odd toys

Today the folks at LEGO introduced a thick-with-pieces new brick set for their Winter Village product range. This is the LEGO Creator Expert Gingerbread House, the 10th individual set in the modern Winter Village LEGO universe. This set looks both modern and retro at the same time - it seems to roll with classic North Pole furnishings, but stays general enough to be a holiday release any individual get on board with later this year.

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Today we're taking a peek at a couple of new LEGO sets in the company's newest line: Hidden Side. This new LEGO line Hidden Side stars with some spooky setups and enhances play with a smartphone app. The sets themselves are akin to past releases with monsters, haunted houses, and Halloween in mind. Given their release of this series here so far in advance of Autumn, we must assume that the ghoulish attraction of the month of October is spread beyond its Roman Calendar confines at last!

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Before we get too far here, I need to mention that this is a real LEGO set you can actually buy in a store - for real. The Friends television show has such a ravenous following of fans that iterations of the various sets and people in the show have appeared as fan-made LEGO sets for years. Maybe not as long as there've been fan-made LEGO Star Wars minifigures, but still - for quite a while.

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Tariffs levied against imports of China-made goods mean higher prices for your favorite gadgets, gear, games, and collectables of all sorts. That's the situation in a nutshell. Today, more than ever before, it's become clear how major this disruption will be to your wallet. You, the SlashGear reader, the gamer, the smartphone user, the nerd - you could be any or all of these, and more. If you want to buy new games, gadgets, toys, or gear that were imported from China, you're gonna have to pay up!

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This week the folks at Hasbro sent out a number of sizeable cardboard boxes to the media. These boxes contained large arrangements of toys - Transformers toys. It's the 35th anniversary of the original release of Transformers into our collective conscious - and it's apparently time to celebrate. This celebration is connected to the hashtag #morethanmeetstheeye, because of course it is.

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Today we're taking a peek at the first wave of Minifigure blind packs from the movie which is forthcoming. This is a release similar to that of the blind bag collection released with the first movie, with both main, major characters and minor, obscure characters in the mix. This might well be the only place you're able to find some of these oddities - and they're all wild, of that you can be sure.

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This year we've got a nice little list of awesome toys for all the girls and all the boys. This list includes not just toys for younger family members, but creative tools for older kids too. On this list are all the one-hit home run gifts that'll make your gift recipient the coolest kid on the block - or at least keep them entertained for the entirety of your extended family's holiday celebration afternoon.

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Today we're taking a peek at all 19 of the first wave of building sets for The LEGO Movie 2: The Second Part! This is the second of two movies (of what we must assume will be a never-ending collection), coming back to visit with all the biggest names in LEGO voices from the first round. Right about now we're going to look at what that'll all mean for LEGO toys!

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The LEGO brick set you're about to behold looks like and acts like a pop-up book. This set drops in on two classic fairy tales in a way dissimilar to every single LEGO set in the history of LEGO. This set, for lack of a better word, is completely bonkers. It not only features some awesome new LEGO mechanics, but a set of new minifigures (and a microfigure too!) This set is a LEGO Ideas set, the first one to appear at the 10-year anniversary of the LEGO Ideas program.

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LEGO bricks are far older than their epitomous Minifigure friends, and today, 40 years after the first Minifigure was born, we're having a peek at the first patent. The patent comes after the first Minifigure, but it shows a sort of figure that's already evolved beyond the original release. LEGO celebrates the birth of the Minifigure in the release of the original "LEGO building figure," a terrifyingly odd creature born in 1974. It wasn't until 1978 until the form of the true Minifigure came to fruition.

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Over the past week we've played with the Air Hogs Supernova, a tiny drone made to be minimal. This drone is controlled with an on-switch and sensors. The user tells the drone what to do and how to act with a series of gestures - hand signals in the air - and all power is provided by a charging cable that's not unlike what smartphone users have for their smartphone. This drone is just about as simple as a drone gets.

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Today the folks at LEGO revealed they'd be bringing on the most wizard-friendly release for magic users in Minifigure form, this August. Today we've got images of the whole pack of packs. They're going to be blind-packaged in the store, so you've got two options. One, buy as many as you can and see what you get. Two, sit in the aisle and feel around with your dextrous fingers for the identifiable elements, and cheer with each new ID, like a goon!

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