Sadly what I see is Lego producing sets, even for kids, which consists of an endless amount of tiny bricks which is impossible to build stuff with quickly. It's absolutely wonderful when you want to build highly detailed reproductions.

What you can do, as you say, is to go get sets/buckets of classic bricks and use those, but the sets are getting annoying. As a kid I have pretty large number of various Lego sets and I mostly mixed and matched to build rough castles, space stations, house whatever, but you can do that with modern sets, to many tiny tiny bricks and very few blocks suitable for a five year old who just wants to build a house.

I get that Lego would have gone out of business if they had continued to produce the type of sets I played with in the 1980s, but it's barely a children's toy any more. Don't get me wrong, it's great that they can make things that brings joy to adults but I just feel that they've done it at the cost of the youngest children.

Also, the display pieces are often terribly unstable and a pain to keep clean. The Lego flowers are basically junk and you shouldn't buy them. They aren't nearly stable enough to have on display and they will certainly break when you try to clean them.

The best way to buy Lego is just to buy bulk dumps from families that stopped playing with them. It's going to be piles of unsorted bricks of all kinds and that in itself is a stimulus for creativity.

Just go on ebay or the local equivalent and search for 'pounds lego' or 'kilo lego' and you should be all set.

You're looking for the Minecraft sets. If you don't especially like Minecraft, throw away the one or two figures and enjoy the cool 2 by 4 bricks, just as they were in your childhood.

Bonus: every detail is printed, no stickers anywhere.

You can think of the advanced ones as more like puzzles you can display once you're done. Kids still like them. Even the finicky themed ones in our house get built then torn down to be rebuilt into fantastical mashups from my kid's imagination.

I think a lot of adults have overly fond memories of using the basic blocks to build relatively basic things. Also kids today can (and do) that in Minecraft now.

My kids when 7 or older played more creative with Dublplo blocks than their Lego sets.

Duplo is also from Lego. It's basically just larger blocks: https://www.lego.com/da-dk/themes/duplo

And it's compatible (2:1). So if you want to fill something large in a color or do some vast ice landscape, just get Duplo blocks and build away.

There's also quattro, which is 2x duplo, and compatible

Duplo is interesting, it allows kids to quickly build pretty massive stuff if they have enough of it. But mine were done with it relatively fast and we ended up donating it to other people.

Primo and Quattro are also interesting but much more rare.

Modulex, that's rare!!

If you find some keep it.

We have a large box of duplos but my three-year-old isn't interested at all, maybe showed some interest a while ago, but mostly to build the tallest tower. Now it's time for the real legos, but I'm not sure if we'll even get any if she won't play with them.

My 2 year old daughter hasn’t really shown any interest either.

It’s weird, as a kid I wasn’t really into building stuff. Lego, wood blocks, etc. The only exception was “forts” in my woods. I could play with my Power Rangers toys for hours.

As an adult, though, I’m into it.

Side note, have you seen Magna-Tiles? My 4yo son loves them. They have magnets along the edges so you can easily stick pieces together and build structures. They are bigger than regular LEGOs, more along the lines of Duplo. And they can be pricey, but they are tons of fun for little ones! Especially when their favorite thing is to knock down whatever you build.

Odd comment in the context of the thread since Duplo is also LEGO

Even as an adult, Duplo is underrated. It's a lot of fun to noodle around with creating things in Duplo because there are more constraints and you can build a rough simulacrum of something in only a few minutes.

Duplo seems much more in the spirit of Lego sets from the '80s. Builds used fewer, but larger pieces. I enjoyed playing with the older sets because you could tear them apart and put them back together much more easily.

Newer sets look nice, but IMO are much less fun to play with. My kids still like building Lego sets, but our Duplos get played with more often.

Bionicle/Hero Factory was by far the best they had for creative play. They cancelled it many moons ago, and now we have to buy 'em used for our kids.

On the whole it's a disappointing downward trajectory.

Funny, you couldn't pay my kids to play with those! But they never seem to have enough 2x4s...

Emphasis on "creative". Bionicle was was their product line that was simple enough for a child to have a complete mental model of it, and at the same time complex enough that they could build their own "real" adult sets, something that isn't obviously a throwaway pile of bricks.

> Bionicle/Hero Factory was by far the best they had for creative play.

I disagree with this premise. Play comes in countless forms, and I think this statement places roleplay above other forms of youthful creativity. For some kids, the roleplay of Lego action figures was a huge draw. Other kids play in different ways.

Some kids (like me) enjoyed Bionicle at first, but got bored of action figures by age ~8. Bionicle's lack of compatibility with most other Lego products meant that I was left with a bunch of parts I never really played with much (except for the ripcord disk-launcher things. I still get a kick out of those!) For me, the next chapter was Technic, because I liked making things that move. Fast forward a bit, and Technic led to Mindstorms, Mindstorms led to FIRST Robotics and Arduino, and now I'm a firmware engineer.

Does Technic have less creative value than Bionicle? I think that's an impossible question to answer. It depends on the kid. Any given object has as much creative power as a child's mind projects into it.

> On the whole it's a disappointing downward trajectory.

Yes and no.

On one hand, today's Lego action figures are pathetic compared to the Bionicle/Hero Factory heyday. It's also easy to mock cheap, commercialized dust collectors like the Brickheadz series. Part of me is sad to see Mindstorms dying off, but I also recognize that, even at its peak (NXT), it was totally inaccessible to most kids.

On the other hand, some things have gotten a lot better than they were 20 years ago. Lego's "Friends" theme is by far the best girl-targeted product line they've ever made. Belleville was the "girl" product line of my youth, and it was was cynical, condescending trash that was so thematically paper-thin that even my 6-year-old little sister saw straight through it.

Almost identical pathway here, except with some Spybotics thrown in around the same time as Bionicle. I sometimes wish Mindstorms had that level of world building...

> On the one hand I'm disappointed, just like you

What exactly is the disappointment? That they also target adults?

> Fortunately they also still sell the creative play and building blocks and not all kids built canned sets.

Also, after being build as canned sets, the canned sets can become more distinct parts for creative building.

At least, that's what happens with my kids.