If you’re worried that today’s LEGO sets are too prescriptive, worry no longer. The LEGO Classic range is your go-to theme for simple, no-limits construction. Its basic shapes and bright colours make it an ideal choice for young fans.
With most sets in this theme eschewing minifigures, concerns about scale and broader compatibility with other themes can fall by the wayside. The Classic theme has seen a number of new releases in recent years, ensuring new LEGO fans always have something to enjoy.
This page explores the early days of the LEGO Classic theme, and the directions it’s gone in more recently.
LEGO Classic history
The LEGO Classic branding has had an uneven presence on store shelves. A handful of sets bearing the Classic branding popped up in 1999, before vanishing at the turn of the century. Some of these products were released in McDonalds restaurants, with vehicles and exclusive prints of McDonalds mascots. The current Classic brand first made an appearance in 2015, with several releases every year since.
If we want to understand the Classic theme in a wider context, we have to return to the earliest days of LEGO itself – since, arguably, today’s Classic theme is an evolution of those products. 700 Automatic Binding Bricks, released in 1949, offers us one of the first glimpses at the familiar LEGO form factor. It clearly emphasises creativity rather than a specific model, and more sets in a similar vein would follow it.
As LEGO continued to grow in popularity throughout the ‘50s and ‘60s, we can see a number of sets with the Classic philosophy. Sets recreating specific structures (like 1308 Fire Station and 1309 Church) were already popping up. However, many others were designed as freeform parts packs.
050 Basic Building Set is one such example of this idea. It offers a range of basic bricks, with no fixed guidance on how to use them. A number of smaller parts packs also make an appearance in this era – a mid-century forerunner of today’s Bricks and Pieces service.
The ‘70s brought us new proto-Classic sets, even as LEGO sets more broadly continued to become more prescriptive. 1973 is a particular highlight, providing several basic sets with varying piece counts. These basic sets would continue to appear throughout the ‘80s, although familiar themes such as Space and Castle were starting to gain a foothold.
As we approach the turn of the century, we start to get closer to the Classic sets we know today. Basic and Freestyle sets offered a wider range of parts and colours, as well as printed elements to aid play. These sets also included new storage solutions; in some cases they featured studded surfaces to improve the building experience. Other brandings like Creator and Make and Create, which appeared in the 2000s, continued the tradition of freeform building. Bricks and More (introduced in 2010) helped give children of that era a similarly accessible building experience.
Classic, then, is just a new version of a very old concept. New sets at varying price points continue to be released, even if each one’s form factor is relatively similar. 2018 mixed things up a bit with the Building Bigger Thinking subtheme; honouring the 60th anniversary of the LEGO brick, these sets offered an eclectic mix of elements and simple minifigures to mix up playtime. Even if the Classic branding falls by the wayside, its spirit is sure to live on for a while yet.
LEGO Classic sets
Today’s LEGO Classic sets allow fans to construct simple models with great ease and flexibility. While we’ve established they follow in the footsteps of older models, we can pick out some unique features of the current range.
The most obvious change is the mix of colours available. Early LEGO sets had a relatively slim palette of colours, but that has changed as LEGO products have become more sophisticated. Today’s Classic sets enjoy a much wider selection of key colours to build with.
Classic sets also benefit from an expanded parts selection. Sets of this ilk have favoured blockier LEGO elements, presumably to preserve a ‘purer’ building experience. Although that idea is largely preserved in Classic sets today, the introduction of plates, printed tiles and other elements has allowed for a little refinement to building techniques.
That said, Classic sets are – as a rule – pretty similar from one release to another. You can expect to find plenty of basic shapes, plenty of colours and a handful of specialised elements regardless of what you buy.
To aid LEGO fans of all stripes, Classic sets are typically released at multiple price points. A recent example of this was 11007 Creative Green Bricks. With an RRP of £4.99 / $4.99 / €4.99 this was immediately accessible, even if its colour palette was relatively small.
At the other end of the scale, sets like 10717 Bricks Bricks Bricks went all-in on piece count. This set offered a whopping 1,500 pieces for LEGO fans to build with.
From time to time, a Classic set will offer a bit more theming. 10712 Bricks and Gears allowed fans to add simple mechanical functions to their models. 11003 Bricks and Eyes included several tiles printed with eyes, to lend models more personality. 11014 Bricks and Wheels (in a bold move) included several wheel and tyre elements, to make models more mobile.
Outside of the main Classic sets, baseplates are a firm fixture of the Classic theme. These provide a flat, stable surface to build upon, and currently come in four colours. Although the LEGO Group has long worked to phase these out of their product line, they remain extremely useful, and will hopefully continue to appear in the LEGO lineup going forward.
2022 has proved another solid year for the Classic theme, with a couple of detours down Memory Lane. 11021 90 Years of Play draws inspiration from nine decades of LEGO history, recreating both old toys and more recent designs. Themes such as Castle, Pirates and Classic Space make an appearance here, alongside more obscure themes like Belville and Fabuland.
As such, the set could prove an enticing set for parents of younger children. There’s also plenty of spare parts left over, once you’ve finished building the 15 mini models.
Another throwback (well, throwbacks) can be found in 30510 90 Years of Cars. This polybag includes four LEGO vehicles, inspired by LEGO sets dating back to 1975. It’s another impressive tribute to LEGO history, but it’s not widely available for purchase from LEGO retailers.
This means that the other Classic 2022 sets may be more attractive. 11017 Creative Monsters uses a mix of colourful elements to build various creatures. While printed eye tiles add a touch of character, unusual pieces (like leaves, flippers and levers) allow for some wacky character design.
11018 Creative Ocean Fun offers similar delights. Its pieces let you build things like a turtle, a whale and a seahorse. There’s also enough pieces to build a seaplane and a pint-sized Viking longboat – or something even more exotic.
If you’re looking for something more sophisticated, 11019 Bricks and Functions may be better. It comes with various gears, wheels and axles, which allow you to add simple mechanical functions to your builds. You can create a patch of seabed with swimming fish, an organ with moving brass pipes, and even a worm popping out of an apple.
11022 Space Mission is a particularly unusual model in the LEGO Classic theme. Drawing inspiration from space exploration, it offers a relatively restricted colour palette and several more specialised elements. These allow for easier assembly of space-inspired models like space shuttles, command centres and even planets.
11020 Build Together, meanwhile, is great if you want to build with a few people at once. Multiple instruction books and baseplates are included to facilitate this, along with a rainbow of just over 1,600 pieces. You can build everything from animals to castles to musical instruments in this set, promising hours of excitement for younger fans.
LEGO Classic box
Most LEGO sets come in cardboard boxes that aren’t designed for long-term storage. While exceptions exist in themes such as Ideas and Architecture, the LEGO box is broadly disposable.
LEGO Classic sets tend to follow this idea, but they also throw in a more robust storage box from time to time. This follows in the footsteps of older themes like Freestyle, which would package LEGO bricks in sturdier boxes for long-term use.
An early example of this idea was 10696 Medium Creative Brick Box. This 2015 set offered a relatively slim part count of 484 bricks, and included several wheels to play with. 10405 Mission to Mars also included a storage box, with similar form factors gravitating to themes like the Unikitty collection.
More recently, 10713 Creative Suitcase offered a portable storage solution. Its interior included different sections to allow for some basic sorting, and would reappear in the LEGO Movie 2 theme.
In the last couple of years, the plastic storage box appears to have vanished from the Classic theme. This might be part of the LEGO Group’s broader eco-friendly efforts, which are working to phase out unnecessary plastic from LEGO sets. However, a range of smaller storage options are currently available from LEGO.com, including some new ones made of wood.
LEGO Classic ideas
While the emphasis is on freeform building, Classic sets do offer some slim guidance on how to use their pieces. In most of these sets you can find some kind of ideas booklet to get you off on the right foot.
11016 Creative Building Bricks, for example, includes a slim booklet with some simple builds. These builds have dedicated bags, allowing builders to put together something quickly and easily. Other sets offer additional guidance.
11015 Around the World focuses on animals and buildings from specific countries, and includes a poster to help you place them in a broader context. It also offered more numbered bags and more guidance around models to be built, including an eagle, a killer whale and a London bus.
Sometimes, these Classic sets can go in interesting directions. 10717 Bricks Bricks Bricks received building instructions for Geoffrey the Giraffe, mascot of the Toys ‘R’ Us store chain. Geoffrey has received a number of LEGO incarnations (including an exclusive Brickheadz model in 2018) so his appearance here is rather par for the course.
LEGO Classic 2023
LEGO Classic sets for 2023 are currently a little thin on the ground. However, the one that has been announced is highly endearing. 11031 Creative Monkey Fun allows you to build a variety of cheeky monkeys with a variety of facial expressions. A small tree with a pair of birds is also included – and naturally the tree has bananas in it.
It’s unusual for LEGO Classic sets to focus on such a specific subject matter at this price point. However, the low price and variety of elements may endear this set even to non-Classic fans.
