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Comment by bradleyjg | Hacker News Reader

A little off topic, but I recently found out that you essentially can't buy plain old legos+ anymore. I wanted to buy some as a gift and I ended up having to buy knock offs because the lego company effectively doesn't sell them anymore.

+ I.e. full height 2x2, 2x3, 2x4

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Is this what you are looking for from Toy's R Us?

https://www.toysrus.com/product?productId=45199456&source=CA...

That's the closest I found, but it still has plenty of wheels, doors, windows, half height pieces, round pieces, eyes, knobs, flat on top pieces, etc, etc, etc. The child I was buying for has some sets like that, but I wanted to buy just a large number of regular lego blocks for freeform play. I couldn't find anything on their website like that other than individually picking out single blocks.

Pretty sure that's never actually been a thing.

Yeah the 'basic' sets I got in the 70's had plenty of wheels, slopes, windows, and those weird articulated arm people- the mythic age of children building everything out of rectangles never really existed.

The Lego Store near me has bins separated by color. You can buy as many pieces as you need of each size. Kind of like how you buy bulk candy or nuts at Whole Foods.

For the price they charge for that, though, they'd be better off buying one of the creative line boxes and throwing out all of the non-rectangular pieces. Which would be dumb to do, but apparently they want those pieces and none others.

It seems they have:

https://www.bricklink.com/v2/catalog/catalogitem.page?S=5576...

https://www.bricklink.com/v2/catalog/catalogitem.page?S=6177...

All those specialty pieces are useful in freeform play and have definitely been a part of the non-specific Lego boxes since at least when I was getting them as a kid starting in the 1970s.

Sometimes I see Ebay sellers selling random bricks by the pound.

This is one of the best ways to go. If you're lucky, you can come upon somebody who isn't a professional seller that's getting rid of a whole collection, and snag an entire tub for < $100.

This is really helpful, thanks. Not sure why I didn't think of it.

I don't know where you come from, but in france you can easily buy sets that contain lots of basic bricks (full height 2x2, 2x4, etc), and you can buy them individually, in large batches. It has never been easier than today to find those pieces.

https://shop.lego.com/en-CA/LEGO-Creative-Supplement-10693

This looks pretty basic.

You can visit the online Lego store and pick out any number of any colour of the plain (or any other) bricks that you want.

https://shop.lego.com/en-CA/Pick-a-Brick

There's a search filter.

You can filter by colour and by name, for ex: 2x4

Go to any LEGO store and they have bins where you can pick and choose single pieces.

> little off topic, but I recently found out that you essentially can't buy plain old legos+ anymore.

Sure you can. If you just want non-themed sets heavy in classic pieces, they are sold as Lego “Creative Box” or “Creative Set” in various sizes [0]; if you want specific pieces in the common sizes, you can go into a Lego Store and handpick want you want from bins in the wall and pay by the bag.

[0] e.g., https://shop.lego.com/en-US/LEGO-Large-Creative-Brick-Box-10...

You can buy individual bricks off Bricklink. It's basically Ebay but exclusively for LEGO.

That's a painful way to buy half a kilo of Lego standard blocks though.

Maybe parent poster could buy a couple of kg of Lego from Ebay, then sort and wash it. The wheels, doors, etc can be donated to local charities / goodwill etc.

There's a Lego store near me where I can buy pieces by the spadeful. I'm not sure what you're on about.

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