Probably an age thing, but I’ve never understood the point of Lego instructions. Or the sets.
The whole point of Lego was creative free form building. Remove that & it’s dull as hell. It just becomes model building with poor quality models as the result.
I’m happy other people find it fun, but to me it misses the entire point in favor of weak licensed “kits”.
For us growing up, the point of the sets was that you got a cool spaceship or whatever, which you would put your personal Lego guy into, park near your "base", and play with until some other project demanded the parts. Then it would be disassembled mercilessly and consigned to the bin as grist for the constantly evolving construction project laid out on our much-abused air hockey table.
If a set was a particularly cool build, we might disassemble it and then rebuild it - but most of the time, once something got taken apart, no one was ever going to bother trying to reconstruct it from the manual, since doing so would have involved finding all 500 necessary pieces in the mega-bin.
Some people want to play with playsets. Some people want to display models. Some people want to create art. Some people want to construct machines. Some people want to assert allegiance. Some people want to collect.
All of these aims are valid. The diversity of ways to buy LEGO supports them all, while maintaining a high-quality, largely compatible, reasonably consistent medium.
In recent years, there is a general drift towards "collectible display models". This means that the piece count in most sets is inflated by a majority of small "finishing" pieces. The models are finicky to build with lots of unusual building techniques (attaching bricks on sidewalls, for example) and are not easy to repurpose into something else in a reasonable amount of time.
In the 1990s, it was a "construction toy" first, playset second, display model last. A kid could take any set and rebuild it into something else in an hour or so. Now, they would need more time only to sort the tiny 1x1 pieces before starting to build anything.
> In recent years, there is a general drift towards "collectible display models"
I think there is an actually an "addition" here rather than a change. You're an adult conversing with adults (I assume) and therefore the discussions you have and the marketing you see are more about sets targeted to AFOLs (Adult Fans of Lego).
The classic Lego childhood lines (Lego City) still exist and still work just as well for play and creative construction as they ever did - and they don't use a lot of 1x1s. It's just that we've also gained these new lines of large adult sets that never used to exist.
Even the vehicles in 5+ City sets are affected by this trend. It takes about 50 parts stacked in intricate ways just to build the base chassis structure of a van, for example.
In the 1990s, Town vehicles were 4-stud wide and didn't focus on the small detailing. The instructions for the original vehicle were just a single sheet of paper with less than 20 steps. You could build the original vehicle by memory after having built it a couple of times with instructions. The back of the box suggested alternative builds, which, although looking "imperfect" were a solid base for imagination.
Once they've got a few sets like that, the rebuilding into unspecified stuff seems to come naturally (at least with the cousins and friends kids I've played with).
Those complex sets are great for stimulating certain types of spatial reasoning, perseverance, and fine motor skills. My four year old went from 'building a tractor (60287) with dad helping' to 'building 5+ kits all by himself'.
The kits don't stop him from just building his own stuff either. The two forms of play seem complimentary.
See, I love all those detail bits. I love to make tiny, intricate models that say a lot in a small space. I love grabbing a couple of random gribbly bits, sticking them together, deciding they look like the beginning of something, then sticking on more bits to make it more like the thing.
The "voxel sculpture" style where you just stack (mostly) rectangular bricks into a shape is perfectly valid, but it's less interesting to me personally.
Modern Lego supports both. Both are valid. They still sell big brick buckets, and no one's stopping you from buying one of those and doing your thing.
What I'd really like to see is a "brick bucket" that contains mostly large bricks and maybe a few doors, windows, and slanted tiles. I'm all for gribbly bits, but it seems harder to accumulate a good collection of the basics these days - because the big "brick buckets" you describe are probably half gribbly bits. In my experience as a kid, what we really wanted was enough mass to build walls and houses and forts, and were not as interested in small detail stuff.
That looks pretty good actually, but now I'm going to move the goalposts and wish for a similar box with less color variety so that you can build, for example, a white house with a red roof, instead of having to cobble together various colors.
Still though, I just might have to top off the kids collection with one of these boxes. Good find.
Lego nailed it in 1980 with the 8860 Auto Chassis, IMO. It does all of those things in a nice balance with piece count of 662 (for a 57 cm long car) and IMO still ends up looking better than today's 3000 piece models.
The 1x1 sticker tiles sort themselves by granular convection [1] to the bottom of a Rubbermaid tote just like the sunflower seeds in a snack mix. In our house, they frequently get neglected except as gems/coins/treasure to fill a pirate chest. The large plates and bricks float to the top during shaking and digging.
I'm in my early forties but I still grew up with instructions and sets. Usually I'd assemble a set and probably learn a thing or two along the way, then I'd tear the sets down and build stuff myself.
As a father of three, that's exactly how I see my kids using the sets today. The sets get built once, then they get torn down and the bricks get reused.
I personally agree about the whole point of Lego being free form building - and I still have some Lego magazines from the days when that was explicitly encouraged by Lego - but you need kits and instructions to get to the point where you can do free form building. It's like composing music, you're going to have a very difficult time of it if you don't first study a whole lot of existing, well-constructed music.
Neither did I till I had a kid. My kid loves following instructions, builds a set a few times, then he goes into creative mode and builds his own way. Instructions helped my kid learn the basics of instruction following which is a good skill to have for a 5 year old.
The purpose of the instructions is to learn the techniques. First you build with the instructions, then you tear it apart and build what you want.
Not everyone is into the instructions -- my daughter follows them meticulously and will only build with instructions. My son refuses to follow instructions and will only "master build".
When I was a kid I'd build with the instructions, and eventually I destroyed everything and built a whole city from scratch.
Growing up, myself and my siblings built sets when we first got them as gifts, but after that they went in the pile. We would build whatever was in our imagination, from the multicolored heap.
Now I have my own kids, and they all want to build sets from instructions. The odd time we'll dive into the pile of orphaned bits and build a house or a boat or something, but mostly they want to recreate what they remember. My wife spends hours finding all the pieces of a set and bagging them up for the kids to build later (so she's gonna love this)
It's tempting to say "kids nowadays" but I think it's just different personality types. In other media, my kids are far more creative and imaginative than I ever was, but with Lego sets they prefer to recreate the perfect image than make a hodge podge thing that never existed.
The fun of building new sets off instructions is the satisfying-ness. You know the instructions are correct, that no pieces are missing and all pieces click together satisfyingly into the result, that looks and feels nice. Each click is satisfying.
It is a whole lot different from tinkering with arduino hats/sw, as frustration can creep in if things don't work as expected.
I like both. I think Lego sets are in many ways my first experience of technical documentation and I still use those skills. It also helped me learn about how sets went together so I could design my own. Finally, I wanted to play with what was on the box.
> The whole point of Lego was creative free form building. Remove that & it’s dull as hell.
The point is that Lego can be played with in a bunch of ways. It's parts that you can do whatever with, and it has instructions for one or more models that you can make. Some people like the sheer possibilities of making things up, and some people find that daunting. Lego supports both, and anything in between.
Following the instructions does teach you techniques that you can use on designing your own builds. It's a way to learn from experts.
How they reuse molds in Lego models is crazy. I have a model with a pagoda, that uses bananas for the points on the eaves. My favorite is the orchid model, where the smaller orchid blossoms are demigorgon heads from the Stranger Things sets.
I am in-between - so, the way I used instructions was for ideas on how things could be put together that were "non-obvious".
I would build it once, then play with that model for a bit, then deconstruct it, put it into my box of loose LEGO and then build whatever I wanted - sometimes it would look similar, but it was never the same way twice.
I fail to understand expensive sets that get built and sit on shelves or in glass enclosures... Might as well break out the Kragle (I think many people failed to see the point of that movie...)
I'm with you. I remember my childhood experience with Legos. Me and a friend down the road would drag out this big bucket full of random stuff. We'd build forts, and then crazy many-wheeled trucks that would assault them.
The whole thing was about those designs just springing from the imagination, and I really don't get what fun building toward a prescribed design would be, especially since it's so low fidelity.
There are no 'models' to build, and the "instructions" that come with it are more a discussion of architectural principles, as adapted for Lego as needed.
Yeah we never had sets or instructions as a kid (of the 80s). But now doing sets it's pretty relaxing, fun, easy. It's a puzzle. Eventually everything ends up in a heap like other comments mention. I imagine once the heap is big enough we'll go back to creative free form building with the variety of generic and tailored pieces we've accrued.
Free building is great, but my experience is that my young son also wants to build his sense of competence - following the steps correctly, fixing mistakes, and making something exactly like the picture. Sure, he plays with it for a minute and then tears it apart to make something original - but, like you said, that’s the beauty of Lego.
I love following instructions. It's so relaxing for me to just follow without having to figure anything out. Building my own stuff with Lego would be a completely different thing and I never enjoyed that, probably because I'm not very good at it.
It gives you a core set of patterns for going off on your own and building. Think of it as lego practice that shows you a neat model at the end you can then scrap :)
I didn’t. That’s my point. Kits were rare (usually just suggestions with a slight subset of blocks) and most “sets” were 100s of pieces & so infinite options to build.
Now that’s still available but VERY much tertiary.
The whole point of Lego was creative free form building. Remove that & it’s dull as hell. It just becomes model building with poor quality models as the result.
I’m happy other people find it fun, but to me it misses the entire point in favor of weak licensed “kits”.