This year, I have been slowly building my first Lego collection. My kids and GeekMom Jenny each have tubs of Lego bricks that belong to them individually. I felt left out after visiting Legoland with Jenny, so I started my own collection. When I started buying, I did a lot of research, so that I could get the most out of my investment in a fairly expensive hobby. The first thing I needed, no argument, was bricks. There are many ways to get a bunch of bricks at once. I started with the Lego Build and Play Box. It’s a great starter set, highlighted by its large storage box, but I’ve found some cheaper options. Here is a breakdown of the average prices I could find: 884 piece Lego Education Brick Set 779384 = 6.1 cents per brick 650 piece Lego Bricks & More Builders of Tomorrow Set 6177 = 6.3 cents per brick (discontinued and no longer available, as of 11/2016) 1,000 piece Lego Build and Play Box 4630 = 11.6cents per brick 650 piece Lego Creative Building Kit 5749 = 7.1 cents per brick
1,600 piece Lego XXL Brick Box 5512 = 13.4 cents per brick (this one has been discontinued, hence its elevated price) As you can see, the Lego Education Brick Set has some serious bang for its buck. It’s a medium size kit, with 11 sizes and 9 colors. The bricks are pretty basic, but that’s the best place to start. I get the most use out of basic shapes, because they are so versatile. Specialized pieces often have just one purpose, and don’t get used as much. The next thing I needed was a plate. Plates are the foundation that you build your creations on. It’s possible to build on a table, but plates make the whole experience simpler and more fun. Lego makes two 10″ plates, one in green for general use, and one in blue for water scenes. Generally you can find one for about five bucks. There is also an XL gray plate, which measures 15″, but it runs around $15 right now. I own just one green plate, and it is worth its weight in gold. Honorable mention goes to the Brick Separator.
Another thing that is invaluable. Saves me so much trouble when disassembling. Though these are often included in specialty kits for free. The last thing I needed was minifigs. There are hundreds of options. As a matter of fact, according to xkcd, there will be more minifigs in the world than people by the year 2019! Where to start then? This is definitely not a case for the basics. I wanted my minifigs to be special, ones I’d like looking at forever. Since Rory is my favorite character in (I mean, how could I not like a total dork with the same name as me?), I got the Series 10 Roman Commander (read: Centurion). The kids then surprised me with a pile of parts from old minifigs that they didn’t want any more. This was great because I was able to make a few that I liked, and have the ability to change things up. After that, the sky (read: wallet) was the limit. There are so many themed kits it would take an enormous amount of money to get them all. I suggest ignoring sets like the ones, for example, because the scenes are not versatile at all.
This makes me sad, because I love everything. I just don’t have room in my house for a permanent installment of Krang’s Lab, and it’s not fun (for me) to keep building the same thing over and over again. There are a couple of exceptions. If you love one of the kits so much that it’s worth its own place in your home, buy away. GeekMom Jenny has three Lego Architecture sets that have their own shelf in her office. Also, Lego Creator sets are somewhere between free form and regular kits. Each of them makes three things officially. I love the LEGO Creator Fierce Flyer 31004, which has three official builds: an eagle, a beaver, and a scorpion. The only rule of buying Lego products is to never buy something you won’t use. If that means you never buy basic kits because you’d prefer to build a Lego Delorean, that’s okay! Buy things you love, so you will get the most out of them. One last thought: If you are buying for your kids, let them help pick out the pieces they want.
Our kids keep a running list of which sets they might like to have. This is mostly so they know what they want to buy with monetary gifts, and so we know which sets to buy them as a surprise or as a gift. (Kit prices are current as of 11/21/2016)Lego sets come in all different sizes with different numbers of Lego pieces. Of course bigger sets cost more, but is there a linear relationship between set size and cost? Let’s take a look. Oh, and yes – I did look at this before, but that was a long time ago. It’s time to revisit the data. It’s not too difficult to find data for Lego prices and number of pieces. If you just look on the Lego online store. There you can find both the price and the number of pieces for each set. You can even sort them by “themes” – like “Star Wars” or “friends” Even though it’s easy to get, I only collected price data for a subset of the themes (mostly because I am lazy). If I put all of this data together, I can get a plot of the set price vs. number of pieces in set.
Here is what that looks like. Let’s look at the linear function that fits this data. The slope of this line is 0.104 US Dollars per Lego piece. There is your answer. On average, one Lego piece costs 10.4 cents. Also, I think it’s nice to notice that this data is fairly linear.What about the y-intercept for this fitting function? The value from the fit is 7.34 USD. That means that for this function, if you had a Lego set with zero pieces in it, it would still cost $7.34 – you know, for the box and instructions and stuff. Yes, I know that there are Lego sets cheaper than $7.34 – this is just the y-intercept for the fitting function. Now let me point out the three outliers in this plot. Notice that all of these (one from Duplo and two from the City theme) are train sets. Of course train sets are going to be more expensive than a set with the same number of pieces (but not a train) because of the electric motors and stuff. If you are looking for a “good deal”, might I suggest the Trevi Fountain (21020).
This set has 731 pieces for just $49.99. According to the fitting function, a set with this many pieces should cost about 83 dollars. Suppose I break all the data into the different themes. If I fit a linear function to each of the different themes, I can get both the price per piece of Lego and the price of a zero piece set. Here are the brick prices for some of the Lego themes. The error bars are the uncertainties in the fit parameters. If you know what a Duplo block is, you probably aren’t surprised that they are the most expensive (63 cents per brick). These are bricks created for smaller kids. They are all large so that you can’t swallow them. It just makes since that they would cost more. The other expensive bricks are the City sets. But this is deceiving due to the high set prices of the train kits. I suspect if you removed these train sets from the plot, it would be a more normal price. What about the base cost? This is the y-intercept of the linear fit.