Lego strikes back against screens—with chips in bricks

My 8-year-old Lego-maniac son waited with bated breath for two new Lego Smart Play Star Wars sets—Luke’s X-wing and Darth Vader’s TIE fighter—to come in the mail.

He’d seen the TV commercials for the new sets, powered by “smart bricks” that light up when laser blasts are fired and emit a chorus of zooming spacecraft engine sounds. He built the sets excitedly and diligently charged his smart bricks overnight, waking up early to play with them.

Everything seems like it has chips in it these days: smartphones, car dashboards, the FIFA World Cup game balls, even your toaster. Add Lego to the list.

Lego is hailing Smart Play, launched in March, as the most dramatic upgrade of the Danish toy maker’s vaunted “system of play” since 1978. That marked the debut of minifigures, the tiny Lego people that “opened the door to role-play,” according to Tom Donaldson, a Lego senior vice president.

Smart Play is yet another “generational change,” Donaldson says, and Lego plans to introduce hundreds of sets using the interactive technology.

At the heart of the new system are rechargeable smart bricks and microprocessors that can read digital tags inscribed inside other Smart Play pieces. It uses NFC, or near-field communication, a technology found at your local grocery: The powered bricks are like the store’s card readers, while the tagged pieces are like the chip-imbued credit card you tap to pay.

The smart bricks also detect motion, light up, produce sound effects that change based on play and, in some cases, sense and communicate with other smart bricks. The Star Wars-themed sets that include smart bricks range in price from $70 to $160, along with lower-priced “Smart Play compatible” sets with digital-tag pieces. Lego unveiled a Pokémon-themed line last month that hits stores in August.

As a parent, I found Lego’s use of chip technology in service of something other than a videogame or other digital activity to be refreshing. We have plenty of screen-based temptations lying around the house already, and my kids don’t need another.

At the same time, Lego is walking a tightrope: The company wants to innovate to compete for children’s attention with platforms like YouTube, Roblox and Minecraft, but doesn’t want technology to upstage its core offering.

“From a creativity standpoint, kids’ play will be fundamentally changed by these smart bricks. They will be playing in order to get the smart bricks to do the cool thing and make the noises,” says Josh Golin, executive director of Fairplay, a nonprofit watchdog group that advocates for fewer screens and less marketing in children’s entertainment. “Every time the brick does more, the child’s imagination does less.”

I can see this point. The sound effects that Smart Play produces replace the crash noises and pew-pew sounds that ordinarily come out of my son’s mouth.

On the other hand, keeping intact the sense of building something, of taking the time and care to follow instructions and of feeling proud of the outcome, while adding an exciting tech flourish, seemed like a good thing.

The origins of Smart Play shed some light on Lego’s chip move.

Lego in 2018 was stuck in the doldrums. That March, it reported that prior-year sales had fallen 8%, their first decline in over a decade. The company had recently cut 1,400 jobs, and Lego Group Chief Executive Niels B. Christiansen said he had one aim: “to stabilize the business.”

A team of Lego designers took a summer 2018 road trip through the American Midwest, visiting dozens of homes in and around Madison, Wis., and Minneapolis. In family playrooms, the researchers watched young kids play with Lego sets, and came away with three conclusions.

First, kids were thirsty for social experience, says Sam Coates, a Lego vice president who was on the trip. Second, kids wanted “player agency,” the idea that their actions change what happens. And finally, children indicated they wanted “delightful surprises.” In other words, they wanted to be able to craft a new narrative each time they returned to their Lego sets.

Children should feel like “the director of the new ‘Star Wars’ movie that you’re creating,” says Coates. The bricks and tags are meant to “get the action going, get the inner movie going, and prime and prompt the kid to keep going,” he adds.

Lego dipped its toe in the interactive waters in 2024 with Super Mario sets. They included bricks that would play snatches of the iconic theme song and emit coin-collecting sound effects as Mario characters moved around.

Lego says the Smart Play system is more technologically elaborate and broader in scale. It functions as a “platform,” meaning smart bricks are interchangeable between sets, and can adapt to different functions. The new Pokémon sets will detect each other, so kids can “battle,” complete with light-up effects and creature-appropriate roars and fight sounds.

There is a danger, however, that Lego’s light touch might backfire, and parents won’t be thrilled about paying premium prices for a toy that essentially has a few extra beeps and boops.

The recipe that has kept Lego successful for so long is the hands-on nature of the toys, not any novel tech that’s in them, says Dan Klitsner, a toy inventor and consultant best known for creating the Bop-It in 1996.

“Kids really like things that move and that are physical,” Klitsner says. “What’s important is that it doesn’t replace the physical play. You want the technology to animate the player and to be shareable. If the Smart Play technology achieves that, it’ll be very sustainable.”

During a playdate, my son and his Lego-loving friend mounted an epic space battle with the Smart Play spaceships. It lasted about half an hour and was cute to watch. Since then, he’s hardly touched the sets, though they sit displayed prominently on his shelf.

Write to Robbie Whelan at [email protected]