I played with the Lego Smart Brick

When The Lego Group announced that its biggest innovation since 1978 would be a tiny proprietary computer brick, the reactions were divided. I heard from people concerned this was the death of imagination from a company that’s all about imagination — and from people who thought it sounded pretty cool!

Personally, I walked in skeptical. My kids loved Lego’s previous computer bricks, the Lego Mario toys, but don’t play with them for long because they’re predictable and fiddly to use! But I walked out with a grin on my face. These Smart Bricks are far smarter and more imaginative than I expected.

This isn’t like Lego Mario where scanning a barcode largely triggers a series of sound effects on cue. The new NFC smart tiles are effectively programs that tell the Smart Brick what kind of vehicle or character it now represents. Then, it starts reacting and interacting with other smart parts nearby.

Now, I just wonder if Lego will take full advantage of its own creation.

For example, the most attention-grabbing thing you can do with Lego’s flagship set is have a lightsaber battle. Two Smart Bricks, two smart minifigs, smack them into each other and hear lightsabers hum and clash while Vader occasionally breathes ominously into his mask.

The second most attention-grabbing thing you can do is sit Emperor Palpatine upon his throne and hear The Imperial March play.

It’s good fun — but kind of obvious. You know what’s not obvious? Stand Vader next to his master next to the Smart Brick throne, and they’ll begin to have a conversation in an unintelligible language that still sounds like the characters. Your imagination fills in the gaps.

Or, drop a Smart Brick on a Dewback, the scaly reptiles that Stormtroopers ride through the Tatooine desert, and you can stroke its tail with a fingertip and hear it react, as if brought to life by magic.

Or, place a Smart Brick in the Mos Eisley Cantina, that wretched hive of scum and villainy, and you can make a Lego-ified version of the Cantina Band music play as fast or slow as you like, by rocking the brick (and the musicians) back and forth while the brick’s real-time synthesizer produces sounds at your chosen speed. Put a smart minifig like Darth Vader in front of the mic, and they can contribute vocals too!

(The Cantina and the Dewback seem to be part of a fourth unannounced Lego Smart Play set; I’m not sure about price and availability.)

Even a dogfight between an X-Wing and Darth Vader’s TIE Fighter was more sophisticated than replacing the “pew-pew” and “whoosh” sounds that kids will readily make with their own mouths. As you blast away, you’ll “hit” your target if you’re close enough, see and hear the other craft’s Smart Brick take the hit, and eventually hear an explosion sound because it’s keeping score.

The most impressive demonstration I saw wasn’t Lego Star Wars or a confirmed set at all, though. Lego interaction designer Maria Salgado showed us how a little police car set could react to not only the presence of cop and robber smart minifigs, but where they are located compared to the Smart Brick.

If a robber approaches the car, it’ll sound the car alarm; if a cop approaches, he can unlock it with a beep. Drop the cop in the back seat, behind the Smart Brick, and he’ll start snoozing because he’s obviously not on the job; drop the robber into the front seat, and the cop will wake up shouting. Lego’s SVP of innovation, Tom Donaldson, tells me that each smart minifig is programmed with certain traits that dictate how they interact.

He says these Smart Bricks have been in active development for roughly six years. The big idea was that many existing playsets have several small models, like a car, a building, and a motorcycle, and the company wanted to make them feel like they interact instead of just having “one big central robotic element” at the set’s core.

I was surprised to find the smaller Lego Star Wars spaceship sets actually can feel that way. I thought it might be a negative that Lego sacrificed the size and detail of the X-Wing so it could also include a tiny fuel truck, a scanner outpost, and a laser turret at that price, but it means you have a laser turret that can do battle with the X-Wing, a fuel truck that can audibly fuel the X-Wing, and fun scanning station sounds.

The X-Wing set is also a good demo of how not every Lego element needs to be smart to give you Smart Brick fun. The end of the fuel hose is just a standard round blue tile; once a brick decides it’s an X-Wing, its built-in color sensor can recognize blue as a signal to start the sound of fuel gurgling into the spacecraft.

Donaldson also says the team knew the bricks needed to be wireless and spatially aware almost from the get-go, which allows for complex interactions like that police car scene — but he and others I speak to suggest that Lego doesn’t want to spend its time designing all sorts of specific interactions itself; they still want to let kids’ and adults’ imaginations do most of the work.

That’s probably what some parents and longtime Lego fans want to hear, but I’m not quite sure yet.

I’d like to know I’ll be getting my money’s worth buying Smart Bricks, instead of them collecting dust like my kids’ Lego Mario toys usually do, particularly since these new ones don’t take standard AAA batteries that will almost certainly still be available decades from now. I want to know they’ll keep surprising us year after year, and Lego is absolutely not committing to that yet, even if it is dropping hints.

Speaking of batteries, I wonder how much their limited capacity might impact play. Salgado says the Smart Bricks should last for 45 minutes of intensive play, which seems like plenty, but the bricks put themselves to sleep very quickly when idle. You can just shake to wake them, but in our demo, they sometimes needed to be reintroduced to nearby smart tags and figures before they’d start working again.

The company claims the bricks can also sleep for years, though it recommends charging them every six months to be safe. You can plop two at a time on Lego’s wireless charger, which takes USB-C power, and I’ve emailed Lego to ask if it has a plan to let us replace the batteries as they age.

I don’t think I’ll need to speculate long on whether Lego’s Smart Bricks are worth the money, though. This feels like the rare Lego product that The Verge will definitely want to review.