The Lego Smart Brick.<\/p>\n Up close.<\/p>\n But even my daughters, ages six and nine, weren\u2019t captivated as long as I\u2019d hoped. Though they loved building the sets and trying each little computerized interaction in turn, they rarely came back for more. When I asked them if I should return the sets, they told me to go for it.<\/p>\n My youngest loved the Smart Brick \u2014 for a little while.<\/p>\n The problem isn\u2019t the price tag or even the kid-friendly builds; it\u2019s that Lego\u2019s been too stingy with the Smart Brick\u2019s smarts. Half its sensing features aren\u2019t even used in the first eight sets; the ones that are here are underutilized.<\/p>\n For now, these \u201csmart\u201d bricks feel far too dumb. I\u2019m afraid the first Lego Smart Play sets are largely just light and sound like critics feared. And that wasn\u2019t enough to entertain my kids.<\/p>\n 1\/10The color sensor on the side of the Smart Brick. Photo by Sean Hollister \/ The Verge<\/p>\n The Lego Smart Brick is a tiny computer in the shape of a 2×4 Lego brick. It offers RGB light; real-time synthesized sound; a wirelessly rechargeable battery; Bluetooth mesh networking to communicate with other bricks; sensors including motion, orientation, color, ambient light, and proximity; a microphone to detect sound; and most importantly, an NFC reader so it can execute tiny programs just by attaching the brick to a Lego set.<\/p>\n You can\u2019t buy a Smart Brick solo, and five of the first eight Lego Star Wars sets<\/a> don\u2019t come with one. You\u2019ll pay $70, $90, or $160 for one of the first three starter kits that do \u2014 which means you\u2019re paying as much as $30 per Smart Brick compared to Lego\u2019s typical prices.<\/p>\n Once a Smart Brick is in a vehicle like the X-wing, it\u2019ll continually blink a bright LED.<\/p>\n At the moment, the most sophisticated interaction is the X-wing tile. Take a Smart Brick off the charger, shake it to wake it, drop it on the starfighter, and you\u2019ll hear it power up. Pick up the craft and you\u2019ll hear whooshing air sounds like it\u2019s a fighter jet; swoosh it around, and it\u2019ll sound like the air\u2019s going by faster.<\/p>\n Drop a Luke or Leia smart minifig into the cockpit and it\u2019ll play a few bars of the Force theme; Luke will also occasionally babble in an unintelligible language. Plug in his trusty R2-D2 astromech, and you\u2019ll hear bleep and bloop sounds instead. If you turn the craft upside down, they\u2019ll scream; if you press the X-wing\u2019s button, you\u2019ll hear an utterly generic pew-pew-pew blasting sound. (Always the same sound every time, and definitely not a Star Wars laser.)<\/p>\n My daughter appreciated that the TIE Fighter cockpit has gaps for Vader\u2019s lightsaber blade.<\/p>\n When you press a button on a fighter, it moves a red paddle in front of the Smart Brick\u2019s color sensor to trigger the shooting action.<\/p>\n If you have a second or third Smart Brick-powered spacecraft or laser turret nearby when you blast away \u2014 regardless of which way you\u2019re shooting, or whether they\u2019re friend or foe \u2014 every other craft will take a \u201chit\u201d and flash red. If a craft gets hit enough times, it\u2019ll sound a warning, then \u201cexplode\u201d with light and sound if it gets hit again. If you put something blue in front of the Smart Brick\u2019s color sensor, like the included fuel pumps, it\u2019ll make a gurgly refueling sound; if you put something green in front of the sensor, like the included hammer, it\u2019ll sound like someone\u2019s hammering a repair.<\/p>\n It\u2019s really cool that you can make any Lego object act like a jet or starfighter by adding one brick and one tile. They don\u2019t even necessarily need to be right next to each other, though they do need to be close: In my testing, the Smart Brick can detect a NFC tile through seven Lego plates (22mm), a little more than a fingertip away.<\/p>\n My eldest made her own \u201chouseboat\u201d using Smart Tags and some pieces from our Lego bin.<\/p>\n To test how intuitive and compelling Lego Smart Play might be for kids, I started with a hands-off approach. My six-year-old wanted to build the \u201cAges 6+\u201d X-wing all by herself, which left the \u201cAges 8+\u201d TIE Fighter for my nine-year-old.<\/p>\n The first \u201cAha!\u201d moment was when they discovered the included fuel pump could make a refueling sound by touching it to the side of the Smart Brick. \u201cI think the fuel is supposed to come out of here, and then you put it into the smart brick! And then it will recharge!\u201d my six-year-old proudly reported back. She danced around the living room with the little fuel transport that comes with the X-wing set, imagining that the transport\u2019s whirring hovercraft sound was its flight motor. \u201cWe\u2019re going off on adventures!\u201d she shouted. So cute.<\/p>\n That\u2019s Darth Vader with my daughter\u2019s special \u201cstaff\u201d \u2014 I love that she used the extra bottom half of Vader\u2019s mask that came in the box.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, my nine-year-old added a blue stud to the top of a spare Lego lightsaber handle and placed it in Darth Vader\u2019s hand so he, too, could refuel. \u201cI can control it with the addition to my staff! I can make it do my bidding. I fuel it with dark energy!\u201d she cackled.<\/p>\n A few minutes later, they discovered the Smart Tile-equipped communications tower that comes with the X-wing set. It was my youngest\u2019s turn to act sinister: \u201cI can SCAN you now! I can SCAN Darth Vader!\u201d she threatened, as she spun the swiveling satellite dish tower around and heard the brick\u2019s bleeps and boops. \u201cI hope she doesn\u2019t scan to find out my secret base,\u201d my eldest told the room.<\/p>\n The X-wing set comes with the scanning station, fuel transport, an Imperial turret, and just one Smart Brick to go round. <\/p>\n \u201cWait, I just noticed something,\u201d my younger girl replied. \u201cIt moves when you touch something on here. I touched the buttons,\u201d she said, using the Leia minifigure\u2019s hand to poke at a painted picture of a Lego keyboard on the front of the scanning station as it continued to sound.<\/p>\n But that\u2019s roughly when I saw the lightbulbs over their heads start to disappear. My youngest soon realized subtle taps on the keyboard weren\u2019t enough to produce the sound, it took nudging the entire comms tower a bit. Though my eldest was happy to discover the green hammer could \u201cfix\u201d a ship, she lost interest in repairs as soon as the hammer didn\u2019t work when she tried it on R2-D2. If it could fix a ship, why not a droid too?<\/p>\n There\u2019s lots of little missed connections like that \u2014 moments that could\u2019ve been magical if the Smart Bricks did what we expected.<\/p>\n The $160 Throne Room set has the Emperor and his guards look on as Luke and Vader duel. <\/p>\n I hoped that by putting Vader next to the comms station tile instead of Princess Leia, I might hear the Emperor or a frightened Imperial commander on the other end. No dice. With two Smart Bricks, I expected one to light up green and another red when starting a lightsaber duel between Return of the Jedi Luke and Vader; instead, both glow purple and flash blue. My kids wanted to hear the Emperor\u2019s lightning powers crackle during a duel, but it still played the same humming lightsaber sound instead. When you pick a different duelist, the only thing that changes is which character shouts when they get knocked off the platform at the end.<\/p>\n The Emperor comes with his Force Lightning, but the Smart Bricks don\u2019t let you hear it crackle yet.<\/p>\n The Smart Minifigures don\u2019t even really speak to each other, and when they do say things, it\u2019s with seemingly no awareness of who else is nearby; they sound like they\u2019re all complete strangers. Chewbacca does pleasantly growl (in repetitive patterns) and Darth Vader has his trademark labored breath sounds, but it\u2019s hard to even tell Han Solo and Luke apart, and Leia is simply higher-pitched gibberish. Pop a Lego Smart Brick between Han and Greedo (which requires buying the $80 Cantina and the $100 Millennium Falcon plus a starter set, by the way), and you won\u2019t hear anything that resembles a confrontation or even playful banter between foes.<\/p>\n And that\u2019s only if you\u2019ve got a free Smart Brick to use as a conversation starter; if it\u2019s already playing a role, like becoming an X-wing or a blender, only one nearby figure gets to speak. When you pop R2-D2 into the X-wing, it seems to become R2-D2\u2019s X-wing; Luke doesn\u2019t chat with him.<\/p>\n We all know who shot first.<\/p>\n Aside from the minigame where ships and turrets can blast each other, multi-brick communication seems to be completely absent from these first sets. If Leia\u2019s in the comms tower and Luke\u2019s flying around in the X-wing, you won\u2019t hear them talk to each other. In the Millennium Falcon set, if you have one Smart Brick flying the ship and another in the hyperdrive, the bricks\u2019 sounds compete with each other instead of syncing over Lego\u2019s mesh network.<\/p>\n A quick note on battery life: Lego recommends always leaving the bricks on the charger when not in use, and when we did that, we didn\u2019t run out of charge. Lego\u2019s quoted 45 minutes of intense play was long enough for my easily bored kids. But when we forgot to put them back, we sometimes ran out mid-session. Not great!<\/p>\n There is a method to some of this madness. The Lego Group has a rich history of limiting its bricks only by your imagination. Lego\u2019s hot dog piece<\/a> has been repurposed by its own designers as railings, the stem of a flower, an armrest, and eyebrows on the Statue of Liberty. Lego famously turned 100 of its frog pieces<\/a>, now colored pink, into the cherry blossoms on its bonsai tree. Viewed through that lens, it makes some sense why Lego isn\u2019t always using authentic Star Wars sounds. The X-wing tile can double as a jet, too.<\/p>\n But I thought that would be why the Smart Minifigures exist \u2014 to tell a Smart Brick that no, this isn\u2019t just a generic aircraft, it\u2019s Luke\u2019s X-wing from Star Wars. The Smart Brick should be able to do that.<\/p>\n The Smart Minifigures are wonderfully detailed.<\/p>\n It makes sense that The Lego Group doesn\u2019t want to put real words in the minifigures\u2019 mouths or have them utter lines from Star Wars, because that could limit kids\u2019 imaginations. As Lego senior sound designer Elysha Zaide put it in an official Lego livestream<\/a>: \u201cA movie, a photograph, they are amazing experiences but they are stories that have already been told and they can only be told one way. We wanted to make instead something with open-ended play, something that lets you choose your own adventure.\u201d But there\u2019s a big gap between gibberish that makes a toy feel alive and the lifeless gibberish we\u2019re getting here.<\/p>\n I do have to hand it to Lego\u2019s designers: The little spaceships are among the most swooshable and durable Lego creations I\u2019ve seen, using advanced building techniques that can help them easily survive drops, and rubber cushion parts to help their internal mechanisms weather abuse. The A-wing in particular is so beautifully put together, I\u2019d buy one for myself if it were sold separately. And I get why designers made some of the tradeoffs they did, like open cockpits and unusually short capes for minifigures so kids can easily get the Smart Bricks in and out.<\/p>\n The A-wing that comes with the $160 Throne Room set is beautifully designed.<\/p>\n I even like how each of the starter kits is a full playset, with good guys and bad guys and multiple environments, even though none come with enough Smart Bricks to simultaneously power them all.<\/p>\n But I can\u2019t understand why none of the launch sets have anything close to the smartest Lego Smart Brick experiences I saw at CES in Las Vegas<\/a>. There, on the strength of demos like a dinosaur celebrating a birthday with a surprise Smart Brick cake where you can blow out the candles, a police car that knows who owns it and who\u2019s sitting in which seat so it can sound the alarm, and the ability to precisely measure distance and orientation<\/a> between two bricks in 3D space, we gave it our Verge Award for Best in Show<\/a>.<\/p>\n There is one launch set that did capture my kids\u2019 attention for longer: the $80 Mos Eisley Cantina<\/a>. It doesn\u2019t come with any Smart Bricks, but it has two of the best Smart Tags in the entire lineup.<\/p>\n One plays the Cantina Band theme<\/a>, dynamically changing the tempo as you rock a Smart Brick back and forth, while the band mechanically sways. \u201cYou can even make it stop whenever you want!\u201d says my youngest. The other is the Dewback creature that Stormtroopers ride to comb the Tatooine desert, which grunts, purrs when pet gently, and snores if you lie him down. One of the best laughs you can get is by swapping those two tiles, turning the Dewback into a funky dancing Cantina Band lizard.<\/p>\n \u201cThat set\u2019s really fun, I like that one a lot,\u201d says my eldest. My youngest agrees it\u2019s the best. It\u2019s the only one they\u2019ve fought over, the only one they\u2019ve come back to play without my supervision. But they haven\u2019t asked for it again since I put it away, not even after we showed them the Cantina scene in the movie.<\/p>\n Cantina Band. Photo by Sean Hollister \/ The Verge<\/p>\n Stroking the Dewback. Photo by Sean Hollister \/ The Verge<\/p>\n I\u2019ll be honest, I\u2019m a little worried the Lego Smart Brick will be a flop, and I suspect The Lego Group is too. It didn\u2019t seed products to reviewers ahead of launch, and the company didn\u2019t want to overcommit in an interview<\/a>. But I agree with Lego Group head of product and marketing Julia Goldin that it\u2019s good to think of the Smart Brick like a game console<\/a>, and that Lego should simply produce a better wave of software if the first \u201cgames\u201d underperform. I hope The Lego Group has excellent game developers working on its next Smart Brick products.<\/p>\n My family loves Lego. We build with a huge bin of bricks from my childhood, bricks my siblings and I collected in the \u201990s that still do a fantastic job of unlocking imaginations today. With its non-replaceable battery, I don\u2019t expect the Smart Brick will have quite that same staying power, but the problem isn\u2019t too much smarts. The problem is they don\u2019t have enough smarts, yet, to keep us from getting bored.<\/p>\n Photography by Sean Hollister \/ The Verge<\/p>\n Follow topics and authors from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.Sean HollisterClose Sean Hollister<\/p>\n Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.<\/p>\n FollowFollow<\/p>\n See All by Sean Hollister<\/a><\/p>\n GadgetsClose<\/p>\n Gadgets<\/p>\n Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.<\/p>\n FollowFollow<\/p>\n See All Gadgets<\/a><\/p>\n ReviewsClose<\/p>\n Reviews<\/p>\n Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.<\/p>\n FollowFollow<\/p>\n See All Reviews<\/a><\/p>\n TechClose<\/p>\n Tech<\/p>\n Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.<\/p>\n FollowFollow<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/lego-smart-brick-sean-hollister-verge-331A1596.jpg\"\/)
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<\/a>Lego Smart Tiles, NFC tags that act as little programs that tell the brick what to be \u2014 an X-wing, a lightsaber, a blender, a scanning station, a Star Wars creature. Lego Smart Minifigures, which are just specific minifigures like Luke, Leia, or Darth Vader with those same NFC tags embedded.A wireless charging pad that will become your new best friend, because the bricks have less than an hour of battery life \u2014 which is not a lot! \u2014 and generally need charging overnight. It\u2019s powered over USB-C and comes with a USB-A-to-C cable. (By the way, you can\u2019t replace the lithium-ion battery in these Smart Bricks; they\u2019ll eventually stop working.)![\"Once](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/lego-smart-brick-sean-hollister-verge-331A1573.jpg\"\/)
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