There are two types of people in this world. Lego shelf and Lego bucket.

I bemoan having gone from being a bucket person, to shelf person, to not even playing with Legos anymore person. Adulthood kinda has a way of doing that.

My friend and I wanted to start a Beer, Brats, and Bricks night, but right when that was gonna materialize, the plague struct. I should hit them back up. I still have buckets on buckets.

Sounds like a great time! From the brats comment I’m guessing you’re in Wisconsin or may Chicago.

Upstate NY, like Albany ish. We have bratwurst here. Actually being at the nexus of historic Dutch, German, Polish, and Italian immigrant populations, we have quite the selection of tasty cured pork products.

Sindoni Italian sausage is world-class. Aldi has a good selection of brats. And my family is from Western NY so we get Salen's hotdogs occasionally. I forget the name but there's a really good kielbasa at the grocery too.

Wow, sounds awesome! I’m from Chicago and there’s a lot of similar stuff around here. Maxwell polish, brags beer with onions and mustard, Italian meats… I’m salivating! I haven’t really been to the eastern parts so I’m unaware of what it has to offer but from your description there’s a lot!

Keeping it on topic… when is Lego releasing a Chicago dog? :)

Brats being children or hotdog sausages [Bratwürste]? (Or brothers [in Anglicised Russian]?)

Either sounds good.

I meant sausages, but I guess both, it's a double entendre :p Grilling and also we would involve his young son who is a big Lego fanatic.

He doesn't get to sample the beer, of course.

And then there's closely related Venn diagram of any-color-will-work-lego-house people vs. single-color-walls people

EDIT: the current two child comments are of parts in that diagram, great. No judgement, I just wonder what type my son is going to be :-)

I never understood the any-color-will-work people. When you were a kid and were painting something, did you cover all surfaces do random blotches of color?

Think of it like dithering. Not all of us could afford full 24 bit color displays and had to make do with 256 or 16 colors or 8 colors instead. Sometimes the right color brick isn't there and it's better to have the odd colors spread throughout the whole thing than one brick that's off.

I lived near a Samsonite factory (they manufactured Lego in Canada) and my bricks were purchased in giant shopping bags. They were all seconds which means some parts had color problems, some were a bit melted, some were cracked, etc... Mostly they were fine and I had a lot of bricks.

I know! I remember as a child spending forever digging through the Lego pile looking for the right color. I had to reluctantly teach myself that it was okay to build with any color first and then go back and swap out with matching colors afterwards once I was happy with my design.

Bad analogy: If you dipped your brush in the pot and it came out a random one of a small selection of colours, would you wash it off until you got the "right" colour when the only requirement was to put paint on the paper?

Do you build with lego by picking random pieces and sticking them together? If you are choosing the next piece by shape, why not add color to the selection criteria?

Not random, but functional equivalence is fine.

I always cared about how it looked too.

Haha, didn't even realize the second kind existed until I watched my wife build from the big bucket with my son, I was like "What is THIS?"

That's the core beauty of Lego, I think. There are so many meta games one can decide to play with a single bucket, and at least one caters to pretty much everyone under the sun.

And then you get amazing synergies when people who play differently combine their efforts.

Which is one of the reasons I'll admit I cried during the first Lego movie ending. They nailed that aspect.

Saw the 1st Lego movie on a plane once, did not expect to tear up. Spaceship!

Ok now I need to see that movie.

I saw it on a plane, and IMHO it was way better than it needed to be.

Tip: Just kind of relax into the goofiness and have fun, but make sure you watch the entire movie if you start

I appreciate the construction process of an intricate shelf piece, but I wish I had the creativity of a bucketeer.

I think there's a reason bucketeers skew younger: imagination is replaced by knowledge as we age.

We look at a pile of bricks and see whatever it's supposed to be.

An 8 year old looks at it and sees whatever pops into their head.

There is a less common hybrid third type: design a model in bricklink studio then buy individual bricks to build it, then shelve it.

Do the "Lego bucket" people buy $500+ kits? Do the "Lego shelf" people ever disassemble the $500+ kits?

> Do the "Lego shelf" people ever disassemble the $500+ kits?

I've turned into a Lego Shelf person. I like to buy the architecture kits. I put them on the shelf in my office, but every so often when I get frustrated and no one is watching I will take one and smash it to bits on the floor like a child. It's great because it lets me vent, and it gives my future self the gift of building a Lego set. Really, it's an act of self-care.

If the 500+ price kit is a huge bucket of random pieces, then I guess the bucket people would. =)

I disassemble some of mine. I'm a Lego shelf person because I actually like the intricate designs and attention to detail of modern Lego sets AND because I don't have enough free time to be a bucket person in a way that would be satisfying to me as an adult. I think I'm pass making approximate version of my ideas and using them as toys.

I've never sold a kit and I don't intend to ever do it.

They'll be disassembled when they want to resell the kit.

There's two major categories of Lego sets IMO display pieces (the UCS or Creator Expert series) and playsets. They still very much make the second type of set for their younger audience but they realize adult fans wanted more intricate sets so gave them that. I think it's interesting they finally made this kind of hard/impossible to disassemble configuration a part of their build but I don't think it's a big knock against them. They know these UCS sets largely get assembled then sit assembled until they go into storage or get moved/sold, so it's not really a big issue imo.

They've always had both types of blocks, the custom stuff and the standard array.

If you're in stores often you catch the 50 piece standard piece sets for $10 or whatever. Lego stuff lasts generations.

These Creator Expert models certainly are.

I'm not the greatest fan of the explosion in use of small tiles and cheese wedges in recent years. It's kind of like AAA videogames that have a billion vertices but are empty

Why would you say that? (Honest question)

There's been a marked increase in custom bricks for a perfected, rendered look on newer models. That does make shelf builds look more like actual miniature models of the thing being built, but it makes the parts more difficult to use in creative builds, and makes it much more difficult to add a creative flair to a shelf build in a cohesive way.

My son is 5, and recently graduated from Duplos to classic Legos, he started with this set:

https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/lego-medium-creative-bric...

It's basically a box of hundreds of colorful plates and bricks. There are a few wheels and eyes, too, but it's mostly just bricks. We make bulldozers and airplanes and robots and houses and all manner of things! Yes, there are studs instead of smooth tiles on top of the engine compartment, and yes, there are about 7 shades of yellow, cream, and orange making up the dozer, and no, the tracks aren't functional, but it slides fine. Mom might need to ask to know that the pink 1x1 brick sticking out the top is the bulldozer's TURBO BOOSTER MODE BUTTON, or she might guess that because she knows our son.

He's received a few sets once we let family and friends know that he's using legos now. He got this Ninjago set:

https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/tournament-of-elements-71...

which focuses the design on a bunch of stickers and printed parts and custom weapons made to look like a show he's never seen. He does love all the little Lego people, they have fun adventures, but he built it once, took it apart, and now most of the parts end up in the bottom of the brick box unused. Another typical one is this monster truck:

https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/monster-truck-31101

https://www.lego.com/cdn/cs/set/assets/bltd6f7b204e1e11893/3...

Kudos to Lego for the cool Technik functional rubber suspension design, my son loves that and has rebuilt it on other vehicles! And kudos for the 3-in-1 design that reuses a lot of the custom pieces for a truck, a dragster, and a small car. But look at all the rounded tiles and cheese wedges and smooth surfaces. It's possible to build things that aren't one of the intended three things, but it takes a lot more planning. Like the random horns and staffs from the Ninjago set, he doesn't use these studless tiles much either. You can't click anything into the bed of the truck; it's supposed to be a truck, what's up with that! There's almost nowhere to put a pink turbo booster mode button at all.

The truck looks like a plastic model. Anything built with the creative brick box has studs all over and looks like a pile of Legos begging to have something added to it or to be rebuilt into something else.

My youngest (7) has watched Ninjago, but if he got a Ninjago set, I'm 100% sure he would build it once according to the instructions, then after a little while, take it apart and incorporate all of the pieces into a new creation from the bucket. It's his original creations that end up being displayed on a shelf.