[Breazy]

When I was a kid my mother bought me and my two brothers a 5 gallon bucket of lego at a yardsale. We played with those bricks A LOT but no matter how much we built the bucket never seemed to drop below half full. There are only so many bricks you can place a day before your fingers feel like they're going to bleed.

Of course, we weren't keeping builds around forever either. That's the real trick I think. Lego should be for ephemeral builds (for some reason, kids usually understand this better than adults.) At the end of the day/week/month, take whatever you built and drop it back into the bucket. If you have enough lego for X kids to build things that last Y days, you'll never run out.

[adamrezich]

one of my best friends growing up was from one of those kinds of families that thought Harry Potter was witchcraft, but he had a cool older brother who later showed me QBASIC and RPG Maker 95 and got me into programming. when I'd spend the night at this friend's house, we would play with legos but in a different way than most kids do, which my friend learned from his big brother: instead of building walls and roofs and such for houses in Legotown, all walls and everything were just one brick high, unless necessary for some specific purpose. when you play like this, your Legotown becomes a cross between a 16-bit JRPG and a tabletop role-playing game—you can focus on role-playing and adventures using spaceships and stuff that you build, while having a town that resembles blueprints or cut-away diagrams, which makes it easy for players to go visit each others houses, and for a "dungeon master" type player to move the story along, introduce villains, role-play NPCs in the town, and so forth. I brought this type of play home to my four younger siblings and we had a Lego Island with an ongoing story that evolved every time we played. it was fun to have the persistence of houses that made up a town on an island, but building walls only one brick high and using our imaginations to fill in the rest to save on bricks so we could build airplanes and spaceships and whatever we wanted for a given play session. years later I would put two and two together and realize that my friend's older brother more than likely had some secret D&D books that his mom would forbid him from having and this game was his way of role-playing with his younger brother. anyway, if you have kids, this is a solid way to introduce basic role-playing and epic storylines with the persistence of a video game, but without actually being a video game—highly recommended.

[andrewflnr]

Nice, we did the one-brick-high walls thing, too, and minifigures representing ourselves. My sister wasn't much into the epic storylines, though. :D

[andrewflnr]

I don't know, my sister and I kept a lot of things around for a long time, in a similar way to the Legotown in the article.

But I'd agree that probably doesn't work if you have a bunch of kids trying to play with the same set. It has to be very clear that everyone is borrowing the Legos, and anything that survives the day's session needs some consent from everyone.