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Comment by riffraff | Hacker News Reader

What timeframe do you refer to as "what it used to be"?

I owned lego castles and spaceships sets even 30+ years ago.

I was a kid in the 90s so that's when I bought my Lego.

One specific example I can give is with the chassis for small cars. In the 90s they were fairly generic. They were obviously intended to make cars with but you could build any kind of car or boat or plane or spaceship using it as a base.

Now I'm buying Lego for my kid and the car chassis have integrated tyre pins and mudguards, so it's hard to put on e.g. monster truck wheels (won't fit) or build it into a boat/plane.

So while specialized pieces aren't new, they're so very single purpose now. Not every piece, but enough of them that it's problematic.

Lego sets intended for younger children tend to have more large, single purpose pieces. For example, [0] is a set intended for children as young as 4 and it has the single purpose car chassis pieces you mentioned. However, in the same City theme this set intended for 5+ year olds [1] has the same sort of generic chassis you remember. The city theme as a whole though does tend to have more single purpose pieces such as plane cockpits or boat hulls, but even then you can use the pieces to build new boats or planes. Furthermore, the Creator theme has no single purpose pieces for at all, those models are made completely out of generic pieces (not just bricks mind you, there are lots of slopes and other kinds of really useful pieces used). For example, [2] is a pirate ship made completely out of generic pieces that even has instructions to rebuild it into a Pirate inn or a skull island. If pirates aren't your fancy, how about a monster burger truck [3] or a twin rotor helicopter [4]? Again, no single purpose pieces in sight. Even the modern Star Wars sets tend to have mostly generic pieces and even the custom pieces made for the set tend to be things like windscreens that can be used for custom spaceships.

[0] https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/garage-center-60232

[1] https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/service-station-60257

[2] https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/pirate-ship-31109

[3] https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/monster-burger-truck-3110...

[4] https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/twin-rotor-helicopter-310...

Maybe that's what I've been experiencing. He's four and a half so mostly we've been buying slightly "younger" Lego I guess.

Those 3-in-1 sets really impressed me though! We've got two of them and as you say they come with instructions for several different ways of using the same pieces, and they're generic enough that you can build mostly anything.

We're definitely picking up more of those as both me, my dad, and my kid all like to just free-form build things most of the time. The creator pieces are actually really great because of the slopes and curved pieces that complement your ideas and help put the finishing touches on things.

Got it, thanks for taking time to explain.

I stopped playing with lego as a child around 1975. I've played with lego as a parent and inveterate fiddler ever since.

I freely admit by the time I stopped, Lego was well beyond blocks: fences, animals, plants, roofing elements, train elements, turntables, windows, car elements...

I think you're going too radical. I get that LEGO gradually shifted from pure blocks to more and more specific things for aesthetics (and sales), but even up to the 90s the main focus was functional blocks. It was still geometric in spirit and very free.

I had a spaceship in the late '80s which was full of custom pieces (like V shaped blue windows with yellow glass). Anecdotal I know, but still..

those were my gear (6685 :)

The weirdest and less reusable were hollow corners (for the V shaped windows) the oval feets. The rest was very generic.

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