Toys

I kid you not: if I had to pick just one Lego set ever made, this epic transforming castle packed with clever details and play features would be the one. I sold off my airsoft guns to afford the $400 set at launch — now, Lego has it on backorder for $300 alongside the awesome Loop Coaster (also $300) and UCS Razor Crest ($420). I’ve never seen this one on sale before.

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Bricklink is currently under maintenance, and Jay’s Brick Blog reports that it may be because of a suspected hacking or cybersecurity incident.

Bricklink’s maintenance message doesn’t make things sound great. “We are currently investigating some unusual activity, so it’s too early to speculate further. We will share more information once it’s available.”

We’ve reached out to a Bricklink customer support email to try and learn more.

Add Ted Lasso to the list of TV shows getting the Barbie treatment. Mattel’s offering three Barbie dolls based on the show’s wholesome characters. You can choose from Coach Ted, BFF Keeley, or the one I need, brick shith— err— AFC Richmond owner Rebecca Walton. The dolls are available right now, but it seems the Diamond Dogs have snapped them up already.

If you’ve been sleeping on Lego’s incredible $240 Atari 2600 replica... good! You can now nab it for $192 from Lego or $202 from Amazon. I love the pop-up diorama.

The massive 21-inch tall Hulkbuster is also just $385 right now (normally $550), and the best Luke Lego Landspeeder yet is $168 at Amazon (normally $240).

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Lego has leaked its own Orient Express train set — as part of a truly excellent online catalog of its most detailed sets for adult tastes and budgets. Will those adult tastes extend to murder? It does include a well-dressed man with a walking stick — perhaps Poirot.

Here’s the fan set that inspired it; leaks suggest it’ll cost $300 for 2,540 pieces, and that it may have been delayed to 2024.

Thorston Bonsch has been building incredible Lego vignettes based on The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings for years, and he’s now capped it off with an incredibly detailed version of the famous Hobbit-house with the round green door where Bilbo and Frodo lived.

I particularly love the pantry and dining room — can easily imagine them full of singing dwarves! (via The Brothers Brick)

The latest collab between Nintendo and Lego will feature the cozy world of Animal Crossing — though right now, it’s unclear just what the sets will consist of. Based on the teaser, though, things are appropriately adorable, and Isabelle unsurprisingly makes for a very cute minifig.

Tomorrow, Meta will explain why you should pay $500 for a Quest 3 at Meta Connect... and I’m starting to wonder if Lego will be part of the pitch. See the blocks in Zuck’s image below? They’ve got trademarked Lego logos on top!

But Zuck has since yanked his video, and Microsoft’s similar teases with Minecraft have yet to produce a killer app.

What’s better than a Mandalorian Jedi? A USB-powered one, of course. Not only does Hot Toys’ 11-inch tall Sabine Wren action figure reach uncanny levels of photorealistic, her miniature lightsaber lights up green thanks to USB-powered LEDs.

Oh, and you can roll her eyes at Ahsoka. Pre-orders are $271, figures ship mid to late next year. This Obi-Wan figure might beat her to a USB lightsaber by a few months, though.

Dart Zone is about to sell a pair of Stranger Things themed blasters — one fires darts out of a mini Demogorgon head that opens when you squeeze the trigger, the other out of a foam baseball bat covered in nails. That sounds safe! (FWIW, the nails are squishy.)

Guessing it’s just a cash-in, but maybe Season 5 will see the group wield such gadgetry? Here’s hoping.

In a world full of swiss-army-knife 14-in-1 docking stations, how do you make yours stand out?

RayCue’s formula: it’s also a digital photo frame... and a Bluetooth speaker... and charges both your phone and laptop... and comes with a secondary “keyboard” hub... and most importantly, lets you stick SD cards into a tiny Mac’s floppy slot.

It’s no longer the pinnacle of official Nerf — that’s the new $120 Stryfe X — but this 50-round Perses is an absolute steal at $35 from Walmart, and a better choice for indoors.

A full-auto blaster with battery and charger for $35? Unheard of. I was jazzed when this thing hit $50. Tempted to buy another.

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Lego did the DeLorean right in 2022 — with light-up flux capacitor, wheels that flip into hover mode, a tiny Mr. Fusion with a banana to throw inside, and much much more.

It’s $160 at Amazon and Walmart, the best price I’ve seen — $10 cheaper than its pre-inflation pricetag. $170 at Target, too.

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Lego VIP is now “Lego Insiders,” unifying other accounts in the process. It’s still a free signup to get first dibs on new sets and collect points.

But now, you can get points for existing sets — just 20 per instruction manual QR code you scan with your phone, which seems a tad stingy — and there’s an AR treasure hunt where you can scan a brick to potentially win $9,000 worth (in nine countries), tho it’s not working for me right now.

From today’s announcement:

The sale will include a talented team of employees, a content library of nearly 6,500 titles, active productions for non-Hasbro owned IP like The Rookie, Yellowjackets and Naked and Afraid franchises, and the eOne unscripted business, which will include rights for certain Hasbro-based shows like Play-Doh Squished.

And as Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks explained in March on Decoder, the IP that’s staying is the stuff that leads to selling more toys:

...it’s natural that we would have entertainment and help to execute entertainment for Transformers. We want to make sure that we retain those capabilities, whether it’s live-action movies or kids’ animated TV shows. 

Naked and Afraid, the reality TV show, is probably not going to do an action figure, at least not one that would ship at Walmart. Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris Monopoly is probably not going to be a huge business opportunity for that.

On July 7th, SleepyCow’s bike finally hit 10,000 supporters on Lego Ideas, which means Lego’s gotta decide whether to produce it. While most Ideas are based on existing IP, we do get some mechanical gems like the Typewriter or working Fresnel lighthouse.

Bikes aren’t just our nostalgic past, though — they’re the future too! But almost every “bike” Lego sells today is a motorbike, and it only recently began including bike lanes.

Imagine a smaller symmetrical Millennium Falcon, with its own detachable secondary spaceship. Now imagine paying $500 to crowdfund it before September 6th for a fall 2024 release.

It’s nearly three feet long, over two feet wide and over a foot tall, with all kinds of removable panels and landing gear, a detailed bridge and crew quarters, and of course a Dejarik table. Tested got hands-on at SDCC.

I wasn’t about to drop $90 on this super-cute animatronic toy from the Kenobi show — but $19.93 on a “Last Act: Final Sale” at Macy’s or the same price at Amazon? Sold.

Here’s a good look at how it works, and a slightly deeper dive with the designers.

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Lego builds are endlessly fascinating and they get far more complicated, but I fully respect this person’s dedication to creating a small device for the sole purpose of lining up Lego-made dominoes.

No doubt inspired by Nerf community mods, the Motoblitz is the first official Nerf rifle with a built-in underbarrel shotgun. Everything you need for indoor foam warfare in a single package, for an unheard-of $15 clearance price from Amazon and Walmart.

For longer-range play, Out of Darts sells a full modkit.

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Did you know you can freely download instructions for loads of Lego? The Lego Group has its own searchbox, and the Internet Archive now hosts an easily browsable backup of 6,854 sets (via Hacker News).

Neither has my childhood favs yet, but Lego’s scanning in new instructions all the time — you can already recreate the Black Seas Barracuda or the valuable Cloud City sets. Bricklink fan designs have downloadable instructions too.