LEGO Bricks / Classic LEGO

Snap the bricks together and build almost anything! Cars, houses, castles, spaceships — or whatever you can imagine.

Take a bunch of small plastic bricks, snap them together, and start building. A house. A car. A spaceship. A castle. Or something that doesn't look like anything except whatever you decide it is supposed to be.

LEGO has been making plastic building bricks since the 1940s, but the LEGO brick we know today really took shape in 1958. That's when LEGO developed its stud-and-tube design - those familiar bumps on top and holes underneath that allow the bricks to snap together tightly but still come apart when you want them to.

As a kid, one of the best things I remember about LEGO was just dumping a big pile of bricks on the floor and building whatever I wanted. (As a parent, one of the worst things about LEGO was stepping on those dumped-out pieces in the middle of the night.) You didn't need instructions, or even a particular set. Just find the pieces you needed and start building. And if you didn't like what you made, take it apart and build something else.

Of course, LEGO has grown way beyond boxes of basic bricks. Today there are thousands of different sets and themes - Star Wars, Harry Potter, Marvel, cars, trains, castles, spaceships, buildings and just about anything else you can imagine. There are simple sets for younger kids, enormous sets with thousands of pieces, and plenty that seem to be aimed just as much at adults as children.

But you can still buy a box of ordinary LEGO bricks and do exactly what kids have been doing for generations - dump them out and build something.