LEGO Smart Brick preview: These next-gen blocks rock

There have been a few major innovations in LEGO's history: LEGO Technic in 1977, and the minifigure a year later, but those are nearly 50 years ago now.

In the interim, the LEGO brand has kept its place as the world's favourite toy mainly by pairing up with kids' favourite intellectual property, including Star Wars, Marvel, Minecraft and Super Mario.

Enter the Smart Play system, out this year, which incorporates modern digital technology such as sensors, speakers and lights to offer the first new way to play with LEGO in decades. We went hands on at the CES conference in Las Vegas to find out more!

So, what actually is this new range? The Smart Play system incorporates the Smart Brick itself, which is the hub of the whole experience thanks to the built-in sensors, speakers, lights and custom chips it houses.

Check out LEGO Smart Play at LEGO

These allow it to be aware of data such as movement, as well as proximity to other Smart products. Those include the Smart tags and Smart minifigures, both of which tell the Smart Brick how to behave — for example, make duck noises if the tag is attached to a duck, or mimic Darth Vader's breathing and vocals if it's a Smart minifigure of the Sith Lord.

The real genius, though, is how LEGO's engineers have programmed the Smart Brick to enhance LEGO play and make it more fun and interactive. Maarten Simons, the Design Manager on the project for the last few years, started our CES session with a relatively simple demonstration, attaching a Smart Tag to the Smart Brick to play simple musical notes and flashing lights when you tilt and move the brick around.

Another Smart Tag tells the brick to be a car, making engine noises as you move, tyre screeching noises as you go round a corner, and a crashing noise when you hit something. There were similar demos with a helicopter, a duck and a dinosaur.

However, things get a lot more fun when you combine multiple LEGO items that feature Smart Bricks, as they interact with each other in both predictable and surprising ways. For example, we watched Simons surprise the aforementioned dinosaur with a birthday cake covered in candles, upon which the dinosaur's brick flashed green with excitement, made the sound of streamers.

When you then blow the candles out on the cake, the Smart Brick on it emits a "Happy Birthday" song, upon which the dinosaur flashes with excitement once again. It's simple, but super fun, and just five minutes into our demo we can already tell kids are going to love it. And that's way before we've even seen the Star Wars packs that are coming out.

We're getting ahead of ourselves, however. There are other Smart features, such as a tag that allows the Smart Brick to sense colour: if it sees blue, it will make underwater sounds; or if it sees yellow, it will make beach noises; green will make it assume it's on grass; while red will cause a fire alarm. You can also link multiple bricks by shaking them to pair, upon which a second brick will match whatever the first brick is sensing, up to five meters away, using its own low latency BrickNet wireless technology.

Next up, we got to see how LEGO minifigures interact with the Smart Brick. Smart-enabled minifigures feature a symbol on their back to denote their Smart status — it's a circle encapsulating speaker, sparkle and mystery symbols signalling what they can make a Smart Brick do.

When they're placed near a Smart Brick, the brick will react differently to which side they're placed. This allows for interesting play possibilities, which was demonstrated with a police car featuring a Smart tag, and cop and robber minifigures. If the robber approaches the police car, the car alarm goes off, but if the cop is driving towards the robber, his siren will start wailing.

The Smart Bricks can also measure distances away from each other, using colours to denote how far apart they are. This allows LEGO builders to do things like create a defensive bubble around certain objects, and set an alarm if anything breaks that perimeter. Similarly, the bricks can tell if they're facing each other, and light up accordingly.

A fun demo we played that took advantage of these features was a mother duck and her four ducklings — the ducklings would talk among each other, but when the mother turned around to face them, they'd behave and stay quiet. When the dinosaur from earlier comes in, the ducklings then sing him a birthday song. We then played a game of duck curling with the ducklings (on skateboards). Standard!

A gold trophy with a Smart tag was the target to get closest to, and each player would shake a duck to activate it, and then push it towards the trophy. The player with the closest duck is then recognised at the end with lights and sounds (in our case, the green duck) and then fireworks once the duck is placed in the cup of the trophy.

With those cute demos over with, it was time for Star Wars, and one of the first Smart-enabled sets to go on sale. We saw Darth Vader's TIE Fighter (£60), Luke Skywalker’s Red Five X-wing (£80), and the Throne Room Duel sets (£140), and saw how they can all interact together.

The X-wing houses Luke and R2-D2 minifigures, and as you fly the X-wing around by hand, the Smart Brick will make engine noises, and if you perform a barrel roll (that's a neat trick), there'll be a loud wooshing sound followed by a cute wail from R2-D2.

There's also a button at the rear of the ship to fire the lasers, which is where the TIE fighter comes in, as you can fire back and forth between the two ships. If one ship "hits" the other using its lasers, the opposing ship will flash red, sound alarms, and finally mimic an explosion once you hit critical damage.

The throne room allows you to put Luke and Vader down opposite each other and have an interactive lightsaber battle in front of the Emperor sat on his throne. You can hear lightsaber sounds as their laser swords clash, which is pretty cool, it has to be said.

On a technical level, each pack will come with a couple of Smart Bricks, and a charger which can charge up two bricks at once. Each brick should offer about 45 minutes of play time, and take about 2 hours to fully recharge.

The bricks will go to sleep when they're not being used, however, which will help kids who might not be the best at remembering to recharge every time they finish playing.

LEGO's new Smart system is great fun, and you could see how much it delighted a room full of middle-aged, probably somewhat tired and jaded journalists having to contend with a packed Las Vegas.

It's a safe bet, then, that it will be mightily popular with children, who will no doubt love doing things with this tech that its designers haven't even dreamt of.

LEGO's debut Smart Play kits are available for pre-order now, and will be released on 1st March 2026.

Read more on LEGO:

• Best LEGO deals for January 2026
• New LEGO sets for 2026 revealed
• How to get the new LEGO Zelda Ocarina of Time set

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