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And better than Duplo (For babies anyway) is the Baby Lego. They are rounded so your son can't get poked or scratched with it. Most of them have rattles in them, and some have a little music box.

The baby bricks are larger than Duplo, and stack on top of the Duplos.

Baby Lego

I am constantly frustrated when I try to buy Legos for my daughter. She loves building with Legos, but is not really interested in the kind of macho directions Lego has been going (fighting themes). Clikits does not fit the bill, and it's almost impossible to find a store that carries Belville sets.

Maybe if Lego would try harder and with more imagination to reach the other 50% of the zero-to-seven set, they's make more money.

Mindstorms is all about three things: RCXes, motors and sensors. The RCX is the "brain" that you program. It has inputs and outputs.

You want to buy as many Lego Mindstorms Robotics Invention Systems as you can. Each RIS kit comes with an RCX, two motors and various sensors. The kit also includes plenty of wheels, axles and generic blocks for building just about anything. It's a good bargain. I own two kits and probably need more now that they'll be discontinued.

The accessory kits have been somewhat of a disappointment for me, but it is how you get some different sensors. You can order discrete parts directly from Lego but you end up paying a lot.

Well, lucky all of us, really. That seems to be exactly the new strategy. Check out the Make & Create stuff.

They come in buckets now. They were called Freestyle sets throughout the 90's, but I'm not sure what the series name is now. Check your local Lego aisle for buckets full of windows, bricks, etc.

If it's individual kinds of parts in bulk you want, shop.lego.com still sells the service packs that they've always sold through the Shop At Home catalog, as well as the rest of their product line.

For single special parts, or any other sort of non-set purchase, BrickLink is a great resource. That's where the resellers break down the sets they buy from stores and sell the parts individually. If you want 300 wigets in blue, bricklink is the best way to find them.

I am an adult Lego fan with quite an inventory of the stuff. This parent is right on the quality issue (and others on the thread pointing to low margins are also there).

Lego keeps on selling 1949 designs (basic lego bricks with ~11-year industrial patents) because nobody can beat them at their prices. Lego invests quite a bit in product design ... but also in manufacturing design. Their systems are partly secret (and the company is 100% privately-owned).

There are clones that can *potentially* be attached to regular Lego, but their quality is glaringly inferior ... although some are put to good use in "realistic" castle walls, depicting stones of different hues and textures. There are also extremely high quality non-official Lego-compatible components for Mindstoms, but those are another story altogether.

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Want to buy cheap Lego? Try searching ebay for bulk lego (which can be washed with lukewarm water and soap). Keep an eye out for the (regular) Lego sales at toy stores, including the official online Lego store (which also offers bulk sales). Or use the new pick-a-brick Lego outlets. For specialized/hard to find parts Bricklink and Pitsco are your friends.

I am an adult Lego fan with quite an inventory of the stuff. This parent is right on the quality issue (and others on the thread pointing to low margins are also there).

Lego keeps on selling 1949 designs (basic lego bricks with ~11-year industrial patents) because nobody can beat them at their prices. Lego invests quite a bit in product design ... but also in manufacturing design. Their systems are partly secret (and the company is 100% privately-owned).

There are clones that can *potentially* be attached to regular Lego, but their quality is glaringly inferior ... although some are put to good use in "realistic" castle walls, depicting stones of different hues and textures. There are also extremely high quality non-official Lego-compatible components for Mindstoms, but those are another story altogether.

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Want to buy cheap Lego? Try searching ebay for bulk lego (which can be washed with lukewarm water and soap). Keep an eye out for the (regular) Lego sales at toy stores, including the official online Lego store (which also offers bulk sales). Or use the new pick-a-brick Lego outlets. For specialized/hard to find parts Bricklink and Pitsco are your friends.

My little brother got a Rahkshi Kaita Vo Kit for Christmas and I had the opportunity to play with it for an hour or two. The kit contains the pieces to make three functionally identical models, which seems pretty useless to me, but since you can buy them separately I'll blame the person who bought it for him.

Yes, many of the fixed pieces are overly specialized. However, the characters also have novel motion features, which would be difficult to design with general pieces and need to be light weight. By far the most interesting aspect of the whole kit is that the articulation of the limbs is due entirely to ball and socket joints, so although the "bones" appear only stylistically different, when you actually start building with them you realise that the attachment of balls and sockets at slightly different angles makes a big difference.

So the Bionicles don't just look organic, but incorporate organic design principles. And that could be way more educational than yet another civil engineering simulator!

I was also happy to see that many of the pieces included connection points that weren't used in the default models. So reuse might not be as high a priority at Lego as it used to be, but its still considered a virtue.

Yeh, you can directly order them, but are they in the shops?

That probably has a lot more to do with how the toy stores want to use their shelf space, than some decision by Lego, itself. I personally agree that only having the model sets visible seems like a mistake, but I have no evidence to back it up. I would assume that stores stock based on what sells, but it may well be that Lego pushed the other lines since they saw their future in that direction (or to try to cover the licensing costs). Even on shop.lego.com makes it is harder to find the buckets than it is the model sets, from the top of the site (unless you already knew about what the "Make & Create" line refers to).

Since the late 70's all Lego sets I've owned have contained specialised pieces.

You'll note that the previous poster didn't claim otherwise. You are, perhaps, arguing that there were as many then as now? Good luck.

I will point out that people who want more generic blocks can still get them at http://shop.lego.com/department.asp?d=19&t=7. It's not the same (for Lego, anyway) as having an assortment bucket out in front of consumers in the toy store, but at least you can get them if you need more pieces.

The do come with instructions

Most of the the body units are bionicle specific, but the bionicle parts are poping up in more an more LEGO kits (for example the whindscreen on the H.O.T. Blaster Bike is a Toa nuva shoulder pad. parts of the Spybotics guns are Bohrok hands. I think there not popping up in many other kits because the bionicle range is still quite new

Hmmm Spybotics are basically Mindstorm. I wonder if they are pulling the plug on them. It would be a shame they are little robot cars with some cool games to play and the option of programming them

Most of the the body units are bionicle specific, but the bionicle parts are poping up in more an more LEGO kits (for example the whindscreen on the H.O.T. Blaster Bike is a Toa nuva shoulder pad. parts of the Spybotics guns are Bohrok hands. I think there not popping up in many other kits because the bionicle range is still quite new

Hmmm Spybotics are basically Mindstorm. I wonder if they are pulling the plug on them. It would be a shame they are little robot cars with some cool games to play and the option of programming them

Most of the the body units are bionicle specific, but the bionicle parts are poping up in more an more LEGO kits (for example the whindscreen on the H.O.T. Blaster Bike is a Toa nuva shoulder pad. parts of the Spybotics guns are Bohrok hands. I think there not popping up in many other kits because the bionicle range is still quite new

Hmmm Spybotics are basically Mindstorm. I wonder if they are pulling the plug on them. It would be a shame they are little robot cars with some cool games to play and the option of programming them

Most of the the body units are bionicle specific, but the bionicle parts are poping up in more an more LEGO kits (for example the whindscreen on the H.O.T. Blaster Bike is a Toa nuva shoulder pad. parts of the Spybotics guns are Bohrok hands. I think there not popping up in many other kits because the bionicle range is still quite new

Hmmm Spybotics are basically Mindstorm. I wonder if they are pulling the plug on them. It would be a shame they are little robot cars with some cool games to play and the option of programming them

4) where are the old series? trains castles cities... there was really tons and tons of stuff!!! (and some amazing works to say the truth) where's all that stuff gone?

Trains, castles (pretty abysmal, I know -- there's more in the Harry Potter section, cities.

4) where are the old series? trains castles cities... there was really tons and tons of stuff!!! (and some amazing works to say the truth) where's all that stuff gone?

Trains, castles (pretty abysmal, I know -- there's more in the Harry Potter section, cities.

4) where are the old series? trains castles cities... there was really tons and tons of stuff!!! (and some amazing works to say the truth) where's all that stuff gone?

Trains, castles (pretty abysmal, I know -- there's more in the Harry Potter section, cities.

• Input multiplexers are available
• You can insert rechargable batteries. RCX 1.0 also had an AC adapter input making batteries unnecessary
• Lego CyberMaster is programmed/controlled via RF instead of infrared
• Vision Command is a Logitech webcam

Perhaps if they want their fortunes to improve, Lego should bring back the originals.

They tried.

(Dune Quote)
"They tried and failed?"
"They tried and died."

The LEGO company would beg to disagree. Its all caps and never LEGO's see page 16 of compprofileeng.pdf

that were just the simple colored bricks, but the newer "town" and "space" legos had radar dishes, antennae, car bottoms, etc. Also, the small scale of the little lego people means that you really can't make things at the same scale with plain bricks, because the "resolution" is too coarse.

Amen to that. One of the delights of the special bricks is that they can be used to create on a much smaller scale requireing less LEGO to make something. personally I think the complaints about special bricks is based on envy that they didn't have them to play with when they were kids... I once held that view, but changed it when I fitst played LEGO with my son (I've now entered my second LEGOhood)

Fine, you don't like 2x1. Try Regular and Transparent Bricks. At $15 for 240, it's a little more expansive, but not as bad as those pirate sets.

Anybody knows the email of the marketing departement of Lego? We need to send them the link to this Slashdot story; there are some good comments here. But I cannot find any emails on their site.

"As a consequence of the situation, a significant change of strategy has been initiated. The LEGO Company will focus on the fundamental product idea, as represented by the LEGO brick and the values of the LEGO Brand. It is a timeless and universal idea, which the consumers confirm they value highly, as clearly indicated in 2003: In spite of the general decline in sales, sales of Make & Create, the core products, were more than doubled."

I had (and dearly loved) piles of Legos when I was little, but most of those came as hand-me-downs in buckets. Maybe we can convince the folks at Lego to stop spending as much effort in producing new, specialized blocks for new, specialized sets with fancy graphics on their boxes and start selling things in buckets.

On another note, I bet that if someone were to set up a PayPal account to donate to the Lego corporation, that the mobs of Lego maniacs out there would be able to generate a significant amount of money for them.

I had (and dearly loved) piles of Legos when I was little, but most of those came as hand-me-downs in buckets. Maybe we can convince the folks at Lego to stop spending as much effort in producing new, specialized blocks for new, specialized sets with fancy graphics on their boxes and start selling things in buckets.

On another note, I bet that if someone were to set up a PayPal account to donate to the Lego corporation, that the mobs of Lego maniacs out there would be able to generate a significant amount of money for them.

Lego has been going down the road of specialized pieces that can't be used for building other things for a while. Fortunately they recently have released the Designer Sets. I got one of these as a birthday present a while ago and they are just like the sets I used to play with in the 80s in that all the pieces are general enough to be used for other creations. If you are a Lego enthusiast or supporter I highly recommend you buy some of these sets and even write Lego to tell them to releaes more sets like these.

Jarjar was an example, not a posterboy. I'm stating that a lot of the bricks have nowhere to go but in one very specific application. For example, the new Bionicle sets have TONS of specialized bricks, many of which would serve no real purpose on anything else.

I am young enough to remember playing with Legos very vividly, and let me tell you, the appearence DOES count. I wouldn't play with my older space legos with the 70's style colors and more square helmets, as much as I would the cooler, 80's sleeker space designs, like the Blacktrons. I'm pretty sure JarJar would have stayed at the bottom of the bin.

To further my point, I remember having a very nice (and particularly expensive) Lego train set. There were only 4 specialized brick types in the set (of well over a thousand pieces): the motor itself (was basically a huge brick with an electric motor and battery compartment), the wheels (which were normal Lego axles, the wheels were just different), the tracks and the ties. That train was designed very well, especially for not relying on new injection molds for everything.

What was great about that whole thing (the projects with few specialized bricks) was that I could totally disassemble them and actually have bricks to build something else. And they still make sets without relying on specialized pieces, but they don't market them. Go to WallyWorld and you will see that the Bionicle are the only sets available outside of the small 3-5yr old $5 Star Wars sets. I wouldn't buy those if I were a kid, but the huge sets (like the Hospital I had, for instance) would definitely catch my eye.

I hear many people in here complaining that Lego has become too 'specialized' and they need to get back to simple blocks. This is absolutley rediculous. You can still buy simple bricks. They haven't stopped making them, they have just expanded their product line. You hear about the specialized sets more only because they bring in more cash for Lego.

The article confirms that Lego has been hurting badly. The writing has been on the wall for a while now though. Just look at Lego's product lines over the past 5-10 years. Added: Harry Potter, Star Wars, video games, Bionicle, Sports, Mindstorms. Lost: classic space, castle, pirates. Plus the saddest thing for me, a lack of focus on good Technic sets.

Why so many problems? I think kids expect more from today's toys than just bricks. That's kind of a sad fact that says something about our culture I think. Second, since the expiration of Lego's stud-and-tube patent, there's been competition from Mega Bloks, which are inferior but cheaper. In today's world though, I think it makes sense that many parents choose cheaper rather than better. Another sad fact.

In any event, while I'm unhappy about Mindstorms, I'm happy they're abandoning Harry Potter and the like. They have totally lost their identity by branching out, and I think they really do need to get back to their core business as they're doing now. I wonder though, is it too late already?

There use to be a steady stream of great Technic sets worth getting, but recently good sets have slowed to a trickle, with just one catching my eye recently... 8455 Backhoe. Check it out, it might be one of your last few chances to grab a great Lego set.

As for the toys, some of the earlier sets are quite remarkable sets on par with many of their Technic creations. They even produced a set of remote control fighting crabs that could "disable" each other.

Also there's a secondary market of collectables, masks called kanohi, kanohi nuva, krana and krana kal, as well as kraata and not yet released kanoka disks, all affordable in small sets, but promoting many purchases from collectors to obtain the large collections.

As for the toys, some of the earlier sets are quite remarkable sets on par with many of their Technic creations. They even produced a set of remote control fighting crabs that could "disable" each other.

Also there's a secondary market of collectables, masks called kanohi, kanohi nuva, krana and krana kal, as well as kraata and not yet released kanoka disks, all affordable in small sets, but promoting many purchases from collectors to obtain the large collections.

As for the toys, some of the earlier sets are quite remarkable sets on par with many of their Technic creations. They even produced a set of remote control fighting crabs that could "disable" each other.

Also there's a secondary market of collectables, masks called kanohi, kanohi nuva, krana and krana kal, as well as kraata and not yet released kanoka disks, all affordable in small sets, but promoting many purchases from collectors to obtain the large collections.

As for the toys, some of the earlier sets are quite remarkable sets on par with many of their Technic creations. They even produced a set of remote control fighting crabs that could "disable" each other.

Also there's a secondary market of collectables, masks called kanohi, kanohi nuva, krana and krana kal, as well as kraata and not yet released kanoka disks, all affordable in small sets, but promoting many purchases from collectors to obtain the large collections.

As for the toys, some of the earlier sets are quite remarkable sets on par with many of their Technic creations. They even produced a set of remote control fighting crabs that could "disable" each other.

Also there's a secondary market of collectables, masks called kanohi, kanohi nuva, krana and krana kal, as well as kraata and not yet released kanoka disks, all affordable in small sets, but promoting many purchases from collectors to obtain the large collections.

As for the toys, some of the earlier sets are quite remarkable sets on par with many of their Technic creations. They even produced a set of remote control fighting crabs that could "disable" each other.

Also there's a secondary market of collectables, masks called kanohi, kanohi nuva, krana and krana kal, as well as kraata and not yet released kanoka disks, all affordable in small sets, but promoting many purchases from collectors to obtain the large collections.

This this likely means:

• No more Harry Potter _video games_
• No more Bionicle _shoes_

• More basic building bricks like we grew up with!

I totally agree. In fact, I think they should design a range of products, mmm, and call it something like the 'Inventor' or 'Creator' series.

I imagine they could use model numbers like 4026, 4094, 4095 or 4407.

Alternatively, you could just go to the lego website and check out their current line of products, before giving them advice on what products to produce.

If you want just plain bricks, they sell them. And those sets aren't that expensive.

Speaking of price, I just bought a bunch of the music builder series to give as gifts.

Here's the fatwallet thread describing the deal.

$9 instead of $49 is pretty sweet!

AC

A good friend of mine, Russ, has a great and interesting and THOROUGH page detailing everything you could ever want to know about Mindstorms.

His page, at http://www.crynwr.com/lego-robotics/, discusses the internals in great detail. You really won't believe how ADVANCED his knowledge is, so you've gotta check it out for yourself.

The page contains EVERYTHING about these amazing toys. I can't believe they're being discontinued. It's probably due to kids having too many activities (to beef-up their resumes) and videogames/television/radio taking up their time. No one sits down anymore to spend quality time with their family and build toys like these Mindstorms. We all have our own schedules and stuff, and it's probably NOT good for America in the long term.

Anyway, sorry to jade off a bit there, but here are some other links from my friend's page:
1) Create a Spider Robot
2) LEGO MINDSTORMS Group official SDK

Enjoy these links and much more on Russ's page! I helped him with the HTML code ;-)

I'm not sure the price of these toys is the problem. Toys in general aren't exactly cheap these days. Neither are video games, and video games seem to be what is the most appealing to children these days. So what we might need to look into is why expensive video games are more interesting than expensive toys where children have to actually think to use them. Or did I just answer my own question?

You should look for the Creator series. They are sold in the plastic stackable buckets, and contain mostly standard bricks and plates. In my opinion, the blue bucket number 4028 is the best deal. It's normally $20 or less at Toys R Us, and contains a ton of the 2x4 bricks that are the staple of most large lego creations.

Lego has been going down the road of specialized pieces that can't be used for building other things for a while. Fortunately they recently have released the Designer Sets. I got one of these as a birthday present a while ago and they are just like the sets I used to play with in the 80s in that all the pieces are general enough to be used for other creations. If you are a Lego enthusiast or supporter I highly recommend you buy some of these sets and even write Lego to tell them to releaes more sets like these.

Not sure what your basis for that claim is. Lego had/has Life on Mars, has Discovery Space which is all US Space equipment themed, and has the Classic Castle theme.

For those of you who want to just DIY, the best bet is to go to one of the Lego retail stores and use "Pick-A-Brick" to buy bulk bricks by the cup-full or by the kg.

--H

Not sure what your basis for that claim is. Lego had/has Life on Mars, has Discovery Space which is all US Space equipment themed, and has the Classic Castle theme.

For those of you who want to just DIY, the best bet is to go to one of the Lego retail stores and use "Pick-A-Brick" to buy bulk bricks by the cup-full or by the kg.

--H

Not sure what your basis for that claim is. Lego had/has Life on Mars, has Discovery Space which is all US Space equipment themed, and has the Classic Castle theme.

For those of you who want to just DIY, the best bet is to go to one of the Lego retail stores and use "Pick-A-Brick" to buy bulk bricks by the cup-full or by the kg.

--H

Not sure what your basis for that claim is. Lego had/has Life on Mars, has Discovery Space which is all US Space equipment themed, and has the Classic Castle theme.

For those of you who want to just DIY, the best bet is to go to one of the Lego retail stores and use "Pick-A-Brick" to buy bulk bricks by the cup-full or by the kg.

--H

If they lower the price, they lower the profit. Lego benifits by limiting suply. Just like the RIAA. That said, I'd buy my legos here, not at the store.

Lego Spirit Rover