[thrower123]

I'm somewhat depressed by how explicitly Lego is marketing towards 30-something man-children who build things to put them on the shelf.

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.

[jbrnh]

My dad complained about modern specialized lego bricks 30 years ago. I got some of his old bricks from the 50's. They got some weird shapes too. Nothing changed.

[loudmax]

Totally agreed. I have several single function pieces from sets from the late 70s and early 80s:

  - spring actuated forklift loaders
  - boat hulls that actually float in water
  - airplane/helicopter rotors (incompatible with technics because they predate it)

Not to mention all the doors, windows, trees, wheel axles and pulleys that can really only do one thing.

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.

[thrower123]

This argument is about a decade out of date, and I'm completely uncomprehending how someone could not come up with a way to repurpose doors and windows and wheel axles...

There was a terrible period in the late 90s/early 2000s when they did make a bunch of really chunky large pieces that were impossible to do much with. Now the pendulum has swung to the other extreme, and designs are littered with a ridiculous number of miniscule pieces, which do little but bulk up the part count and add baroque detailing.

A terrible example of this style of design is the most recent X-Wing (https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/luke-skywalker-s-x-wing-f...). Clearly a model marketed at children. But the whole thing is incredibly fragile, made up of fiddly bits, with a couple spring-loaded shooter thingies tacked on to give it a modicum of play features. The entire segment aft of the cockpit is a complicated mass of technic beams and pins with a facade over the top, to make the wings fold open, except that the wings don't actually lock open. It looks really pretty, but as a Lego set, it's a big failure.

[jbrnh]

Yes, and it almost killed the company. I read an article a while back how they had no accounting from the designers to production, and literately had 8 different chef minifigs (also, making star wars sets helped them out as well)

[handrous]

The trouble with the modern sets isn't specialized bricks, it's that 3/4 of the brick count is short 1x1s and tiny flat cladding pieces used to cover all the nubs. They're worse for play than the old ones with more large pieces (so, a chance of actually repairing the damn thing from memory if part broke) and exposed nubs to add on to. Older sets also had way more interior space or surface area for a similar brick count, for ones where that mattered (buildings, vehicles).

[seppel]

This is true, but what changed is that Lego is now filling the inside of their models with ugly colored bricks, which makes changing the models much harder than in the past.

[jacquesm]

Fun fact: some of the oldest plastic Lego is H0 scale vehicles. I have a bunch of these they are ridiculously valuable today.

[skipnup]

There still are lots of classic boxes of "normal" pieces:

– https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/bricks-bricks-bricks-1071...

– https://www.lego.com/en-us/themes/classic

[hinoki]

It’s even better now than it was, since now you can get those basic bricks from IKEA for cheap: https://www.ikea.com/us/en/p/bygglek-201-piece-lego-r-brick-...

[jacquesm]

That's not cheap. Ebay bulk buys are cheap. And they come with the free surprise factor too. Why not recycle?

[lawn]

Plenty of Lego sets for the kids as well. Just avoid these sets if it's something you worry about.

[Tomte]

Buy Lego Minecraft. Lots and lots of 2x2, 2x4 and 2x8 bricks in sensible colors.

[thrower123]

Might have to look at this. The Classic boxes don't actually have the classic colors in much sufficiency, and are likewise full of tiny 1x1 and 1x2s to bulk up the part count

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.

[ht_th]

My mother, who is in her 70s, loves to build these new sets! She also loved to build all the old Lego sets from her children again for her grand children. Just to see if all the pieces were still there, she said :-)

I like living in a society where playtime isn't just for kids!

[bombcar]

I still remember as a child loving the “customized” pieces - printed, rare - much more important that the normal bricks

[elliekelly]

They still make the “classic” sets of just basic bricks in assorted colors. Around the holidays you can get a giant box at Costco for $20 and I think Ikea might have a classic set even cheaper. The classic bricks come in bright yellow boxes while the dedicated builds are usually in blue boxes and the duplo sets (classic brick sets for toddlers with extra large pieces) are in green boxes. I think it’s sometimes easy to miss the yellow boxes in the lego aisle when you’re so focused on the blue boxes.

[estaseuropano]

The kids spilled over their Lego box a few days ago - so many unusable and pointless 1x1 round pieces, special weird shapes, etc. Its all the sets which are fun to build but seem more like a puzzle than a Lego set which you can really reuse, rebuild, etc. I'm not normally nostalgic, but my box as a child used to be all real blocks and I could build great stuff. Now its more marketing to sell more and more branded sets. Worst is the Lego city stuff though.

[lucideer]

If you think a 1x1 round piece is unusable/pointless, you are truly lacking in imagination.

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

[handrous]

> If you think a 1x1 round piece is unusable/pointless, you are truly lacking in imagination.

I think you're underestimating the percentage of bricks in modern sets that can be described like this. They're very hard to mash up (e.g. "I'm going to use these two castle sets to build a totally different GIANT castle!" or "Now this pirate base is an oceanographic research center!"), to add on to, and to repair if damaged. Plus they're just damn tiny for the part count.

They do sell the buckets still, which is always the retort to complaints about modern sets, but it makes me sad that the entire way I played with LEGO sets when I was growing up is nearly impossible with (most) modern sets (the ones intended for kids, I mean—I don't care if the ones plainly marketed to adults aren't good for those things, of course).