The Top 5 LEGO City Sets for Kids image LEGO City History For years, LEGO has always had sets under different themes, like Star Wars LEGOS and Harry Potter LEGOS. Most of the town-themed LEGO system sets released in 2005 and later years...Read More about The Top 5 LEGO City Sets for KidsThere are many of us—errr, people—who build stuff with Legos at all ages. Having grown up with loads of hand-me-down Legos (and having a Lego Wall-E sitting on my desk right now), I started to wonder how Legos evolved from the sets I remember from my childhood to what they are today. As an analyst, I turned to data for answers. I found a dataset on Rebrickable (a site that shows you which Lego sets you can build from the sets and pieces you already own), which contained information on the color, number, and type of pieces in each Lego set for the past 67 years. I used Plotly and Mode Python Notebooks to explore the data. Like a baseplate, scatterplots make a good foundation for building analysis.
I took a look at Lego sets through the years broken down by the most basic of Lego metrics—how many pieces are in the set. Mouse over a data point for information about a particular set. Highlight an area to zoom in. To see the complete Python notebook generating this plot, click here. Is it fair to say sets are bigger now than they used to be? While the number of sets released each year have generally increased, there’s a conspicuous dip from 2004-2009. Those years represent a difficult period for The Lego Group, when the company teetered on the brink of bankruptcy before picking up the pieces. There’s an interesting disparity between the annual mean and median pieces per set. While the mean pieces per set continues to grow, the median pieces per set remains fairly consistent over time (around 50-100 pieces). This indicates that while there are roughly an equal ratio of sets above and below 75 (plus or minus 25) pieces each year, something is happening with the volume of pieces to drive up the mean.
The box plot shows that the number of pieces per set has become more widely distributed over time. The first quartile (25th percentile) doesn’t change much decade to decade, but the third quartile (75th percentile) has grown steadily. This signals that the increasing mean is driven by sets that were already above the median—or put simply, big sets have gotten bigger while small sets have stayed about the same size. The 95th percentile of sets more than doubled in pieces from the 1970s to today. This outpaces the 90th percentile, which grew 80%, as well as the 75th percentile, which grew 37% over the same period. This trend is particularly evident at the top. Until 1985, Lego’s biggest set was still under 1000 pieces (the 973-piece U.S.S. Constellation). Today’s biggest set (the 5922-piece Taj Majal) is six times bigger. Legos have gotten darker, with white giving way to black and gray. The transition from the old grays to the current bluish grays (or “bley”) is a hot-button topic for many Lego fans.
Perhaps not surprisingly, Lego’s color palette has expanded over the decades. Until the 1990s, almost every piece was one of the top ten colors; now only about 80% are. The remainder of pieces outside the top ten consists of a growing long tail of many minor colors. I decided to switch up the visualization tool for this chart—it was made with Apple Numbers. Color palettes help define set themes. Some colors really pop out, like the orange of SpongeBob’s and Prince of Persia sets, and lime from the Power Miners series. Source: Bikini Bottom Undersea Party via Lego and Good Neighbours at Bikini Bottom via Brickset Source: Scorpion Pyramid and Battle of Alamut via Brickset Source: Underground Mining Station, Titanium Command Rig, and Boulder Blaster via Brickset The Lego universe can be thought of as a network in which sets that share many of the same pieces have strong connections, whereas sets that only share a few pieces have weak connections.
I defined the connection score for two sets as the number of shared pieces over the total number of pieces between the two sets. In (Lego) set theory, that formula would look something like this: #(x ∩ y) / #(x ∪ y) Each circle (or node in network-diagram-speak) in the visualization below represents a Lego set theme. The size of the circle represents the total number of pieces in a theme’s sets; the color shown is the color that makes up the most pieces in that theme. By clicking and dragging the circles, you can explore how closely one theme is connected to others. To see the HTML powering this network diagram, click here. It was built in Mode using this D3.js library. A few smaller themes—including Hobby Sets, Dinosaurs, and Fusion—share a high percentage of their pieces (and therefore have strong connections) with many other themes. Bionicle and Technic (two mechanical themes) don’t share a strong connection directly, but end up close together by virtue of each of them sharing strong connections with Spybotics and Znap.
Finally, I wanted a way to represent each year’s Lego sets. I thought about the summary for each year as a combination of color and set size (median pieces). To determine the essential color for each year, I chose the most dominant color (by number of pieces) in the most sets. All this Lego analysis had me eager to build something, so I recreated the above chart with Legos. Want to join in on the fun? Explore Rebrickable’s data for yourself in Mode’s public warehouse. Pages in category "Sets by piece count" Ad blocker interference detected! Wikia is a free-to-use site that makes money from advertising. We have a modified experience for viewers using ad blockers Wikia is not accessible if you’ve made further modifications. Remove the custom ad blocker rule(s) and the page will load as expected.Lego has come a long way since its roots. The story of Lego goes all the way back to 1932. Originally, Lego was a Denmark company that did actual carpentry work.
After a streak of really bad luck that involved a workshop fire and The Great Depression, owner and operator Ole Kirk Christiansen moved on to make smaller builds like shelving and ladders. To display these products without making an entire item at his own cost, he made miniaturized versions of them to give potential customers an idea of what product they were purchasing. These miniatures inspired Christiansen to expand his business into making toys. For the most part these toys would be wooden until another warehouse fire in the 1960’s consumed most of Lego’s wooden toy inventory. Christiansen decided to take this as a sign to focus on his line of plastic building bricks. This was a gamble since the response to plastic toys was lukewarm. In those years, people still preferred wooden and metal toys and looked at plastic as a sign of poor quality. Luckily for Christiansen, the gamble worked in his favor. Since then, Lego has gone on to become one of the most popular toys of all time.
At one time, Lego made simple sets with generic themes like pirates or knights. As time has gone on they’ve made several deals with many hot properties to base their sets on, from Marvel Heroes to nostalgia classics like Ghostbusters and Back to the Future. Their Star Wars sets are consistently big hits and generally have rather high price tags for what are essentially children’s building blocks. Speaking of high price tags, let’s check out some of the most expensive sets on the market right now. Note: All prices come directly from Lego’s own catalog. In store (and in some cases collector prices) may actually be higher or lower. Did you plan a weekend at the fair but the weather decided that its plans to rain were more important than your plans for fun? For roughly the same price as a weekend at the fair you can bring a miniaturized version right into your own home. At 1,746 pieces and an Expert level of difficulty, it might even take you the whole weekend to piece it together.
This isn’t the Lego set you build to keep on display to show your build skills off to your friends; this is the Lego set that you actually play with when nobody is around to judge you! It includes some iconic characters as mini-figures and the loony bin van complete with a strap-in stretcher is a really nice touch. The Star Wars ship line seems to be a really big hit for Lego. Children and adults alike buy these things up and piece them together to display in their homes. One perk to them is their large size and attention to detail. These aren’t just miniatures you build and play with. They also tend to have interesting mechanical parts. Variants are released from time to time that make past models rather expensive on the collector’s market. Good luck finding them though. The Town Hall is the most expensive set piece in a collection of Lego sets that can be combined together to make an entire city. Other parts of the city include a pet shop, a bike shop, a police station, a post office, and so on.
A really cool feature with this collection are the endless possibilities that Lego offers in terms of adding your own personal details like streets, parks, and playing with different arrangements. There’s a good chance that no two complete Lego cities will look exactly the same. This play-set probably isn’t as fun to play with as the Arkham set, but it is a cool display piece for the hardcore Lego enthusiast. The mini-figures have their own distinct look instead of the standard Lego look, and the house has a lot of cool details. You can look in the windows and see the familiar indoor arrangement from the series, Flanders comes along with the grill that sparks Homer’s jealousy, there are loose bricks on the fire place, and it even includes the iconic purple station wagon. This Lego kit looks so much like the real thing that you can barely tell it’s Lego. To achieve this look and the high level of detail, this vehicle kit has the same amount of pieces as your average play-set.
With over 1,800 pieces and a price tag of $199.99, you’re paying almost $0.10 per piece. That most definitely puts the cost of these Lego sets into perspective. The final product is totally worth it, especially in this case. The Technic line of Lego figures tend to have more complicated mechanical parts and generally run with a small motor and a battery pack. Fortunately, they aren’t too complicated to assemble for Lego’s target age group. Of course, we all know that the kids ask for Lego sets to build, but the parents are the ones that end up assembling them to be played with (or destroyed) later. Like the Arkham set, this is the type of set that even adults want to play with when no one is looking. It’s more expensive than the Simpson’s House and the Arkham set, but it definitely gives you a lot more bang for your buck. It has a very unique look for a Lego set as the pieces are supposed to resemble a forest instead of a building, and it comes with a HUGE assortment of classic Star Wars character mini-figures.
The Sea Cow set is actually a Lego original as it came from this year’s Lego Movie. The Sea Cow ship is captained by Metal Beard, a Lego figure who had his parts taken by the nefarious Lord Business. The character is voiced by famous “man’s man” Nick Offerman. Pirates are so synonymous with lost limbs that it’s mildly surprising the shtick wasn’t used in a Lego set before the movie. Star Wars sets seem to be the cream of the crop for Lego. This model would probably be especially hard to assemble when you consider the fact that 90% of the thing appears to be brown. Put this Sand Crawler together and tell those folks that put together 2,500 piece photo mosaic puzzles that you’ll teach them everything you know! If you don’t have the funds to visit the Sydney Opera House in Australia, this pricey Lego set is actually much cheaper than airfare and boarding. It looks so much like the real thing you may think you’re in Australia and not even realize it’s 4:00 AM and you’ve stayed up all night on your living room floor putting the thing together.
The Mindstorm Ev3 is something to behold. Sure it only adds up to a measly 600 pieces, but it takes on several forms, has its own infrared sensors, it has a programmable brick that you can use to make your build move and speak, and the build can be commanded with your tablet or smart phone. This is the Lego kit of the future. Considering how big the Death Star is in Star Wars: Episode IV and Episode VI, you’d think that it would end up being the largest and most expensive Lego set on the market. This is not the case. While the Death Star is cool, it definitely isn’t the most detailed set out there, and most of its price factor comes from the number of pieces, which totals to over 3,800 bricks. This is one of those sets that a Lego enthusiast builds to put on display (made evident by the included display stands). This seems to be a common practice with adult fans of Lego and Star Wars, which is probably why these things sell so well and why they can fetch high prices for toys.