LEGO Super Mario is the Toy of the Year
We recently picked up the LEGO Super Mario kit along with several of the expansions for our 7-year-old son, and I’m here to report that they have already gotten more actual hands-on playtime than any toy we’ve ever owned. If you have a LEGO fan in your house, the kits are certain to be a hit. And if they happen to be fans of Nintendo and Mario too, these kits have to be the biggest no-brainer birthday or Christmas gift I’ve ever seen.
The starter kit, which you need to buy first for any of the expansions to work, comes with a very cool battery-powered Mario figure that interacts with his environment. He knows what color surface he’s standing on and actually interprets it appropriately as grass, water, lava or sand. The amazing thing about that is that we’re able to use our giant bucket of old LEGOs and build any elaborate environments we want - and Mario will be able to interact with them.
And Mario also interacts with specific pieces and characters that he runs into as well. He knows when you place him in the green pipe to start a level, he knows if he’s jumping on an enemy, and he knows when he reaches the flag at the end of the level - and that’s just the start of it. Depending on which kits you buy, you’ll find question blocks, p switches, different power-up suits, and much more.
The Mario figure also connects to a simple app as well, which you can use for things like the building instructions and a cute feature that keeps track of the total coins you’ve collected while playing. But you’ll probably also be very happy to know that you don’t need the app at all to play with these toys. All of the cool interactivity happens completely independently of the app. And if you really want to be 100% unplugged, you could even turn off Mario and you’ll still be left with some very impressive and entertaining LEGO sets.
Our son is in love with the whole thing - and he’s in love with the Mario figure itself most specifically. The tiny screens that it has for eyes really make it come alive. He wants to take his Mario on walks with us, and to sleep with him at night. It’s adorable and very clearly a sign that he’s very wrapped up in the imagination of the whole thing. And that’s a big part about why I love this toy. LEGO and Nintendo have combined forces to make his imagination explode.
Our 7-year-old has been a casual fan of LEGOs for a couple of years now, and he has a little bit of experience following the instructions and building kits like these by himself. And of course I love the workout for the brain that LEGO always provides, as well as the satisfaction of creating something with your own hands. Honestly I think it’s so cool that he took all of these Mario kits into his room and constructed them all completely alone.
But before these Mario LEGO kits came around, LEGO kits have always been a one day project for him. For better or worse, he typically builds them and quickly forgets about them. Maybe they’ll sit on display somewhere, but more likely they’ll get tossed back into the giant LEGO bucket the very next day. But the LEGO Mario sets, on the other hand, have been built and setup ready to play with for weeks already.
And I think it’s pretty clear what the difference with this LEGO set is. It can’t be underestimated that this LEGO world our son is building really feels like it comes alive with the interactivity. And, best of all, it does so in a way that still nourishes and feeds personal creativity and imagination. It opens up possibilities for play that are very engaging, but also very subtle and simple enough to still rely entirely on the creativity of the child to bring the story to life.
It might be confusing or intimidating to research what is actually available right now, but I think we’ve wrapped our heads around it. Available right now is the essential Starter Kit that has Mario in it, a few large expansions like King Boo’s Haunted Yard or Bowser’s Castle, and a few smaller expansions like Mario’s House and Yoshi or the Piranha Plant Slide.
And another option available that we’ve dipped our toes into is the mystery character packs - to try to get our hands on more figures like a Blooper or a Koopa to bring the environments to life and to interact with Mario. There are definitely pros and cons to not knowing which character you are going to get, but our son certainly loves opening them. And I definitely recommend getting some - because having more characters to play with makes a significant difference for playtime.
I don’t think there’s any doubt we’ll try to collect them all, primarily because of how much these kits fire up our son’s creativity. Maybe it’s something about the way Mario actually falls asleep, or that you can change his outfits, but our son treats him like a doll or a good friend. He’ll carry him around the house and “play Mario” with his sister for hours - even more often than he plays with the LEGO sets themselves. He does a voice for Mario and everything and I adore it.
He even came up with a great idea to turn the whole thing into an interactive board game - and together we’ve been brainstorming ideas for how that might work. With Mario traveling around a LEGO board that we build, and interacting with the colors he lands on and the various pieces from the playsets, we could definitely come up with something that feels like a real life Mario Party. And obviously any toys that get my son and I bouncing ideas like that off each other deserve a lot of kudos.
Do you have any LEGO fans or Mario fans in your house? Have you tried the LEGO Super Mario kit yet? Let us know what you think in the comments!
