I was about to be the coolest dad ever. I’d prepared the magic words: “Do you want to help daddy test the new Lego Smart Bricks? I can pick you up from school early!” It worked. My kids literally jumped for joy.
When The Lego Group announced in January that a tiny computer brick would be the company’s “most significant evolution” in nearly 50 years, even Lego fans were skeptical. Why buy bricks that make pew-pew sounds that kids should make with their own mouths? My first reaction was to explain that the Lego Smart Bricks have so much more potential than that: The bricks in these kid toys could lend their smarts to adult robots, too.
But even my daughters, ages six and nine, weren’t captivated as long as I’d hoped. Though they loved building the sets and trying each little computerized interaction in turn, they rarely came back for more. When I asked them if I should return the sets, they told me to go for it.
The problem isn’t the price tag or even the kid-friendly builds; it’s that Lego’s been too stingy with the Smart Brick’s smarts. Half its sensing features aren’t even used in the first eight sets; the ones that are here are underutilized.
For now, these “smart” bricks feel far too dumb. I’m afraid the first Lego Smart Play sets are largely just light and sound like critics feared. And that wasn’t enough to entertain my kids.
1/10
The Lego Smart Brick is a tiny computer in the shape of a 2×4 Lego brick. It offers RGB light; real-time synthesized sound; a wirelessly rechargeable battery; Bluetooth mesh networking to communicate with other bricks; sensors including motion, orientation, color, ambient light, and proximity; a microphone to detect sound; and most importantly, an NFC reader so it can execute tiny programs just by attaching the brick to a Lego set.
You can’t buy a Smart Brick solo, and five of the first eight Lego Star Wars sets don’t come with one. You’ll pay $70, $90, or $160 for one of the first three starter kits that do — which means you’re paying as much as $30 per Smart Brick compared to Lego’s typical prices.
- Lego Smart Tiles, NFC tags that act as little programs that tell the brick what to be — an X-wing, a lightsaber, a blender, a scanning station, a Star Wars creature.
- Lego Smart Minifigures, which are just specific minifigures like Luke, Leia, or Darth Vader with those same NFC tags embedded.
- A wireless charging pad that will become your new best friend, because the bricks have less than an hour of battery life — which is not a lot! — and generally need charging overnight. It’s powered over USB-C and comes with a USB-A-to-C cable. (By the way, you can’t replace the lithium-ion battery in these Smart Bricks; they’ll eventually stop working.)
At the moment, the most sophisticated interaction is the X-wing tile. Take a Smart Brick off the charger, shake it to wake it, drop it on the starfighter, and you’ll hear it power up. Pick up the craft and you’ll hear whooshing air sounds like it’s a fighter jet; swoosh it around, and it’ll sound like the air’s going by faster.
Drop a Luke or Leia smart minifig into the cockpit and it’ll play a few bars of the Force theme; Luke will also occasionally babble in an unintelligible language. Plug in his trusty R2-D2 astromech, and you’ll hear bleep and bloop sounds instead. If you turn the craft upside down, they’ll scream; if you press the X-wing’s button, you’ll hear an utterly generic pew-pew-pew blasting sound. (Always the same sound every time, and definitely not a Star Wars laser.)
If you have a second or third Smart Brick-powered spacecraft or laser turret nearby when you blast away — regardless of which way you’re shooting, or whether they’re friend or foe — every other craft will take a “hit” and flash red. If a craft gets hit enough times, it’ll sound a warning, then “explode” with light and sound if it gets hit again. If you put something blue in front of the Smart Brick’s color sensor, like the included fuel pumps, it’ll make a gurgly refueling sound; if you put something green in front of the sensor, like the included hammer, it’ll sound like someone’s hammering a repair.
It’s really cool that you can make any Lego object act like a jet or starfighter by adding one brick and one tile. They don’t even necessarily need to be right next to each other, though they do need to be close: In my testing, the Smart Brick can detect a NFC tile through seven Lego plates (22mm), a little more than a fingertip away.
To test how intuitive and compelling Lego Smart Play might be for kids, I started with a hands-off approach. My six-year-old wanted to build the “Ages 6+” X-wing all by herself, which left the “Ages 8+” TIE Fighter for my nine-year-old.
The first “Aha!” moment was when they discovered the included fuel pump could make a refueling sound by touching it to the side of the Smart Brick. “I think the fuel is supposed to come out of here, and then you put it into the smart brick! And then it will recharge!” my six-year-old proudly reported back. She danced around the living room with the little fuel transport that comes with the X-wing set, imagining that the transport’s whirring hovercraft sound was its flight motor. “We’re going off on adventures!” she shouted. So cute.
Meanwhile, my nine-year-old added a blue stud to the top of a spare Lego lightsaber handle and placed it in Darth Vader’s hand so he, too, could refuel. “I can control it with the addition to my staff! I can make it do my bidding. I fuel it with dark energy!” she cackled.
A few minutes later, they discovered the Smart Tile-equipped communications tower that comes with the X-wing set. It was my youngest’s turn to act sinister: “I can SCAN you now! I can SCAN Darth Vader!” she threatened, as she spun the swiveling satellite dish tower around and heard the brick’s bleeps and boops. “I hope she doesn’t scan to find out my secret base,” my eldest told the room.
“Wait, I just noticed something,” my younger girl replied. “It moves when you touch something on here. I touched the buttons,” she said, using the Leia minifigure’s hand to poke at a painted picture of a Lego keyboard on the front of the scanning station as it continued to sound.
But that’s roughly when I saw the lightbulbs over their heads start to disappear. My youngest soon realized subtle taps on the keyboard weren’t enough to produce the sound, it took nudging the entire comms tower a bit. Though my eldest was happy to discover the green hammer could “fix” a ship, she lost interest in repairs as soon as the hammer didn’t work when she tried it on R2-D2. If it could fix a ship, why not a droid too?
There’s lots of little missed connections like that — moments that could’ve been magical if the Smart Bricks did what we expected.
I hoped that by putting Vader next to the comms station tile instead of Princess Leia, I might hear the Emperor or a frightened Imperial commander on the other end. No dice. With two Smart Bricks, I expected one to light up green and another red when starting a lightsaber duel between Return of the Jedi Luke and Vader; instead, both glow purple and flash blue. My kids wanted to hear the Emperor’s lightning powers crackle during a duel, but it still played the same humming lightsaber sound instead. When you pick a different duelist, the only thing that changes is which character shouts when they get knocked off the platform at the end.
The Smart Minifigures don’t even really speak to each other, and when they do say things, it’s with seemingly no awareness of who else is nearby; they sound like they’re all complete strangers. Chewbacca does pleasantly growl (in repetitive patterns) and Darth Vader has his trademark labored breath sounds, but it’s hard to even tell Han Solo and Luke apart, and Leia is simply higher-pitched gibberish. Pop a Lego Smart Brick between Han and Greedo (which requires buying the $80 Cantina and the $100 Millennium Falcon plus a starter set, by the way), and you won’t hear anything that resembles a confrontation or even playful banter between foes.
And that’s only if you’ve got a free Smart Brick to use as a conversation starter; if it’s already playing a role, like becoming an X-wing or a blender, only one nearby figure gets to speak. When you pop R2-D2 into the X-wing, it seems to become R2-D2’s X-wing; Luke doesn’t chat with him.
Aside from the minigame where ships and turrets can blast each other, multi-brick communication seems to be completely absent from these first sets. If Leia’s in the comms tower and Luke’s flying around in the X-wing, you won’t hear them talk to each other. In the Millennium Falcon set, if you have one Smart Brick flying the ship and another in the hyperdrive, the bricks’ sounds compete with each other instead of syncing over Lego’s mesh network.
A quick note on battery life: Lego recommends always leaving the bricks on the charger when not in use, and when we did that, we didn’t run out of charge. Lego’s quoted 45 minutes of intense play was long enough for my easily bored kids. But when we forgot to put them back, we sometimes ran out mid-session. Not great!
There is a method to some of this madness. The Lego Group has a rich history of limiting its bricks only by your imagination. Lego’s hot dog piece has been repurposed by its own designers as railings, the stem of a flower, an armrest, and eyebrows on the Statue of Liberty. Lego famously turned 100 of its frog pieces, now colored pink, into the cherry blossoms on its bonsai tree. Viewed through that lens, it makes some sense why Lego isn’t always using authentic Star Wars sounds. The X-wing tile can double as a jet, too.
But I thought that would be why the Smart Minifigures exist — to tell a Smart Brick that no, this isn’t just a generic aircraft, it’s Luke’s X-wing from Star Wars. The Smart Brick should be able to do that.
It makes sense that The Lego Group doesn’t want to put real words in the minifigures’ mouths or have them utter lines from Star Wars, because that could limit kids’ imaginations. As Lego senior sound designer Elysha Zaide put it in an official Lego livestream: “A movie, a photograph, they are amazing experiences but they are stories that have already been told and they can only be told one way. We wanted to make instead something with open-ended play, something that lets you choose your own adventure.” But there’s a big gap between gibberish that makes a toy feel alive and the lifeless gibberish we’re getting here.
I do have to hand it to Lego’s designers: The little spaceships are among the most swooshable and durable Lego creations I’ve seen, using advanced building techniques that can help them easily survive drops, and rubber cushion parts to help their internal mechanisms weather abuse. The A-wing in particular is so beautifully put together, I’d buy one for myself if it were sold separately. And I get why designers made some of the tradeoffs they did, like open cockpits and unusually short capes for minifigures so kids can easily get the Smart Bricks in and out.
I even like how each of the starter kits is a full playset, with good guys and bad guys and multiple environments, even though none come with enough Smart Bricks to simultaneously power them all.
But I can’t understand why none of the launch sets have anything close to the smartest Lego Smart Brick experiences I saw at CES in Las Vegas. There, on the strength of demos like a dinosaur celebrating a birthday with a surprise Smart Brick cake where you can blow out the candles, a police car that knows who owns it and who’s sitting in which seat so it can sound the alarm, and the ability to precisely measure distance and orientation between two bricks in 3D space, we gave it our Verge Award for Best in Show.
There is one launch set that did capture my kids’ attention for longer: the $80 Mos Eisley Cantina. It doesn’t come with any Smart Bricks, but it has two of the best Smart Tags in the entire lineup.
One plays the Cantina Band theme, dynamically changing the tempo as you rock a Smart Brick back and forth, while the band mechanically sways. “You can even make it stop whenever you want!” says my youngest. The other is the Dewback creature that Stormtroopers ride to comb the Tatooine desert, which grunts, purrs when pet gently, and snores if you lie him down. One of the best laughs you can get is by swapping those two tiles, turning the Dewback into a funky dancing Cantina Band lizard.
“That set’s really fun, I like that one a lot,” says my eldest. My youngest agrees it’s the best. It’s the only one they’ve fought over, the only one they’ve come back to play without my supervision. But they haven’t asked for it again since I put it away, not even after we showed them the Cantina scene in the movie.
I’ll be honest, I’m a little worried the Lego Smart Brick will be a flop, and I suspect The Lego Group is too. It didn’t seed products to reviewers ahead of launch, and the company didn’t want to overcommit in an interview. But I agree with Lego Group head of product and marketing Julia Goldin that it’s good to think of the Smart Brick like a game console, and that Lego should simply produce a better wave of software if the first “games” underperform. I hope The Lego Group has excellent game developers working on its next Smart Brick products.
My family loves Lego. We build with a huge bin of bricks from my childhood, bricks my siblings and I collected in the ’90s that still do a fantastic job of unlocking imaginations today. With its non-replaceable battery, I don’t expect the Smart Brick will have quite that same staying power, but the problem isn’t too much smarts. The problem is they don’t have enough smarts, yet, to keep us from getting bored.
Photography by Sean Hollister / The Verge