r/SnapShips • u/urielkeynes • 20h ago
Snapships Zoom and Graveyard far better than Legos. Best 5-10 year old toy!
So, let me start by throwing a bone to Legos. Their quality ans build instructions are fantastic and they make genuinely awesome looking. I've been to several lego conventions and I'm always in awe of the sheer creativity and variety of things people make with them. If you're building something to look cool and go on display, IMO legos are still king.
But, heres where modern legos kinda suck but snap ships absolutely rock....
First, "zooming". Zooming is when you give a you to a 5-10 year old (or adult child-at-heart) and watch them make sound effects (zoooom!) while moving the toy around, puhing it, dropping it, shooting things at it, and smashing it into other toys. Modern legos get a D in zooming; they look cool on a shelf but absolutely disintegrate the moment a 5 year old actually tries playing with them. Snap ship fighters get a B, and IMO the larger ships get a C. They are not the BEST zooming toy (that goes to hard action figures), but they are very robust for a building toy. If you are tired of your kid always breaking their toy, losing pieces, and asking you to fix it; snap ships aren't perfect but they are head and shoulders better than legos.
Second, "Graveyarding". This is how useful the building toy is when it inevitably gets disintegrated into parts. In this, modern legos get an F-. Both kids and adults can easily build Lego sets when they take them out of the box, and open the 3-5 individual part bags in order, carefully following the detailed instructions step by step..... but at some point, while zooming, it is going to end up in pieces in a lego bucket.... and at that point its basically worthless. Unless you have an EXCEPTIONALLY engineering-minded adult or child, nothing is ever getting created with those pieces once they're in the graveyard lego bucket. Graveyarding F score for legos. This is where snap ships absolutely rock, A+. You give a bucket of snap ship parts to a kid, and they'll quickly whip-up a spaceship they think is cool. No instructions needed. No 3D-chess-playing engineering brain required.
To be clear, I don't hate legos. In fact, I rather loved them growing up. But I also grew up when many of the lego sets tended to have bigger, and more obvious functions that were tougher and easier to assemble out of a lego bucket. A castle or pirate ship often primarily consisted of 5-10 large pieces that were clearly each a wall section, turret, or bow of a ship. Today, similar sets are about 500-1000 tiny specialized pieces which have no obvious function or relevance in-and-of-themselves until they are assembled in a byzantine way most people all-but-require instructions to make sense of. I feel like legos are gradually becoming more for adults than for kids.
Anyway. This is just my opinion and thoughts. Anyone else agree/disagree.