LEGO SMART Play hands-on reaction: this probably isn’t for you

Brick Fanatics had the chance to go hands-on with LEGO SMART Play’s Star Wars sets in London, and the main takeaway is that these sets probably aren’t for you.

The LEGO Group this week announced its Next Big Thing in the form of LEGO SMART Play, which once again fuses physical and digital play together. There are no screens here, though: everything happens natively in the bricks, which pack all the necessary technical gubbins into a 2×4 canvas. The elevator pitch is that you can point the brick at compatible 2×2 tiles and minifigures and it’ll react with sounds and lights.

It’s not difficult to see how much this means to the LEGO Group. SMART Play has been at least eight years in the making, has required unimaginable sums of investment and debuted on the world stage at CES (the Consumer Electronics Show) in Las Vegas. It has the attention of not just LEGO-focused sites but the wider media landscape, and the LEGO Group is calling the SMART Brick its ‘biggest innovation in 50 years’.

The initial unveiling and launch in Las Vegas was also twinned with a similar event in London, which Matthew and I attended this week for Brick Fanatics. Following a short presentation of the same visuals shown off at CES – including an ad that looks like it could have swallowed up the entire LEGO annual marketing budget – and intros from key personnel including the LEGO Group’s SVP of Product (Core) Lena Dixen, we had the chance to go hands-on with SMART Play during a product demonstration.

LEGO SMART Play demonstration

The demo kicked off with a handful of customised SMART Tag tiles and play scenarios that won’t be released to consumers (at least in the initial wave of Star Wars sets), intended to show what the brick is capable of – and how multiple bricks can interact with one another.

In one example, a birthday cake with a SMART Brick could tell when its candles had been blown out. In another, a group of four ducklings (each with SMART Bricks) could tell when their mother duck (equipped with a fifth brick) had turned away, and started misbehaving or singing songs – but would stop when the mother duck turned back to them.

The demo team also showed how SMART Minifigures can interact with the SMART Brick in unique ways. Each minifigure has its own character and personality, which effectively translates to a different ‘tone of voice’ or pitch when placed in proximity of a SMART Brick. But if you’re expecting these minifigures to come out with catchphrases – Darth Vader’s ‘I am your father’, for instance – think again.

Rather than packing a bunch of prerecorded sounds into specific bricks (and therefore requiring unique SMART Bricks for each product), the LEGO Group has instead cooked up a synthetic soundscape universal across every SMART Brick. So what we’ve actually got here is one new brick that’s identical across all sets in which it appears. The unique SMART Tags (2×2 tiles) and minifigures then tell the brick which sounds to produce. 

That means the minifigures are restricted to the sort of mumbling that will be familiar to veteran LEGO video game players (remember TT Games’ original LEGO Star Wars titles?), only with slightly more dynamic range. The team in London used a police officer and robber to demonstrate the difference between two minifigures – the police officer was high-pitched and friendly, while the robber had a more sinister tone – and then demonstrated a typical play scenario using the SMART Brick and a police car.

First, the robber tried to open the ‘locked’ car door, only to be greeted by an alarm. They scarpered, and the police officer returned puzzled to shut off the alarm. The cop then clambered in the back of the car and had a nap – cue snoring sounds through the SMART Brick – while the robber came back to find the car unlocked, hopped in the front and drove away, all to the terrified screams of the startled police officer.

All that was facilitated by the specific placement of SMART Tags and SMART Minifigures, as well as the directional awareness of the SMART Brick itself. In addition to reacting to tags and minifigures, the brick can respond to the position and direction of specific tiles, the position of other SMART Bricks (in three dimensions) and even colours. While the output is basically just a few lights and (quite tinny) sounds, it’s the input that really sets the SMART Play system apart from the likes of LEGO Super Mario’s already impressive tech.

LEGO SMART Play Star Wars sets

The second half of the demo saw the three LEGO Star Wars sets revealed this week come into play, along with part of an upcoming Mos Eisley Cantina model that has yet to be fully unveiled. Key interactions between SMART Bricks, Tags and Minifigures included the Imperial March playing when Palpatine was placed on his throne, Luke’s X-wing responding to coming under fire from an Imperial turret, and the Cantina Band playing music that (for some reason) was not the iconic tune you know and love from A New Hope but a random jingle.

Again, it pretty much boils down to the SMART Bricks making lights and sounds in reaction and response to the way they’re played with. Turn the X-wing upside-down and the brick flashes red and warns you that you’re crashing; push a button towards the back of the model and the lasers will fire (though again, not with the iconic X-wing laser sound but a more generic sci-fi ‘pew pew’); and so on.

Throughout all this it was difficult to shake off my initial scepticism with the SMART Brick: can’t kids just make their own ‘pew pew’ noises? That’s definitely what I did when I was seven. But who am I to say what kids today want? The SMART Brick has been rigorously tested for years, and the outcome of those tests is clearly that kids do want the toy to make the sounds for them (or else the LEGO Group would not be pursuing this obviously very costly enterprise).

And, to be fair, I do have very specific memories of loving that one light-and-sound brick that came in the vintage UFO sets, and the illuminated turret in Rock Raiders, and even the light-up lightsabers in the Revenge of the Sith sets. So maybe there’s more obvious mileage in the SMART Play System than my jaded and cynical adult point of view is seeing at first glance.

There are some clear and immediate ways these bricks can enhance play, too: in another example, the demonstrators placed four SMART Bricks on individual cars and a fifth brick on a LEGO trophy. They then pushed all four cars along the table in a sort of curling exercise, and the trophy could detect which had come closest (thus winning the ‘race’). The caveat to that scenario, of course, is the price.

The SMART Play System isn’t cheap by any means, and amassing a large number of SMART Bricks is only really going to be possible when it expands beyond LEGO Star Wars. For now, you’ll find four bricks across the three starter sets – 75421 Darth Vader’s TIE Fighter, 75423 Luke’s Red Five X-Wing and 75427 Throne Room Duel & A-Wing – while the rest coming in March will all be ‘compatible’ sets that only include SMART Tags and SMART Minifigures.

LEGO SMART Play discovery

Beyond just the cost of those sets, which is in itself pretty high – especially compared to similarly-sized LEGO Star Wars products – there’s another question that was running through my mind while watching the product demonstration. How much of the play value offered by SMART Bricks will be directly communicated to kids, and how much will be left for them to discover?

It’s a similar problem I’ve encountered with the LEGO Super Mario sets, which feel like the closest evolutionary forebears of the SMART Play System. Mario, Luigi or Peach’s interactions with each of the expansion sets, enemies and stickered tiles is often frustratingly random – sometimes they’ll react one way, sometimes another – and understanding the particular action required and why the character is responding in that way isn’t always easy.

Similarly, understanding why the SMART Brick responded in a certain fashion didn’t always feel obvious during the product demonstration – at least when we had freeform hands-on time with the LEGO Star Wars sets. The carefully-controlled narrative of the robber stealing the police car had logical outcomes, but will kids know exactly how to activate those responses, why particular reactions were evoked and how to replicate them? Is the SMART Play System an organic path of discovery or a road to further frustration?

I put the question to the demo team, and they explained that each SMART Play set will have ‘play prompts’ to help kids get going – but that the LEGO Group also wants them to have the freedom to discover reactions for themselves. In testing, kids apparently quickly understood not only the concept of SMART Bricks, but indeed how to elicit particular responses.

According to the LEGO Group SVP of Product (New Business) Federico Begher, one of the biggest challenges around the SMART Play System is in communicating what the SMART Brick is before consumers have their hands on it (so, selling the concept in the first place). But once they’re playing with it, everything starts to make sense. Unfortunately, our hands-on time with the tech was so controlled and limited that I can’t really verify that one way or the other just yet.

Brick Fanatics will have another (extended) chance to go hands-on with the LEGO Star Wars SMART Play sets ahead of their March release, though, so keep an eye on the site – and in particular our YouTube channel – next month for a more in-depth examination of the SMART Play System.

LEGO SMART Play: probably not for you

For now, I’ll leave you with my closing takeaway from this week’s event: these sets are not at all designed for adults, and the LEGO Group is clearly communicating that not only through the age rating on the boxes – Lena told us that the key target demographic for SMART Play is six-to-eight-year-olds – but the design of these sets, too.

The X-wing is perhaps the best example. The four-stud-wide SMART Brick could easily have fit into the more accurate designs of recent sets, which can already accommodate R2-D2 (who is also four studs wide), but here it’s a chibified and cuter model built specifically for play. If you want an authentic LEGO X-wing to pop on a shelf, head elsewhere.

These sets are for an audience increasingly overlooked by a LEGO Star Wars theme that’s otherwise skewed further and further towards adult display sets in recent years, and that is – of course – kids. More specifically, kids whose parents have the money to splash on more expensive versions of sets we’ve seen countless times before, but now with sounds and lights.

Hey, it’s the Next Big Thing…

LEGO Star Wars SMART Play 2026 sets

LEGO set	Price	Pieces	Release date
75421 Darth Vader’s TIE Fighter	£59.99 / $69.99 / €69.99	473	March 1, 2026
75423 Luke’s Red Five X-wing	£79.99 / $99.99 / €89.99	584	March 1, 2026
75427 Throne Room Duel & A-wing	£139.99 / $159.99 / €159.99	962	March 1, 2026

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