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

For the past few years, Lego has been releasing a collection of intricate, affordable sets for adults who want a touch of green in their lives without pruning or watering, like the Lego Bonsai Tree, Orchid, and Succulents. Now, there’s a Mario set fit to join them.

Lego’s just introduced the Lego Super Mario Piranha Plant, a $60, 540-piece set that looks absolutely fantastic without breaking the bank. It kinda-sorta is a bank, too: you can hide at least a couple coins inside! Two Mario coins come with the set.

It’s been 20 years since the final flight of one of the most beautiful planes ever made — the supersonic Concorde — and you’ll soon be able to buy one in Lego form.

The $200 Lego Icons Concorde is nearly three and a half feet long, has a 17-inch (43cm) wingspan, and three neat tricks up its sleeve. Not only does it capture many of the real plane’s iconic curves, but it’s also got an incredible Lego mechanism hidden inside to raise and lower its landing gear with a twist of the tail cone on the end.

Lego’s last Mars Rover was a little simplistic (pdf) — so I’m glad to see that the new Lego Technic NASA Mars Rover Perseverance, just announced today for $100, puts more of the real rover’s engineering front and center.

With the flick of a lever, the rover’s iconic six-wheel suspension spins a set of ball-tipped gears — to turn four of its wheels inward so you can spin the entire craft 360-degrees. You can switch back and forth between that 360-degree mode and a normal driving mode, much like you can see in the NASA JPL video here:

Lego has announced a new premium set based on 1980s arcade classic Pac-Man. The 2,650-piece set is designed to recreate a Pac-Man arcade cabinet, complete with an illuminating coin-slot, four-way joystick, and a mechanical chase.

There’s a crank on the side of the cabinet which you can turn to move the characters around the game’s maze, and the set comes with a diorama of a figurine playing a smaller version of the arcade cabinet. On top of the cabinet sit rotating versions of Pac-Man and the ghosts Blinky and Clyde.

Today, five Lego fans are experiencing a dream come true — Lego will turn their design into an official limited-edition Lego set and pay them 5 percent of the proceeds when the sets go up for preorder (limit 20,000 each) in February 2024.

Here are the sets that the internet (and Lego’s panel of judges) have chosen to produce:

Donkey Kong has been around as long as Mario himself, but this August will be the first time he’s officially appeared in Lego form — on August 1st, the Danish toymaker is adding four Lego Donkey Kong sets to the ever-widening Lego Super Mario lineup.

They aren’t filled with ladders, hammers, and fireballs like the original arcade game, mind; these sets are straight out of Donkey Kong Country, with the gorilla’s relatives along for the ride.

Lego has made another fan toy dream come true: its new Sonic The Hedgehog sets actually let you send Sonic spinning through an entire miniature level.

This isn’t the first time Sonic has been recreated in Lego form — we got a picture-perfect recreation of Green Hill Zone in 2021 that’ll look great on a bookshelf and a tie-in for the Lego Dimensions video game in 2016. But if you want a playset like Lego’s Mario line, that’s just now happening for the very first time.

Nick Lever, video editor and Lego Masters Australia finalist, has recreated the original Nintendo Game Boy in bricks — and with such droolworthy depth that I hereby petition Lego to make it into an official set.

It’s just 364 pieces, only 115 different parts, most of them common enough you can find ‘em dirt cheap. Almost every recognizable facet of the Game Boy is represented, from the angled rice-grain Start / Select buttons to the distinctive tint of the screen — achieved here by placing lime green tiles underneath a trans-blue window.

This is the third time we’ve seen the T-65 X-Wing Starfighter in brick form, and it’s Lego’s most detailed yet. The 1,949-piece X-Wing costs $239.99 and joins the other sets in the Lego Star Wars Ultimate Collector Series, which include the behemoths that are the 7,541-piece UCS Millennium Falcon and the 6,785-piece UCS AT-AT.

Equipped with 4L4 fusial thrust engines and the KX9 laser cannons, the design of Lego’s latest UCS X-Wing kit doesn’t deviate much from its previous iterations. However, it does feature several hundred more pieces when compared to the 1,304-piece X-Wing set released in 2000 and the 1,559-piece one from 2013. The new X-Wing measures 10.5 inches in height and 21.5 inches in length once complete.