7 ms·

I don't have a problem with the price of lego, having — as a child in the 70s — saved my own pocket money to buy lego. The real criticism of lego is that it's g

I don't have a problem with the price of lego, having — as a child in the 70s — saved my own pocket money to buy lego. The real criticism of lego is that it's gone from being a collection of parts that can make the thing on the cover of the box but also many interesting variations, to something that isn't very malleable. First, lego no longer has a consistent color scheme, so only pieces from one genre go with other pieces of that genre. Next, there's the proliferation of zany specialized parts. I remember getting a lego cargo ship as a kid (the hull was four specialized pieces — bow, stern, and two mid sections and thinking this was awful. Lego doesn't do ship sections any more but many similar things. It's not a get off my lawn thing. I still love lego. But it does seem to have exchanged its DIY charm in the pursuit of merchandising. That said, you can build much better looking models now — just not out of any reasonable selection of pieces.

estel 14y ago
One of the graphs shows that LEGO have increased the number of different sets they're producing a lot, but I frequently still see boxes of "just bricks" for sale, so it just seems as if they're offering the consumer more choice.
stoolpigeon 14y ago
It's all rather subjective and I can't say you're wrong. But I have a 9 year old son who loves lego. When he gets a set he builds what is on the box, that usually lasts a couple hours (maybe longer if it is a bigger/more difficult set) and then it gets torn down and put into the bin. Then all kinds of different stuff comes out. He and his friends have a great time with that bin. I do too. I don't think there are many one-off pieces. In fact he gets rather creative repurposing a lot of what might be thought of as specialized pieces. So my experience at this point is that he can do a lot more and be a lot more creative than I could when I was a kid.
- bmj 14y ago
  I agree, and this is my experience with my own kids. Some sets stick around longer than others (the Quinjet comes to mind), but they are happily building new things with the more specialized pieces from other sets.
arrrg 14y ago
What? Using a great diversity of pieces is what’s fun! I never understood this view on Lego – plus specialized bricks are very much out these days.
DanBC 14y ago
I'm 42. I tend to agree with you that I dislike over-specialised pieces. But then people are creative (which is the point of Lego, after all) and they use the thing for something else entirely. I would like there to be a few good base sets. Luckily, there are, you just have to search to find them, I'd really like to be able to buy blocks by the kg - 200 g of 2x1, 300 g of 2x4; etc.
- ig1 14y ago
  Have you been to a lego store ? http://farm6.staticflickr.com/5215/5460874051_7fbf9e4bf3_z.jpg http://farm6.staticflickr.com/5215/5460874051_7fbf9e4bf3_z.j...
  - DanBC 14y ago
    No, but that'd be great.
    - ig1 14y ago
      I've been to the lego stores in Germany and England and the "pick your own bricks" has been in all of them (although the smaller ones have fewer different types).
- jeffbarr 14y ago
  You can buy (or sell) any and all types of LEGO parts or sets at BrickLink ( https://www.bricklink.com/ https://www.bricklink.com/ ) . The site serves as a marketplace for thousands of sellers who maintain what appear to be fairly large inventories (tens or even hundreds of thousands of pieces). You can find parts by condition (new or used), sort by price, filter by location (to minimize shipping costs and/or delivery time), and more. If you need more of a part that came in a particular set, you can find the set (by name or by number) and drill down to a parts list.
- stusmith1977 14y ago
  Lego Education does a spare parts catalog - but not sure if you can buy from it as a private individual. I used to use something similar when I was a kid - I couldn't afford (say) a complete new pneumatic set, so I just bought a pneumatics parts pack from a mail-order catalog and used those bits with my generic technic stuff. (Another great resource is the ideas magazines they used to print - not sure if they still do - with loads of pictures of creations, but with minimal or no instructions).
acabal 14y ago
My beef is that Lego have become so highly branded. I would rather my kid play with generic space and castle and pirate blocks, than with Star Wars and Harry Potter and Pirates of the Carribbean blocks. As a product of the 80's I can say I spent a lot of time playing with highly branded and marketed toys, so it's not necessarily a bad thing; but there's something special about Lego that makes me feel like they should be above film tie-ins and in a special airy realm of pure imagination.
- chaostheory 14y ago
  > My beef is that Lego have become so highly branded. The problem was no one bought general Lego blocks. This is still the trend today. I guess not many people remember, but Lego was in deep financial trouble during the 90s and early 2000's. Until they started creating licensed packages and video games based on 3rd party franchises like Star Wars, Lego wasn't selling anything.
  - gala8y 14y ago
    As a seven years old, all I wanted (and saved up for) was the biggest, most generic set I could possibly have. I still remember running like crazy to see my mom coming back from the city, carrying LEGO 733 Universal Building Set. Highly branded sets probably push children more into playing roles and sticking to, probably still imaginative enough, scenarios rather than into creative process of building.
    - chaostheory 14y ago
      I don't disagree. My point still stands though: kids don't urge their parents to buy generic sets.
- acheron 14y ago
  Totally agree. I hope Lego will move back to the more generic themes by the time my kid(s) get old enough. (Currently my 1.5 year old loves Duplo blocks; apparently there are even licensed Duplo sets though he doesn't have any of them.)
jdietrich 14y ago
The trend you describe is old news. Lego realised that the vast proliferation of pieces was undermining their profitability, by bogging down their supply chain. Over the last eight years, they have massively simplified their inventory, cutting out huge numbers of single-purpose pieces. The number of colors in use has been halved. The Lego you remember is still available under the Bricks & More line - big boxes and buckets of simple, primary-colored pieces.
rm999 14y ago
This is not a new trend, it extends back to at least the late 70s. As a child of the 80s my 'bag of legos' is full of specialized pieces like castle flags, pirates, and spaceship hoods. I still fondly remember building futuristic space pirate ships with medieval horses on the deck - the diversity really helped my creativity. That said, if you want large sets of generic pieces look into a creator bucket. They come out to something like 5-10 cents a piece and sound like what you are talking about. They're fairly new so I haven't used/bought them, but I think they're basically the same thing as the 'basic' buckets I had as a child.
- nobleach 14y ago
  Go look at bricklink.com sets from around the 1970's. They were ALL just a bunch of blocks. An airplane was basically a long rectangle. Then the 80's brought in some really nice "Legoland" sets. The lego airport from that era was the sweet spot. Not too many specialized pieces, but enough to build proper airplanes and a control tower.
smackfu 14y ago
Look at the Creator series from Lego. Every model has three very different variants on the front of the box, and they are built from pretty standard old-school Lego parts. It's pretty much exactly what you are asking for.
danielweber 14y ago
Steve Yegge has a rant somewhere about how Lego used to make kits that could build special things, using entirely off-the-shelf parts, with maybe one or two exceptions for things that just couldn't work otherwise. And now (for older values of "now") it sells kits loaded up with special parts so that you can't really build as good a Batmobile without getting the Batmobile set. He was comparing it to programming languages that cram in all sorts of edge-case special features, but it still reminded me my modern Lego seems less . . . pure, I guess. shakes cane
- pyre 14y ago
  Depends on how you look at it. Specialized sets with specialized pieces just increase the breadth of your Lego collection and the type of pieces available to your imagination.
- EdwardMSmith 14y ago
  My take on it is this: In the 70s and 80s, Lego was low resolution. Block, 4 bit color. Now its just higher resolution (smaller pieces with more non-right angles), and higher bit-depth. Lego has just paralleled video game evolution.
tedyoung 14y ago
Agreed -- in fact, it's hard to find a book or other instruction manual that describes how to build something cool, without it requiring a bunch of "special" pieces. Also, I'm not sure what's happened, but I've noticed color variations in the standard bricks: yellow bricks that look washed out compared to other yellow bricks. It's a real bummer when trying to create a consistently colored model. While my son loves the Star Wars and City sets, I encourage him to use the standard bricks (I buy 'em in bulk) to build what he wants and to help him learn how to come up with creative solutions given the "constraints" of standard "generic" bricks.
failrate 14y ago
Oh, even the weird pieces turn out to be more malleable than you might first imagine. I've even seen a game based on making LEGO robots by using surprising combinations of pieces (http://mobileframezero.com/mfz/ http://mobileframezero.com/mfz/). That's inspired me to take custom pieces from my kid's LEGO sets and put them to all kinds of new uses.
blue1 14y ago
> I remember getting a lego cargo ship as a kid (the hull was four specialized pieces — bow, stern, and two mid sections and thinking this was awful. From an aesthetic point of view it was indeed awful, yet necessary: those ships were meant to float in real water, so they had to be sealed surfaces. I remember trying to build ships out of regular pieces; they were nice, but when put in the sea, the result was not funny at all.
wslh 14y ago
Yes, when I was a child I played Star Wars using any brick compatible with the idea of a ship, transformers with some moveable pieces. The branding is bad because children think that to make a star wars ship you need a specific lego package instead of roughly creating something from the available tools (hacker mind)
1123581321 14y ago
This opinion is about 10 years out of date. Lego now forces their designers to mostly use simple pieces and colors; if they want a specialized piece they have to gain support from many other designers and only the most popular pieces are created. Otherwise, the designers have to make do with pieces that mostly would have looked familiar 40 years ago. It's a really refreshing change and I'm happy that it's helped Lego to return to profitability and domination of their market.

estel 14y ago

One of the graphs shows that LEGO have increased the number of different sets they're producing a lot, but I frequently still see boxes of "just bricks" for sale, so it just seems as if they're offering the consumer more choice.

stoolpigeon 14y ago

It's all rather subjective and I can't say you're wrong. But I have a 9 year old son who loves lego. When he gets a set he builds what is on the box, that usually lasts a couple hours (maybe longer if it is a bigger/more difficult set) and then it gets torn down and put into the bin. Then all kinds of different stuff comes out. He and his friends have a great time with that bin. I do too. I don't think there are many one-off pieces. In fact he gets rather creative repurposing a lot of what might be thought of as specialized pieces. So my experience at this point is that he can do a lot more and be a lot more creative than I could when I was a kid.

bmj 14y ago
I agree, and this is my experience with my own kids. Some sets stick around longer than others (the Quinjet comes to mind), but they are happily building new things with the more specialized pieces from other sets.

arrrg 14y ago

What? Using a great diversity of pieces is what’s fun! I never understood this view on Lego – plus specialized bricks are very much out these days.

DanBC 14y ago

I'm 42. I tend to agree with you that I dislike over-specialised pieces. But then people are creative (which is the point of Lego, after all) and they use the thing for something else entirely. I would like there to be a few good base sets. Luckily, there are, you just have to search to find them, I'd really like to be able to buy blocks by the kg - 200 g of 2x1, 300 g of 2x4; etc.

ig1 14y ago
Have you been to a lego store ? http://farm6.staticflickr.com/5215/5460874051_7fbf9e4bf3_z.jpg http://farm6.staticflickr.com/5215/5460874051_7fbf9e4bf3_z.j...
- DanBC 14y ago
  No, but that'd be great.
  - ig1 14y ago
    I've been to the lego stores in Germany and England and the "pick your own bricks" has been in all of them (although the smaller ones have fewer different types).
jeffbarr 14y ago
You can buy (or sell) any and all types of LEGO parts or sets at BrickLink ( https://www.bricklink.com/ https://www.bricklink.com/ ) . The site serves as a marketplace for thousands of sellers who maintain what appear to be fairly large inventories (tens or even hundreds of thousands of pieces). You can find parts by condition (new or used), sort by price, filter by location (to minimize shipping costs and/or delivery time), and more. If you need more of a part that came in a particular set, you can find the set (by name or by number) and drill down to a parts list.
stusmith1977 14y ago
Lego Education does a spare parts catalog - but not sure if you can buy from it as a private individual. I used to use something similar when I was a kid - I couldn't afford (say) a complete new pneumatic set, so I just bought a pneumatics parts pack from a mail-order catalog and used those bits with my generic technic stuff. (Another great resource is the ideas magazines they used to print - not sure if they still do - with loads of pictures of creations, but with minimal or no instructions).

acabal 14y ago

My beef is that Lego have become so highly branded. I would rather my kid play with generic space and castle and pirate blocks, than with Star Wars and Harry Potter and Pirates of the Carribbean blocks. As a product of the 80's I can say I spent a lot of time playing with highly branded and marketed toys, so it's not necessarily a bad thing; but there's something special about Lego that makes me feel like they should be above film tie-ins and in a special airy realm of pure imagination.

chaostheory 14y ago
> My beef is that Lego have become so highly branded. The problem was no one bought general Lego blocks. This is still the trend today. I guess not many people remember, but Lego was in deep financial trouble during the 90s and early 2000's. Until they started creating licensed packages and video games based on 3rd party franchises like Star Wars, Lego wasn't selling anything.
- gala8y 14y ago
  As a seven years old, all I wanted (and saved up for) was the biggest, most generic set I could possibly have. I still remember running like crazy to see my mom coming back from the city, carrying LEGO 733 Universal Building Set. Highly branded sets probably push children more into playing roles and sticking to, probably still imaginative enough, scenarios rather than into creative process of building.
  - chaostheory 14y ago
    I don't disagree. My point still stands though: kids don't urge their parents to buy generic sets.
acheron 14y ago
Totally agree. I hope Lego will move back to the more generic themes by the time my kid(s) get old enough. (Currently my 1.5 year old loves Duplo blocks; apparently there are even licensed Duplo sets though he doesn't have any of them.)

jdietrich 14y ago

The trend you describe is old news. Lego realised that the vast proliferation of pieces was undermining their profitability, by bogging down their supply chain. Over the last eight years, they have massively simplified their inventory, cutting out huge numbers of single-purpose pieces. The number of colors in use has been halved. The Lego you remember is still available under the Bricks & More line - big boxes and buckets of simple, primary-colored pieces.

rm999 14y ago

This is not a new trend, it extends back to at least the late 70s. As a child of the 80s my 'bag of legos' is full of specialized pieces like castle flags, pirates, and spaceship hoods. I still fondly remember building futuristic space pirate ships with medieval horses on the deck - the diversity really helped my creativity. That said, if you want large sets of generic pieces look into a creator bucket. They come out to something like 5-10 cents a piece and sound like what you are talking about. They're fairly new so I haven't used/bought them, but I think they're basically the same thing as the 'basic' buckets I had as a child.

nobleach 14y ago
Go look at bricklink.com sets from around the 1970's. They were ALL just a bunch of blocks. An airplane was basically a long rectangle. Then the 80's brought in some really nice "Legoland" sets. The lego airport from that era was the sweet spot. Not too many specialized pieces, but enough to build proper airplanes and a control tower.

smackfu 14y ago

Look at the Creator series from Lego. Every model has three very different variants on the front of the box, and they are built from pretty standard old-school Lego parts. It's pretty much exactly what you are asking for.

danielweber 14y ago

Steve Yegge has a rant somewhere about how Lego used to make kits that could build special things, using entirely off-the-shelf parts, with maybe one or two exceptions for things that just couldn't work otherwise. And now (for older values of "now") it sells kits loaded up with special parts so that you can't really build as good a Batmobile without getting the Batmobile set. He was comparing it to programming languages that cram in all sorts of edge-case special features, but it still reminded me my modern Lego seems less . . . pure, I guess. shakes cane

pyre 14y ago
Depends on how you look at it. Specialized sets with specialized pieces just increase the breadth of your Lego collection and the type of pieces available to your imagination.
EdwardMSmith 14y ago
My take on it is this: In the 70s and 80s, Lego was low resolution. Block, 4 bit color. Now its just higher resolution (smaller pieces with more non-right angles), and higher bit-depth. Lego has just paralleled video game evolution.

tedyoung 14y ago

Agreed -- in fact, it's hard to find a book or other instruction manual that describes how to build something cool, without it requiring a bunch of "special" pieces. Also, I'm not sure what's happened, but I've noticed color variations in the standard bricks: yellow bricks that look washed out compared to other yellow bricks. It's a real bummer when trying to create a consistently colored model. While my son loves the Star Wars and City sets, I encourage him to use the standard bricks (I buy 'em in bulk) to build what he wants and to help him learn how to come up with creative solutions given the "constraints" of standard "generic" bricks.

failrate 14y ago

Oh, even the weird pieces turn out to be more malleable than you might first imagine. I've even seen a game based on making LEGO robots by using surprising combinations of pieces (http://mobileframezero.com/mfz/ http://mobileframezero.com/mfz/). That's inspired me to take custom pieces from my kid's LEGO sets and put them to all kinds of new uses.

blue1 14y ago

> I remember getting a lego cargo ship as a kid (the hull was four specialized pieces — bow, stern, and two mid sections and thinking this was awful. From an aesthetic point of view it was indeed awful, yet necessary: those ships were meant to float in real water, so they had to be sealed surfaces. I remember trying to build ships out of regular pieces; they were nice, but when put in the sea, the result was not funny at all.

wslh 14y ago

Yes, when I was a child I played Star Wars using any brick compatible with the idea of a ship, transformers with some moveable pieces. The branding is bad because children think that to make a star wars ship you need a specific lego package instead of roughly creating something from the available tools (hacker mind)

1123581321 14y ago

This opinion is about 10 years out of date. Lego now forces their designers to mostly use simple pieces and colors; if they want a specialized piece they have to gain support from many other designers and only the most popular pieces are created. Otherwise, the designers have to make do with pieces that mostly would have looked familiar 40 years ago. It's a really refreshing change and I'm happy that it's helped Lego to return to profitability and domination of their market.