legos degrade so much?
Lego is literally a plastic industry leader. Not only a toy industry leader. So no, their plastic quality has not suffered. But some of their competition is producing literally in the same building in China.
i think it's more that knockoffs are catching up. i certainly dont feel that my newer lego is any worse than before. i suppose you could say newer specialized pieces are inherently more fragile? i wouldnt make that argument myself though.
Overall the quality of modern Lego is excellent. My two objections are over-franchising with too many too niche sets (playability of generic sets is better) And, as usual, way too many police sets. What is it with Legoe and police? How many police sets kids really need? How about a hospital or other city structures?
Childhood pieces have survived years of abuse, but some recent pieces from the last few years have had issues, either outright breaking or crumbling.
For example, the 1x3 sloped pieces in some of the newer sets are super fragile near the edge. Similar pieces from many years ago survived.
It's unclear whether the modern set designs are putting new strains on weaker points or if the material quality is worse, but either way the result is a doubt about the longevity of the pieces
There were certain pieces in my childhood sets that broke regularly. something like "1x1 plate with horizontal clip". The clips broke off very easily if there was something attached.
Any Lego piece with a clip has been a problem since inception.
The worst were those grey pieces with clips on both ends and a 150-degree bend in the middle. So easy to break.
Some colors, notably brown, are just more brittle.
The material quality of the competitors has certainly improved! We bought some knockoffs while living in China that were pretty darn good. We learned which were better than others for sure.
Any recommendations? I'm based in Hong Kong, so can easily buy from taobao.
This site is so thick with ads that I cannot stand to read it on my phone. I made it through a paragraph several times and weird reload-like stuff keeps happing, making me lose my place so that the obnoxious video ad stuck to the top of the viewport can replay. And that’s after solving two captcha challenges to find all the busses. The internet is terrible now.
Reading with javascript off (UBlock Origion in default deny all JS) resulted in zero ad, and the ability to read the full article without interruption.
Not worth it to me. I was casually curious, but not curious enough to work around the fact that they’ve made their content almost inaccessible.
That's fine, but please do install UBlock Origin in any case. Future you will be thankful.
Of course I do on my laptop, but I've never really tried to improve the situation on my phone aside from installing AdGuard a long time ago. I just installed AdBlock and enabled every filter. Checked this site and the ads are gone! Thanks for the push.
While we're suggesting QoL extensions I would highly recommend both PrivacyBadger by the EFF (for blocking 3rd party trackers) and SponsorBlock for YouTube (mark and optionally auto-skip all the annoying sponsor / intro / self-promotion)
SponsorBlock is also available for YouTube Vanced on Android and I couldn't recommend it enough.
With the amount of ads I've gotten that redirect the browser to my mobile ISP's store trying to get me to buy some knockoff game or a site that causes it to constantly vibrate with a fake virus warning for my phone model, and other shenanigans, plus the stuff that happens on desktop, I no longer consider ad blockers QoL. They're a security essential like TLS and not leaving your phone unlocked.
Firefox mobile allows addons, including uBlock origin (and Dark Reader!)
You should install a blocker for security reasons.
The site more or less emulates a memory leak for me in chrome. Have had it open for 2 minutes and I'm at 1gb ram and a constant 15% CPU use for the tab... ram use is continuing to grow and in the time it has taken me to write this comment the tab has become unresponsive.
iOS Safari is crashing, 30 seconds after opening the article, every time.
Brickset is impossible on mobile unless you have uBlock or aggressive content blockers. You expect a punch-the-monkey popup like it's 1999.
The ads placed _inside_ user comments, as if they are content the user included in their message themselves, is particularly obnoxious.
iOS Safari now support “content blocker” extensions which means you can download 3rd party blockers (such as Firefox Focus).
It’s pretty non-obvious feature until you know about it.
Pi-hole, my brotha
FWIW if you create an account all of the ads go away.
This is a borderline inaccurate headline. This is an incidental characteristic of one tiny subassembly in a much larger model. The headline leads one to believe the entire set can’t be disassembled at all and that Lego deliberately designed it that way, perhaps for nefarious corporate purposes.
Additionally, and not to split hairs here, but buried in the middle of the article is the fact that it's a _Technic_ set, not actually a normal _Lego_ set.
Also who builds these models and _doesn't_ put them on a shelf to gather dust for 10 years? Unlikely they ever get dismantled.
I love LEGO and have recently gotten back into it with my kids. There are tons of wonderful sets to choose from and the designs are much more realistic than they were when I was growing up. BUT... I've consistently had pieces missing from new sets! It's not catastrophic. Usually it's just one piece and I can substitute in another from my collection, though often the wrong color.
Lego will send you replacements if you ask them, but that's a pain. Especially since something is deeply broken with my LEGO ID and I can't get into their stupid website.
It's not enough to make me stop buying the sets, but it kills the fun when my kid works hard on a set and can't finish it because of a manufacturing error.
we've purchased at least 40-50 lego sets in the past three years and there has never been a piece truly missing. This includes several really big sets like the Harry Potter Castle (~6000 pieces), Big Ben (~4000 pieces, though this is not as recent of a kit), the saturn V rocket (1969 pieces), two different space shuttles, and many many of the more consumer-level kits, many of them very recent, with no end of spiderman (at least 8 spiderman-related kits), star wars (at least 10-12 star wars related kits), super mario world kits, lego motorized trains, at least three separate commerical jetliner-related kits, two or three helicopteres, frozen/little mermaid/moana etc, minions, etc. our house is totally taken over by many thousands of dollars in legos all over the place.
through all of this, there has never been one single piece missing, ever. which is kind of mind blowing.
What usually happens when a piece is "missing" is, we used the piece incorrectly in another spot - this takes some detective work some kind, but it always turns up, there's the piece! none ever missing, ever.
once the things are built and our 7 year old takes complete charge of them, _then_ we lose pieces like crazy.
Not sure if my kids have that many sets yet (they basically just want Legos for every present so we'll be there soon), but I can definitely relate to this. Every set there is a "missing" piece that they ask me about, but it is always either found in the wrong spot or on the floor somewhere. It is to the point now that they tell me a piece is missing, I give them the look, and then they go back and find it on their own.
My Saturn V was "missing" 2 pieces and I even went to a Lego store in the mall and was given some replacements. Turns out they were stuck by static to the bag they came in. Luckily I hoard the bags in the box the set came in for no good reason so the missing pieces turned up.
Much later I decided to rearrange the letters near the bottom of the first stage and I got 4 spare S pieces from the missing pieces website Lego has.
I recently got the Fender Strat kit and I thought I was missing a few pieces but it turned out I was using the wrong color. The amp is made of a lot of gray pieces with various shades between them. The problem is that the instructions are printed on that glossy paper that doesn't really use the exact color of the brick so a direct comparison is impossible. For sets with very distinct colors, it's fine, but because this one had 3 different shades of gray, it was hard to tell which was which, especially when you factor in taking a day off in between building times.
we've had a few issues with missing pieces but it's usually a color problem: extra red brick, one less white brick. There's roughly the same weight of contents but not the exact item.
A bigger issue is the reliability. some pieces have been broken in the bag, specifically longer flat plates. other pieces literally crumbled upon assembly, specifically low-grade sloping pieces near the edge. doubt these pieces will last as long as the pieces from 10 years ago
The plastic formulation for some Lego factories is not up to spec, this has resulted in a very large number of complaints. For instance, it isn't rare at all to see brand new 1x1's and minifig bodies that are cracked on one side just by building the set and letting it sit, which in the past really would have never ever happened.
> and the designs are much more realistic than they were when I was growing up
That's one thing I don't much care for in the modern sets. Sure the results look more realistic, but it means that half the pieces are now custom made for the particular set, and often have very little use in a general context. It seems that they've moved from a general building system to more of a per set focused approach.
It's a shame that this is still the perception because this actually was a real issue for a while in the early 2000s. Back then lego was losing money and was not as successful as it had been in the past.
Then lego seriously addressed this problem and since then have made a large effort to avoid having unique parts in sets. And they were incentivised to do so, because the more unique parts you have, the more money it is going to cost you. Reusing parts is just simply a lot cheaper.
Now there still often are unique parts in a lot of sets, but they are usually unique only in colour or printing.
For example, the current set with the record for the number of unique parts is the Diagon Alley set.
Here is the list of unique parts in the set:
https://brickset.com/inventories/75978-1/unique
The thing you will note is that even though there are a lot of parts that only appear in this set, I wouldn't say that these parts are not useful generally. They are mostly just bits of custom lego characters, which you would happily use in any context, or a custom colour for a generally applicable part.
Well for example, my son got this for a present a while back:
https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/catamaran-42105
And just looking at others on the site:
https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/lamborghini-sian-fkp-37-4...
https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/ford-mustang-shelby-gt500...
https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/monster-jam-megalodon-421...
When I was a kid I loved specialized pieces and often re-used them to add flair or distinct touches to my own creation. Having alternatives to rectangles is great!
I don't see what all the fuss is about, it doesn't seem either/or to me. The days of off the shelf models having enough general purpose 2x4 or whatever bricks to build totally arbitrary large structures have been gone for at least 30 years, but nothing really seems to be stopping mixing and matching and getting basic blocks for the backbone of a collection. They've just added the existence of $TEXAS display pieces with unique stuff.
I even accidentally got some pieces stuck together in ways that required screwdrivers or pliers to get them out. No big deal!
I am not too familiar with the current day sets, but around the early 2000s they started pushing the branded movie tie in sets really hard and I do remember seeing sets where a "piece" was essentially half a tie fighter wing and had no real reasonable reusability. I have heard they have pulled back on this almost entirely.
I would agree though that some specialized pieces are fine. My memories from the early 90s were probably the best balance from my time using Legos. By the mid-late 90s the castle and pirate sets did start moving into imho overly specialized pieces which then lead to the 2000s nadir.
I've bought a bunch of LEGO during the pandemic and I very rarely see pieces that are only present in one set (and when I do they are mostly printed pieces, or standard shapes with unusual colors). I think that what makes the models more "realistic" aren't custom pieces, it's smaller pieces. A lot of models have a lot of 1x1 square, circle or quarter-circle tiles, or small slanted pieces, which allows for finer details. At the same time, these pieces are often smooth on top, so they are less composable than studded ones and harder to manipulate, especially for children, so I can see how this could be a problem.
There are also a lot more colors and shades than there used to be, so it is a little harder to make substantial custom constructions that don't look like rainbows.
> it means that half the pieces are now custom made for the particular set
I do not believe this is true. There are Lego enthusiasts that thoroughly review every new set and are careful to point out the introduction of new pieces and new building techniques. The number of new pieces per set is very low, and even then the pieces are typically well received for the number of new build techniques they may open up.
Are you sure they're custom made? My impression was that LEGO rarely does custom pieces (beyond things like printing known character faces or logos onto existing pieces). It's just that they've been making these sets for so long that they have a large catalogue of rare pieces to draw from.
I agree. My son is just getting into Lego, and I find I'm avoiding most of the newer sets in favor of decent-condition used vintage sets, simply because what he enjoys is having enough general pieces to create and imagine new things.
Really? I’ve put a ton of sets together over about 30 years and I have never had a piece missing.
I’m constantly impressed that they just always all the pieces.
What I have found is that sometimes there is 1 piece stuck in the bag after I have dumped it out. So I keep the bags until I’m finished building the set.
I have received a set with pieces missing. I bought the set off eBay, and the seller swore it was new. I didn’t just misplace the pieces either- one was a wheel, not a tiny part
It seems like a weird complaint for this specific set, because this is one of those huge and expensive display pieces aimed at rich adults. I would be _genuinely_ surprised if even a small fraction of these kits were ever disassembled -- it's not the sort of thing where you just break it down and throw the pieces back into a box for reuse.
If this had shown up in one of the smaller kid-focused kits which _are_ building playgrounds, yes, that'd be a problem.
There's a large used market, especially for these super expensive sets. Many people will resell sets after having them on display for a few months or years. For some like me 90% of the enjoyment is in putting huge sets together, so it'll be sold on after just a few weeks. But even then, a few pieces being stuck together permanently doesn't matter much.
But there is a small monitory of people who absolutely do break up sets to add to their brick collection in order to build custom models.
It costs a lot of money (700 pounds, USD$926.27). That alone is a valid reason to be upset.
Mind you, it's not _actually_ impossible to take apart -- just impossible with standard LEGO tools (i.e. "your fingers"). An adult building specialized models for display can probably cope with needing to lever something out of place using a narrow edge.
This was my thought too. Are people really disassembling these? To me these things feel more like typical crafts/construction where you make something once and then put it on display.
Years ago I completely disassembled some of my larger sets and stored the parts into large Ziplock bags when I had to move.
It can't be taken apart because you'll need something like a sewing needle to pry an axle out of a Technic piece? That seems trivially surmountable. I've had much larger problems just prying two small 1x2's apart.
Brick separators can get 2x1 flats apart where this will require you to damage the 4l axel which to me seems like a notable difference.
It really won't require damaging anything, you just gently stick a sewing needle into the small gap and leverage the axel out. Annoying? Yes. But "can't be taken apart" seems rather overblown.
I've got a 42043, Mercedes-Benz Arocs 3245[1] here which allowed me to reproduce this. If you look on page 322 (step #59) of the instructions at [1] it requires the same 4l axel to attach the bucket to its boom, and is held in place by a "bush" piece[2].
That one's trivial to take apart "correctly", but I just tried (without cheating!) by tightly showing the 4l axel in and gently prying it out with a sewing needle.
It took around 10-15 seconds, there's a tiny bit of external visible damage the size of the sewing needle head on the piece the 4l goes into, but I being careful.
Otherwise it's no worse for wear. I also tried it with a wooden toothpick, but the gap is too small for that.
I'd put that into the "annoying" category, rather than Lego having produced a "display-only" set. For comparison on the Arocs I had to spend 5-10 minutes gently trying to get a gear into the engine once with a chopstick without disassembling the whole front of the car after it fell off.
1.
https://www.lego.com/en-us/service/buildinginstructions/4204...
2.
https://www.toypro.com/en/product/968/technic-bush/light-blu...
I'm not clear on what you were testing, did you replicate the design in the AT-AT set from the article or just using a bushing piece?
It's still pretty notable that it requires a sewing needle to disassemble fully instead of just hands or a brick separator as previous sets did.
I replicated the relevant part of the design. I put the same 4l axle into the same sort of Technic slot, it's specifically designed to be flush with those, so there's no easy way to pop it out other than to push it out from the other side.
I then used the "bush" piece to hold onto the axle from the other side, so you have to pull it out of that piece to get the axle out. It's not the exact same piece that's holding onto the 4l axle in the article, but from experience they've got about the same hold on the axle, so the difference won't matter.
Yes it's annoying. I'm just pointing out that it's far short of the "can't be taken apart" claim in the article.
I'd be willing to bet that it can be taken apart conventionally. You can probably push the orange piece a bit from the other side.
Of course it will run right into the frame on the other side, but even Lego doesn't make components with micrometer precision, there's usually a bit of give in the plastic. If you can get some play in it of even a half a millimeter it'll be sufficient to do this with a toothpick instead of a sewing needle.
You can't reach it from the other side though there's the red pin in the way and you can't push the red pin through the grey axel connector. The only access you have to move the 4l axel is through the small window on the lime/neon green piece.
Compared to a real Mercedes-Benz which needs a toolbox full of specialized tools to do routine maintenance, a sewing needle is a cinch :)
I've never had such luck, with either the new or old separators. What's the trick?
Attaching the stuck pieces to a base plate before separating them often works. When it doesn't I reach for the pliers.
Agreed -- once you've stacked two 1x2 plates... might as well just treat them as a single part from then on. With two pairs of pliers of the correct shape, you might be able to get them apart.
There is a LEGO separator tool for this:
https://www.lego.com/es-es/product/brick-separator-630
Yes, I'm well aware of these (and the older, chunkier, grey version from the 90s). It does not help in the case of 1x2 plates.
Beside using a knife, the only trick I've found to work for these is to stack longer 1x plates on either side of the pair, which give you more leverage on the center pair, while themselves being easier to take apart.
> It does not help in the case of 1x2 plates.
This:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLqi7F0QWoI
Looks complicated. Just stack the 2x1 sandwich on a larger place. Pop off the topmost 2x1 with the brick separator tool. Then pop the second one off the larger plate. My 5-year old just showed me :)
Two brick separators also do the trick. If you've bought any of the bigger sets, you probably have a handful lying around.
Those do work for most pieces, but the stacked-plates issue is tricky even with one. Stacked 1x2 or 1x1 is the worst because it's almost impossible to even bring leverage into it.
Stacked 1x1s are trivial -- rotate them 45 degrees!
A 1x1 in the middle of a large plate though can be a challenge though. While the remover tool works for e.g. 1x2s, 1x1s don't quite have enough surface area, so the tool often slips off.
2x plates I find tend not to give as much trouble, if only because they require more force to have been pushed together perfectly flush in the first place.
(My context is teaching Lego professionally to middle-school children for a few summers. You get given all sorts of fun things to take apart, and having a pocket knife around isn't a good idea. My other takeaway from that experience is that the LabView-based Mindstorms software is/was total shit.)
I'm sure there's a critical flaw that was designed in, waiting to be discovered by the Rebel Forces.
Isn't the orange piece hollow, so it should be possible to push something in it and drive the pin out (moving the red piece into the green one) after aligning the splines?
_When it comes to attaching the body to the underframe, axles are inserted into holes in the side and, while they do not mate with an axle hole inside the body, they cannot be removed without putting the mechanised beast on its side, shaking it, and hoping for the best._
That is definitely what is called a "blind pin" in machining, with a tighter interference fit, and they are usually avoided in components meant to be serviceable, since removing them requires drilling them out.
It seems amusingly ironic that with the increase in the difficulty of disassembling consumer products, Lego also follows suit.
No you can't push the red short pin through the grey piece, it's a 6538c [0,1] by the looks of it and those have a small wall in the middle to stop push through. They're meant to be used to connect two Technic axels and just sit on the two ends.
[0]
https://www.bricklink.com/v2/catalog/catalogitem.page?id=674...
[1]
https://img.bricklink.com/ItemImage/EXTN/17834.png
The orange pin is hollow, but the red axle is behind it is not.
That gray axle sleeve has a stop about halfway through so you can't push an axle all the way through. It's meant to join two axles.
You could omit the green sleeve as it is completely smooth on the inside. That will give you better access to the dark gray axle, but the sleeve is probably there to provide structural support to the frame.
They might do a small update where they replace the "4 axle with stop" with a "5 axle with stop" and put a bushing on the outside to provide support between the stop and the frame. Provided, of course, that there's a brick's width of room where that assembly goes.
Edit: I just looked up the instructions for 75313 and found the section with the assembly. The assembly is the "hip" joint, where the leg connects with the main body. The assembly is connected so that the offending axles are parallel to the ground. The dark gray axle points inward and it looks like, at least on the front legs, it's too close to another frame to extend the pin so that it sits outside the frame.
https://www.lego.com/cdn/product-assets/product.bi.core.pdf/...
The aggressive advertising on this site broke iOS Safari
Usually, I can guess when a site is likely to suck without adblock or on a different browser, but here my expectations were completely subverted.
On Firefox (desktop) with uBlock Origin and a Pihole, it was a pleasant read. The site loaded quickly, and it worked nicely with a system dark theme and in reader mode.
There are no obvious gaps where sponsored content would be inserted. The header and sidebar look complete yet unobtrusive. It looks like a well-made page that should cooperate nicely with a mobile browser. I'm sorry to hear your experience was so bad!
Content blockers, pi-hole, and/or nextdns does the trick. I see no ads on this page and it works fine in iOS safari.
well not on my iphone, installed adblock for safari
Major alternative more cost efficient brands to Lego / Duplo (compatible bricks) are:
CaDA Q-Bricks XingBao Mould King Wange Cobi Winner Sembo bloxbox ZHE GAO Panlos Klemos Ausini MunichBricks BlueBrixx Unico
There are much more, take a google and you'll see that there are many cheaper alternatives...
Are there any that come close to the tolerances achieved by Lego batch-to-batch? I'd genuinely consider buying them if I know that when I buy more 10 years from now, they'd all work together
Depends on the category... I think that especially Cada and Cobi have good quality in all kinds of vehicles and planes, Qman and Wange are more into buildings and other stuff.
Can we just agree that the plural of lego is lego :P
How about this?
| singular | plural
nom | legum | legi
voc | lege | legos
gen | legi | legorum
dat/abl | lego | legos
Depends, there are legos: technik, Duplo, standard, space, etc.
But multiple lego bricks are just lego
Lego bricks/elements
lego = lego : lego
1 lego, 2 laygo
I honestly don't understand this article.
Why exactly can't the parts shown be taken apart by reversing the action?
Could someone explain it for someone who have never played Lego other than simple bricks.
Imagine a nail without head that has been fully hit into a piece of wood. Reversing the action doesn't pull the nail out unless you weld the hammer to the end of nail. It can't be pulled out either because there is nothing sticking out from surface and can't be pushed from other side because it's blocked.
Ah, thanks! Now I finally get it.
The dark grey 4l flush end axel sits flush with the rectangular block when properly inserted so it's not possible to get a grip strong enough to pull it out of the grey piece and the light grey piece the red pin goes into has a wall in the middle so you can't push it out through that end. It's impossible to take out non-destructively.
I think they're expecting for it to _easily_ be taken apart but a lot of things they mentioned would require special tools and risk damaging the parts. Honestly, though, that's part of engineering, you're going to break things to figure out what works and doesn't work.
Until now Lego had been careful to not produce this kind of configuration where destructive disassembly was required which is an interesting shift in their design philosophy (assuming it's not just this slipping through the cracks of course).
Lego can't survive on patents forever. They make money by:
- being a known brand, - having a good reputation, - superb quality of its parts and - exclusive sets.
Lego became a toy company that explore Hollywood franchises fans. The possibility of assembling and disassembling anything is a smaller value-added today.
Yeah they are probably counting on the fact that this is a Ultimate Collector Series aimed at Adult Fans Of Lego designed to be a display piece not a playset that gets taken apart and remixed into your pool of Lego pieces. It is a new thing though that is interesting given how long they went before making a set that was this hard to fully disassemble. Till now every set could come apart and besides stickers parts were fully generic and didn't get stuck together permanently. [0]
[0] Except for things you need the brick separators to fix, those configurations have always existed. I have noticed there's more of those being called for in sets lately. eg: 2x 2x1 flat plates together, it's very hard to impossible to separate those without tools.
Lord Business has advanced his operations to placing moles in Lego design team, I see.
This isn't the first time the Lego has lost its way and it likely won't be the last. You have to give them credit for being able to re-invent themselves and pick up the pieces every time this happens. The history of Lego is long succession of crimes and failures punctuated by spectacular successes.
As much as I'm sympathetic to the toy in its basic form, I'm very much disappointed in the company behind it.
Lego is a display-piece company now; like a plastic model but no glue required.
There are two types of people in this world. Lego shelf and Lego bucket.
I bemoan having gone from being a bucket person, to shelf person, to not even playing with Legos anymore person. Adulthood kinda has a way of doing that.
My friend and I wanted to start a Beer, Brats, and Bricks night, but right when that was gonna materialize, the plague struct. I should hit them back up. I still have buckets on buckets.
Brats being children or hotdog sausages [BratwĂĽrste]? (Or brothers [in Anglicised Russian]?)
Either sounds good.
I meant sausages, but I guess both, it's a double entendre :p Grilling and also we would involve his young son who is a big Lego fanatic.
He doesn't get to sample the beer, of course.
Sounds like a great time! From the brats comment I’m guessing you’re in Wisconsin or may Chicago.
Upstate NY, like Albany ish. We have bratwurst here. Actually being at the nexus of historic Dutch, German, Polish, and Italian immigrant populations, we have quite the selection of tasty cured pork products.
Sindoni Italian sausage is world-class. Aldi has a good selection of brats. And my family is from Western NY so we get Salen's hotdogs occasionally. I forget the name but there's a really good kielbasa at the grocery too.
Wow, sounds awesome! I’m from Chicago and there’s a lot of similar stuff around here. Maxwell polish, brags beer with onions and mustard, Italian meats… I’m salivating! I haven’t really been to the eastern parts so I’m unaware of what it has to offer but from your description there’s a lot!
Keeping it on topic… when is Lego releasing a Chicago dog? :)
And then there's closely related Venn diagram of any-color-will-work-lego-house people vs. single-color-walls people
EDIT: the current two child comments are of parts in that diagram, great. No judgement, I just wonder what type my son is going to be :-)
I never understood the any-color-will-work people. When you were a kid and were painting something, did you cover all surfaces do random blotches of color?
Think of it like dithering. Not all of us could afford full 24 bit color displays and had to make do with 256 or 16 colors or 8 colors instead. Sometimes the right color brick isn't there and it's better to have the odd colors spread throughout the whole thing than one brick that's off.
I lived near a Samsonite factory (they manufactured Lego in Canada) and my bricks were purchased in giant shopping bags. They were all seconds which means some parts had color problems, some were a bit melted, some were cracked, etc... Mostly they were fine and I had a _lot_ of bricks.
I know! I remember as a child spending forever digging through the Lego pile looking for the right color. I had to reluctantly teach myself that it was okay to build with any color first and then go back and swap out with matching colors afterwards once I was happy with my design.
Bad analogy: If you dipped your brush in the pot and it came out a random one of a small selection of colours, would you wash it off until you got the "right" colour when the only requirement was to put paint on the paper?
Do you build with lego by picking random pieces and sticking them together? If you are choosing the next piece by shape, why not add color to the selection criteria?
Not random, but functional equivalence is fine.
I always cared about how it looked too.
Haha, didn't even realize the second kind existed until I watched my wife build from the big bucket with my son, I was like "What is THIS?"
That's the core beauty of Lego, I think. There are _so_ many meta games one can decide to play with a single bucket, and at least one caters to pretty much everyone under the sun.
And then you get amazing synergies when people who play differently combine their efforts.
Which is one of the reasons I'll admit I cried during the first Lego movie ending. They nailed that aspect.
Saw the 1st Lego movie on a plane once, did not expect to tear up. Spaceship!
Ok now I need to see that movie.
I saw it on a plane, and IMHO it was way better than it needed to be.
Tip: Just kind of relax into the goofiness and have fun, but make sure you watch the entire movie if you start
I appreciate the construction process of an intricate shelf piece, but I wish I had the creativity of a bucketeer.
I think there's a reason bucketeers skew younger: imagination is replaced by knowledge as we age.
We look at a pile of bricks and see whatever it's supposed to be.
An 8 year old looks at it and sees whatever pops into their head.
There is a less common hybrid third type: design a model in bricklink studio then buy individual bricks to build it, then shelve it.
Do the "Lego bucket" people buy $500+ kits?
Do the "Lego shelf" people ever disassemble the $500+ kits?
If the 500+ price kit is a huge bucket of random pieces, then I guess the bucket people would. =)
I disassemble some of mine. I'm a Lego shelf person because I actually like the intricate designs and attention to detail of modern Lego sets AND because I don't have enough free time to be a bucket person in a way that would be satisfying to me as an adult. I think I'm pass making approximate version of my ideas and using them as toys.
I've never sold a kit and I don't intend to ever do it.
They'll be disassembled when they want to resell the kit.
> Do the "Lego shelf" people ever disassemble the $500+ kits?
I've turned into a Lego Shelf person. I like to buy the architecture kits. I put them on the shelf in my office, but every so often when I get frustrated and no one is watching I will take one and smash it to bits on the floor like a child. It's great because it lets me vent, and it gives my future self the gift of building a Lego set. Really, it's an act of self-care.
There's two major categories of Lego sets IMO display pieces (the UCS or Creator Expert series) and playsets. They still very much make the second type of set for their younger audience but they realize adult fans wanted more intricate sets so gave them that. I think it's interesting they finally made this kind of hard/impossible to disassemble configuration a part of their build but I don't think it's a big knock against them. They know these UCS sets largely get assembled then sit assembled until they go into storage or get moved/sold, so it's not really a big issue imo.
They've always had both types of blocks, the custom stuff and the standard array.
If you're in stores often you catch the 50 piece standard piece sets for $10 or whatever. Lego stuff lasts generations.
Why would you say that? (Honest question)
There's been a marked increase in custom bricks for a perfected, rendered look on newer models. That does make shelf builds look more like actual miniature models of the thing being built, but it makes the parts more difficult to use in creative builds, and makes it much more difficult to add a creative flair to a shelf build in a cohesive way.
My son is 5, and recently graduated from Duplos to classic Legos, he started with this set:
https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/lego-medium-creative-bric...
It's basically a box of hundreds of colorful plates and bricks. There are a few wheels and eyes, too, but it's mostly just bricks. We make bulldozers and airplanes and robots and houses and all manner of things! Yes, there are studs instead of smooth tiles on top of the engine compartment, and yes, there are about 7 shades of yellow, cream, and orange making up the dozer, and no, the tracks aren't functional, but it slides fine. Mom might need to ask to know that the pink 1x1 brick sticking out the top is the bulldozer's TURBO BOOSTER MODE BUTTON, or she might guess that because she knows our son.
He's received a few sets once we let family and friends know that he's using legos now. He got this Ninjago set:
https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/tournament-of-elements-71...
which focuses the design on a bunch of stickers and printed parts and custom weapons made to look like a show he's never seen. He does love all the little Lego people, they have fun adventures, but he built it once, took it apart, and now most of the parts end up in the bottom of the brick box unused. Another typical one is this monster truck:
https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/monster-truck-31101
https://www.lego.com/cdn/cs/set/assets/bltd6f7b204e1e11893/3...
Kudos to Lego for the cool Technik functional rubber suspension design, my son loves that and has rebuilt it on other vehicles! And kudos for the 3-in-1 design that reuses a lot of the custom pieces for a truck, a dragster, and a small car. But look at all the rounded tiles and cheese wedges and smooth surfaces. It's possible to build things that aren't one of the intended three things, but it takes a lot more planning. Like the random horns and staffs from the Ninjago set, he doesn't use these studless tiles much either. You can't click anything into the bed of the truck; it's supposed to be a truck, what's up with that! There's almost nowhere to put a pink turbo booster mode button at all.
The truck looks like a plastic model. Anything built with the creative brick box has studs all over and looks like a pile of Legos begging to have something added to it or to be rebuilt into something else.
My youngest (7) has watched Ninjago, but if he got a Ninjago set, I'm 100% sure he would build it once according to the instructions, then after a little while, take it apart and incorporate all of the pieces into a new creation from the bucket. It's his original creations that end up being displayed on a shelf.
These Creator Expert models certainly are.
I'm not the greatest fan of the explosion in use of small tiles and cheese wedges in recent years. It's kind of like AAA videogames that have a billion vertices but are empty
I have a Cobi ship at home. It's for all practical purposes impossible to take apart without specialized tools. The construction of Cobi bricks is such that if when you stick two bricks together, they _will_ stick together, whether you want them to or not.
It's an absurdly robust model.
It's amazing that people can look at that model and think that lego has gone downhill. This is one obscure flaw.
The classic presentation on these is Stressing the Elements by Jamie Berard:
http://bramlambrecht.com/tmp/jamieberard-brickstress-bf06.pd...
However, illegal setups have slipped through in the past.
Probably Lego needs to add something like these to the orange tool:
https://www.ifixit.com/Store/Tools/Precision-Screw-Extractor...
Someone should sue this website.. Its refreshing rate to allows its weird Ads breaks even the Reader view on my phone..
Is it possible they've created a new device to separate them, similar to the existing brick separator?
I remember encountering something similar in the Lamborghini Sian kit - I think around one of the diffs; I left the axle a bit loose just in case, and that was good, because of course I mounted the diff the other way around and had to take it apart.
Is this by design or an aspect of the design? As a user of Lego since forever I know that there have been previous flaws that made things very difficult to disassemble.
So to summarize, this is a 6785-piece set, and if you decide to break it down after hours and hours assembly, you'll be left with a couple of pieces that can't be separated. Outrage!
They figured out how to brick a Lego set.
as a lego enthusiast, I have to say that it takes a somewhat recent lego brick separator (with the technic attachment) to dismantle it. most modern sets of over 1000 pieces come with that separator.
note: I have over 1000 lego sets ranging from the early 80's to modern times, I love lego.
ÂŁ700 set
That's a shocking price.
That said, it's also over 6800 pieces:
https://brickset.com/sets/75313-1
. There are 678 different kinds of pieces here if you check the csv of parts.
V2 will just replace the few legos that can't come apart with a custom whole part molded from solid plastic.
Just use superglue, and you wont be able to take apart any parts.
LEGO has created a truly immutable blockchain.
Would this be called “lock in”?
I assumed this was going to be an Apple brand deal.
Seems like an apple Lego set
Can't be taken apart easily. A lot of my old lego pieces have bite barks on them because the fit was too tight regardless of best practice. Apart from the Lego Brick separator, wasn't there instructions for unmating a bunch of common stubborn connections? Maybe they need better tools to cater to more flexibility. A set of ifixit/legoit shims and picks perhaps.
You don't own your Legos, Lego does.
flagship ÂŁ700 set
Holy crap... I used to love Lego as a child and I knew some of the kits were expensive. They would be our "main present" at Christmas. But now they are the best part of a grand?! I had no idea people were spending that much on things like this. Maybe stuff like this is why all my friends seem poorer than me despite earning similar money?
LEGO sets are all more-or-less priced per piece, and the price per piece has on average fallen over the years when accounting for inflation.
There is some range.
E.g. this is 11.8 cents/piece, where some other large "adult" sets are more along the lines of 6-7 cents. And the kid-focused ones have similar ranges, (or worse if you include the really small ones)
I'm currently printing a 3D puzzle that probably won't be able to be taken apart (I think I made the gaps a bit too small, but we'll see).
But it makes business sense for Legos to do that (short term)... it is basically single-use and discard Legos.
Hot wheels tracks are very hard to disassemble no ones complaining about it.
Perhaps there might be a market for alternative Lego designs? Like a Lego modding guide. Which is kind of ironic as the entire point of Lego is to build what you want… so modify the design!
Ironic, the author designed a page that can't be read because of the massive blitz of ads and the crushing impact it had on my cpu
honestly? who cares?
The article title made it sound like it was intentional on their part, and not a design flaw.
So, this is Comms.
Legos = symbolism for 'making plans'
Comms are a way of communication using symbolism embedded in news headlines, articles, films, music, even memes. A headline such as 'President Bush trips over a Lego piece' describes a fictional event, but it exists solely as a Comms Vehicle.
Thus, the article represents a Plan that cannot be Stopped.
LEGO has created a truly immutable blockchain :)
I have plenty of LEGO that are never coming apart again...it's a testament to Kragle.
Lego is really a shadow of what it once was. Brand partnerships seem more important than the quality and fun/playability of the products. It's becoming more and more a collectors toy rather than something for kids to play with.
More charitably, those brand partnerships and $700 collector sets is the thing that let them avoid bankruptcy, become profitable, and still be able to also sell toys for kids to play with.
I've always considered the $700 collector sets to not be toys. They're models that will be built and put on display rather than played with, and will never be torn down to be added to the big bucket of Legos.
Nonsense - there is no reason they can't provide display type models for people who enjoy building them to showcase (Like Airfix models for instance), whilst still providing the standard build-destroy-change cycle of products.
My kids are getting into Lego currently, and the quality is just as good as it has been. My Lego works perfectly with their Lego, and is just as fun!
My wife has been buying the Harry Potter Lego, because she likes to build them and display them, whilst I like to dig out old instructions and build old stuff with the kids, which they can change and tweak.
Swings and roundabouts etc
The present core "child themes" (City, Ninjago, Creator) are a far cry from the golden era during the 1990s (Castle, Pirates, Space). Back then, most bigger sets had baseplates (flat or 3D), the latter primarily used with castles and fortresses. You could easily combine sets from the same theme from different years and build something completely new which feels like a new set from the same theme. The variety of parts and colours wasn't so huge.
With a modern theme like Ninjago, most of the sets are some imaginary vehicles with very specific parts and colours. You could probably build a new vehicle from the same set, but combining different sets is much less enjoyable. The few sets with buildings have no baseplates and the structures feel very airy and unharmonic.
Sets like this are clearly designed for adult collectors, but they they still have lots of fun kits for kids. I’d argue that some branded sets like the Mario series are more interesting and fun than almost any sets from the past (other than technic and mindstorms).
The modern LEGO landscape is the best it's ever been, IMO. The Saturn V set is absolutely incredible, and for a kid the manual comes with a wealth of knowledge about the early space program.
The NES set has a TV with a moving Mario level. A _moving_ Mario level. It's insane. My mind is blown as an adult; I can't imagine what child me would have done with that engineering knowledge.
I haven't built the piano nor the typewriter yet, but from what I've seen they are similarly impressive sets.
I don't agree with that. The lego sets of the last few years were the best I ever built. They have increased tremendously in quality of the build steps and manuals.
