Lego isn’t just for kids: the latest news for nostalgic adults and adult budgets

When Lego announced its tech-packed Smart Bricks at CES, we were impressed by the potential — enough to give it our best-in-show award. But when the first Star Wars sets actually launched in March, we were less enamored. All that promise of clever interaction and creative play ultimately boiled down to a few voice barks and flashing lights, with the smartest features we’d seen at CES nowhere to be found.

Today, Lego announced the second generation, with 12 new sets launching this summer, promising Pokémon play and some of the smarts we’d been missing. After a few hours training and battling with the new sets this morning, it’s clear the Smart Brick is getting smarter, but Lego is taking the slow road to delivering on the potential promised in January — and is still struggling to implement one of its most obvious selling points: official sound effects.

The first Lego Smart Brick sets, based on Star Wars, aren’t quite what my kids and I hoped, and I suspect much of that’s down to programming. But the Smart Bricks may also have some technical limitations out of the gate. The first sets don’t ship with a number of their sensors enabled, including the sound-detecting microphone, the ambient light sensor, fine distance measurement, position, and orientation. The Lego Group tells us that “all technology is present, some bits are just not enabled in the current sets.”

“There are more sensors that will be unlocked with future products,” Lego Smart Brick sound designer Elysha Zaide explained on a recent livestream, citing ambient light, position, and orientation as missing out of the gate. (The current sets do have some interactions when you turn a brick upside-down, so there’s some basic orientation.) It’s possible these features will require a software update to unlock: Lego’s Smart Brick app explains that the brick’s built-in microphone is currently disabled and will need an update if that changes.

I was about to be the coolest dad ever. I’d prepared the magic words: “Do you want to help daddy test the new Lego Smart Bricks? I can pick you up from school early!” It worked. My kids literally jumped for joy.

When The Lego Group announced in January that a tiny computer brick would be the company’s “most significant evolution” in nearly 50 years, even Lego fans were skeptical. Why buy bricks that make pew-pew sounds that kids should make with their own mouths? My first reaction was to explain that the Lego Smart Bricks have so much more potential than that: The bricks in these kid toys could lend their smarts to adult robots, too.

In 1979 — nearly 50 years ago — Lego jazzed up its very first spaceships with an iconic sloped computer brick that was just painted plastic. In 2022, we introduced you to the engineer who fit an actual tiny computer inside.

Now, industrial designer Paul Staal has flipped the script with a working desktop PC that’s a supersized homage to the classic computer brick (via Reddit and Hackster.io).

The Lego Smart Brick won our Best in Show award at CES 2026, and it was no wonder after watching Lego designer Maarten Simons’ expert demo there. So I thought: why not let you virtually attend the same tech demo I did? Before I left Las Vegas, I snuck back into Lego’s suite to film a 15-minute uncut immersive video of what these bricks can do.

It just so happens I brought an unusual camera to Las Vegas this year: a Qoocam Q3 Ultra modded for VR180 capture by Siyang Qi. It creates spatial stereoscopic 3D video that you can experience in a headset (like the Meta Quest), or tap-to-drag on a flat screen, or even tilt using the sensors in your phone.

After teasing its first collaboration with the Pokémon franchise last March but sharing very few details, Lego’s first Pokémon sets are now available for preorder through the company’s online store. The cheapest of the three is an articulated version of Eevee, but there’s also a budget-busting set featuring Charizard, Blastoise, and Venusaur that’s a whopping $649.99. Along with Lego’s first Smart Brick sets launching in March, it’s already shaping up to be an expensive year for Lego fans.

Shipping for all three Pokémon sets is expected to start on February 27th.

We just gave the Lego Smart Brick our Best In Show award at CES 2026, and I wanted to stop by The Lego Group’s suite to get a last glimpse before I left Las Vegas.

To my surprise, the company showed off one more feature I didn’t see during my first demo, perhaps the most impressive one should these bricks make their way to adult builders: precise distance measurement.

It may have been one of the smallest devices announced at CES 2026, but Lego’s new Smart Brick was also one of the most talked about debuts of the show. We’ve recognized it as the “Best in show” in our CES 2026 awards, and following the Smart Play system’s launch earlier this week, the first three sets featuring the new Smart Brick are now available for preorder.

Lego is introducing its Smart Brick to the world as part of three new sets in its popular Star Wars line that demonstrate many of the brick’s unique capabilities. The cheapest set is the $69.99, 473-piece Smart Play: Darth Vader’s TIE Fighter that includes one Smart Brick, one Smart Tag, and a Smart Darth Vader minifigure. The $89.99 SMART Play: Luke’s Red Five X-Wing is a 581-piece set that pairs the Smart Brick with five Smart Tags and Smart Luke and Leia figures.

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.

Julia Goldin, The Lego Group’s top executive in charge of product and marketing, will not commit to anything that hasn’t already been announced. She will not promise that Lego’s new Smart Brick — touted as the company’s biggest invention since 1978 — is the future of Lego. She won’t say if any future sets will feature the tiny sensor-packed computer bricks, much less whether they’re core to attention-grabbing brand expansions like Lego Pokémon.

“We’re not betting the farm that this is the future of everything,” she tells me. “We are not tied to it,” she adds later.