I don’t think I’m more at peace than the few times a year I sit down with a new LEGO kit and build it. It’s a delightfully enjoyable break from just about everything else that keeps my mind busy and is such a calming activity.
The Saturn V set is excellent, BTW.
Used in box sells quite well - especially if you sell after they’ve gone from store shelves. eBay or BrickLink.
When you assemble something like a working pneumatic articulated motorized digger, 99% made out of the same basic 200 interchangeable parts, it's incredible.
As far as I can tell, the model - which has a "LEGO first" - Black and red ink spool ribbon is a new fabric element. - and each key has a letter, and the carriage moves, etc ... doesn't actually type.
Instead, Legos is obviously fulfilling/creating a need.
The highly detailed sets really takes nothing away from those.
It is also my understanding that those free play sets sells well, so they really are complimentary.
There's certainly been a shift in marketing (e.g. Ninjago) but if you want the raw build your own experience it's still there, the offer has just expanded.
The result is smallish, expensive, huge-brick-count sets that're cramped (hard even for kid-hands to play in), hard to non-destructively add on to (you have to rip bricks off to find nubs to attach to, sometimes doing a lot of damage before you've got much useful nub-area exposed), and really hard to repair without the manual and a ton of time if part of it gets smashed.
Some of my older castle sets have a brick count similar to modern structures (again, ones aimed at kids, not architectural models or whatever) but are over twice the size and came with like a dozen minifies and horses. The per-piece price may not be much different on modern sets, but there's been some serious size deflation.
The new ones look better (I'm guessing they sell better, too, for that reason, especially to adults making the buying decisions). The old ones were much better LEGO.
For kids they still have their regular simple or mildly complex sets, depending on age and franchise.
I don't know when you were a kid, but when I was a kid Lego sets _were_ like jigsaw puzzles. Lots of big single-use pieces that were hard to adapt into something new.
Modern Lego sets may look like they can only go together one way, but they are made of a bunch of smaller general-purpose pieces. There is much more room for reusing those for your own creations than there used to be.
(You can't take that for granted, even the 700 Euro set #75252 comes with a sticker)
Either way I really want one!
https://hackaday.com/2017/12/12/connecting-cherry-mx-key-swi...
Is this popup a GDPR notice?
For anyone who doesn't see it: There's a giant blue box on the left that just says continue to lego.com, and then a giant yellow box on the right for going to their "Play Zone" for kids I guess.
Then in microscopic text underneath they only describe their cookie policy but say nothing about what you're agreeing to.
[EDIT] Okay, it seems there is a cookie-control thing underneath after you click. Only discovered it by meddling with the Inspector. But that whole first thing just really looks like a dark pattern.
The worst part is that this model-kit design style is spilling over and infecting their actual toy themes. It's harder for kids to repurpose a set that's built 40% out of small tiles and cheese wedges and little greebly bits.
- spring actuated forklift loaders
- boat hulls that actually float in water
- airplane/helicopter rotors (incompatible with technics because they predate it)
There was a period in the late 90s/early aughts when Lego really went adrift with the single function pieces. I got my kids a Lego airplane set from that era that consists basically of plane parts. No matter what you do with those pieces they look like they're parts of an airplane. It's pretty sad.
Fortunately, Lego corrected course. They still make specialized pieces, particularly the minifigs. When you're working at that scale, nearly all the minifig tools are going to consist of a single piece. But most of the sets now consist of largely of pieces that are flexible enough to be assembled into anything. Sets from the Creator line come with a booklet to assemble whatever is on the box (eg. a robot or a dinosaur), but none of the pieces are so specialized that they can only be used for one thing.
– https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/bricks-bricks-bricks-1071...
e.g. https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/creative-building-bricks-...
It's a less than useful selection of pastel colors to really do anything with.
I like living in a society where playtime isn't just for kids!
Even the varied array of "one-off" weirdly specific pieces always find an unexpected application in a pinch somewhere. I've been recently quite entertained by the creative work of a Dublin lego-er making pubs (with many many small 1x1 round pieces, and a selection of weird one-offs for signage/etc.) https://snapwidget.com/embed/927292