I think one of the biggest strengths of the Lego system is the amount of possible combinations you can make. I didn’t remember the exact number, but from way back when I remember people saying with 6 of the standard 4×2 bricks you can make millions of combinations. Turns out the real number is 915,103,765 different combinations. Of course, there are so many different types of bricks these days that add to the ecosystem and make the amount of combinations hard to grasp and less useful. Still, I do think a big strength of the Lego system is this huge potential amount of buildable things from just a few bricks. Just these six bricks give you the ability to mimic shapes of almost anything you want to build.
Capturing this property in a different building block is difficult without it looking too much like Lego. It feels intuitive to go for some cube block but attaching something to the side of a cube gives the same result regardless of the side. After some deliberation I settled on a design with two distinct piece-types, ironically enough both still based on cubes. I feel I should reiterate, sketching really isn’t my thing.
The two pieces of the building kit
The piece on the left I’ll call a hub piece and the piece on the right is a stick piece. Looking at the hub piece, it’s a tesseract-like structure drawn here with two cube sections. The idea is that, just like Lego, they will exist in a variety of lengths i.e. amount of cube sections. They also include little magnets in the corners to attach different hub pieces to each other, however this isn’t supposed to be the main way to attach pieces. That’s what the sticks are for.
Closer view of a stick piece
The stick pieces will terminate with triangular protrusions on each side, which slot into the cavities in the rails of the hub pieces
Closer view of hub piece
The sticks will klick into the cavities with the four triangles on the end, creating a secure connection. These sticks should also exist in a variety of lengths to make for more opportunities. This creates a simple system to quickly create shapes made from squares, just like the Lego bricks. The pieces are also meant as the platform upon which more specialised pieces can be built. One can imagine a piece looking like the nose of a plane or plane engines terminating in a very short stick piece to slot into a hub piece. There’s lots of possibilities to expand this system, but the two basic piece types already offer quite some flexibility if you have just six of them. Nevertheless, they don’t get anywhere near the amount of combinations of six Lego bricks so I haven’t really captured that aspect as well as I wanted to.