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Alternative to Lego building sets...
iamterry
Member Posts: 166
Would anybody be interested in seeing some pics/comments of a non lego branded set I've picked up for curiosity whilst I'm in China?
It's a Woma branded small train (set J5701) and you can see some pics at this url:
(Sorry for the shop link, I just google image searched the set and this came up)
http://www.aliexpress.com/item/FREE-SHIPPING-Yakuchinone-assembling-building-blocks-model-steam-train-two-in-one-100-j5701-Christmas-Gift/654836390.html
If there's interest, I'll update this thread later on today when I come back.
It's a Woma branded small train (set J5701) and you can see some pics at this url:
(Sorry for the shop link, I just google image searched the set and this came up)
http://www.aliexpress.com/item/FREE-SHIPPING-Yakuchinone-assembling-building-blocks-model-steam-train-two-in-one-100-j5701-Christmas-Gift/654836390.html
If there's interest, I'll update this thread later on today when I come back.
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Comments
What they really do have going for them is that the designs appear to be quite good, (ie not LEGO copies of sets) and they're produced for significantly lower.
If they were sold direct in shops in the west, then I suspect LEGO would have a serious problem. Especially when the perception that the premium price of LEGO is justified by the quality and design.
There is a good round up here .... http://www.brickset.com/news/article/?ID=7722
I have to disagree that they're out in the UK, I've never seen any Woma/Star Diamond products in the UK (and these two are the ones I deliberately picked). However here in China, I've seen them in most toy shops I've been in so far. If they are available in the UK, then can you let me know where.
That round up is actually the reason why I've gone looking for them so I can see for my own eyes (and hands) quite how good/bad they are. Now I have, I can tell you for the price I can get them here, I certainly will pick them up when I can.
I recommend you do so also and make your own mind up rather than dismissing them as a competitor just because they don't have LEGO printed on them.
Why no "ultimate" SNOT piece? (Thread started Nov 2012)
Clone Brands (Thread started June 2012)
Lego to Face New Competition? MB/Mattel (Thread started June 2012)
Why don't LEGO competitors produce a decent product? (Thread started July 2013)
Since there is a strong a priori bias here against non-LEGO product, I went out Googling for external reviews of various of the brands mentioned in these threads. There were a few to be read, but even more to be seen on Youtube, many of which tended toward the positive. Then the roundup came out. It was an amusing hatchet job, and somewhat informative despite the obvious bias, though I found it odd that Wange had been neglected in the survey. What is needed is a more objective analysis, which is difficult to do, especially for those of us who do not read Chinese, as even simply disentangling who makes what is not always obvious: is a given set a rebranding, or a knock off of yet another Asian brand essentially unknown in the West? You are in a good position to contribute some real knowledge to this problem, and I encourage you to do so, in at least one of these threads.
Some of the above complaints appear to be about the way the person who built the model and took the pictures in the above shop pictures. I can point to lots of Lego reviews/videos of mis-aligned blocks.
The bricks are harder to join together hence I suspect whoever built it, did a quick job. The finishing clutch power of the bricks is higher than Lego.
Obviously I can't say much about the molding marks apart from to me, I'm generally not noticing them when playing with the train with my son.
The minifig is definitely the thing that lets the set down the most. The head has a hole on the top for the hat rather than the tidier method that Lego minifigs use.
Objectively though, does it look like a train? Yes it does, rather well I think for something that's 4 blocks wide - I think it's designed well because it does the job it set out to be.
Maybe I should specifically come back to this post in 1 years time of play with it from my son and see if it survived/cracked/broke!
The big question that people need to ask themselves is why do they collect Lego. Is it for the designs, for the quality, for the brand loyalty?
Quality is something that Lego is obviously slipping on recently - how many cracked wedges do you have? I know I've got lots. How many multi-coloured 'whites' or 'yellows' within the same set do you have? I know I've got some.
This is not what I'd expect from Lego and its something they're going to have to be very careful going forward. Especially given the obvious cost cutting/reduction of benefits of kinds that seems to be going on.
Designs, well this is where Lego both wins and looses. A brilliant example of this is the new Parisian modular. It is utterly gorgeous. I'm not going to say more on that.
Lego city... Another police/another fire set - how about some more variety. (However police and fire sets sell to boys so there we are)
Brand loyalty is something people feel very strongly about Lego. It's something that I've been bitten by on other stuff over the years. I hope it doesn't happen to me with Lego. Continuing drop in quality with price increases would do it for me.
So going back to mold marks - are you buying Lego sets because they're better molded or better designs?
Lego are trying to get into the Chinese market. Poorly. Somebody else on here was asking about the Beijing lego store and finally visited. As I'm heading there in a few days I asked them about it. Nothing China specific. How very disappointing and surprising. The year of the snake #10250 set wasn't available either. I'm glad I managed to get my copy of it from taobao (ebay equivalent). I believe the retail is about 350RMB (or £35). Very expensive.
If Lego really want to get into the chinese market, they could drop the price to be closer to the competitors - in the west we'd abuse that via the grey market - quite frankly there's no language needed for the instructions) or they hope their brand name wins and people buy the not very imaginative (compared to some of their competitors) designs.
So, lets finally talk money, I've picked up two sets here from a toy store. They are available for cheaper elsewhere from China. I do not know the retail price.
The train set Woma J5701 cost me 25RMB for a 100piece model. So that's £2.50 or 2.5p per piece. A quarter of the Lego typical price.
A transformable Star Diamond 81507 set for 95RMB which has 339 pieces. So that's £9.50 or about 2.8p per piece.
These Chinese sets which are pretty good quality - are nearly a quarter the price of lego sets. That's going to be very hard to compete against in China.
If they come to the UK (eg tesco decides to rebrand the sets and sell them at half the price of a lego set (I picked half rather than quarter to give tesco a healthy profit margin at 'rrp' level). Then they will sell bucket loads. Because word of mouth will get out about them being leagues ahead of stuff like Megablocks).
I'm not sure I'll find the time to build the transformable set before I leave China so probably won't be able to comment on it for a while.
http://www.aliexpress.com/item/Toy-one-piece-blocks-engineering-car-legoland-xf-truck-j5681-FREE-SHIPPING-birthday-gift/654808192.html
TRU has also launched a castle line, called True Legends, apparently through some kind of licensing deal with K'nex. I'm not familiar enough with K'nex to know if it's a rebranding, or if they're just manufacturing the sets for TRU, but all the parts inside are K'nex-branded.
Postscript: The fig inside one Mud Puddle "Action Series" Fire Truck is in a small bag labeled Gangjia Brand. These are omnipresent in a discount chain called Five Below.
Has anyone tried the BanBao brand? They seem to have various civil sets like buses, gas station, farm vehicles, etc that I don't think Lego produces at the moment so I'm interested in hearing more about them.
One thing that I noticed while in China is that nearly EVERYTHING "western" is more expensive in general (not including fast food chains). The idea of paying for the brand name is amplified by 100. My feeling is that because the gap between the poor and well-off in China is pretty extreme (the middlish class is pretty small comparatively), cities that have stores that carry brands like Lego do just fine pricing their goods with a bit of premium.
Of course, when it comes to China, I don't think that it's really the whole picture... but it's still totally fascinating (to me, sadly... but I'm a student, I'm allowed to say that!).
Just imagine the price of the Chinese stuff on K-Mart clearance! :)
1: Avoid early Best Lock
2: Avoid Ban Bao
3: Some Mega Bloks parts don't work right.
Even though K'Nex is US made, I dislike it as is it's unrelated to Lego in its form and the bricks are by no means compatible.
Weren't some Lego parts US made at one time?
So I bought two of the Knight figure sets at 99c each.
This is what came in the pack ... yes, the accessories are still on the molding sprues which makes the pack feel very full, and there was an extra torn empty poly bag shoved in there too in one of the packs - as padding or as a way of getting rid of waste?
And these are the parts ... (note you only get one cushion per pack, I added the other to show the underside)
My verdict:
99c for 32 piece set.
Bricks - they are not too bad. The clutch is decent, slightly harder to get apart than lego, but good all the same. The bricks are clearly not lego, they feel different, both in shinyness and in density. They are compatible, and in this case, all bricks were direct copies of lego.
The studs on side bricks work fine for connecting other bricks. Holes in the studs discussed below.
The brown cushion thing - why has a knight got a cushion? - the minifig can stand on it, but not centred. It has four holes underneath, but these are not compatible with the supplied bricks or lego. I don't know what the point of this piece is. It cannot be connected to anything else.
The minifig - 11 pieces form the minifig. It comes completely unassembled. This is not a scientific sample, but a 6 year old could not put the minifig together but a 7 year old could, with difficulty. I tried one, and it took probably a minute, but it is difficult. You have to line up the arms perfectly before putting in the pin that holds everything together. The figures look crap. The feet are slightly different, so one sticks out 0.5mm more, the legs are short, heads too big, etc. Headgear is compatible with lego, but way too oversized to be of any use.
Accessories - this came with a few weapons on the sprue, and some of them are split down the middle, so again adding to the number of parts. You have to file / pick off sharp parts of the sprue that are left when breaking them off. The accessories are about the same size (diameter) as legos meaning they can be put in a minifig hand. They don't work too well with the supplied minifig though. The hands are too rigid, you really need to clip them in. The problem comes when removing them. The grip is stronger than the wrist, meaning the hands fall off. The accessories are also the wrong diameter to fit in the holes in the studs (or vice versa the holes are wrong). You cannot put anything into those holes. The flag is also very loose on the pole, and doesn't stay on or positioned.
The reason I bought two of these is that I thought the shields might be useful to dye and use for Romans. Unfortunately, the size of the handle is too narrow and it is loose in the hand of a lego minifig, meaning it cannot be positioned.
You get a sheet of instructions, a bit like a lego poly. The minifig instructions are generic on another sheet (not specific to any set), but do not tell you how to put the minifig together - this is important as the arms need to go on first. They tell you how to sit the figure on a seat / horse / etc.
Overall, the bricks are fine, decent clutch but the stud hole is useless for holding accessories. They do not feel at all like lego. And I would not add them to a lego collection. The cushion brick is useless since it cannot connect to anything below, despite having holes in it. I'd give them 6/10. Fine as a cheap toy as for a kid if it is predominantly brick.
The minifig and accessories are a joke. The figures look rubbish, they are poor quality, difficult to piece together and there are clear size consistency problems between the parts and the grip / wrist strength needs addressing. I'd only give 1/10, avoid sets where minifigs and accessories are the key part.
The packaging also doesn't suggest quality (even though it states Best Price - More Bricks - High Quality) on it. Keeping the sprue in the pack and sticking in an old plastic bag pads the box out, but feels cheap. The part count is high, but remember that the minifig counts for 11, and the weapons another 8-9 here, as they come in parts.
I wouldn't buy them again. I'd prefer to have one regular CMF rather than two of these.
But the clone brands that I've seen are really really bad, I mean, there's sprue marks all over the bricks, there is little or too much clutch power, and sometimes the colour of the model doesn't even match up to the box! I think these brands were Slubban and Cobi, but I can't remember exactly.
Megablocks....well, their quality isn't as bad as it was before, but it's still pretty bad. Not to mention that the Halo sets are equal or more expensive in cost to the LEGO Star Wars sets.
As for the fig... oh, I don't know... it looks like it has humor value... if you ever need a smiling legless buffoon. Have you tried putting the Christmas Elf's hat on him?
The elf's hat would not fit on this one's head. The heads are huge... this is the Royal Guard wearing his helmet.
OK, one more theory about the sack of fertilizer: Can the fig stand on it? Perhaps he envisions himself as a great orator in a world before the invention of soap.
LEGO can't afford to be complacent - as clone quality improves, the price differential will be harder and harder for many to stomach.
i actually have see that website and usually many search results of such item lead you directly to this aliexpress site .I have over 160 Lego sets and about a dozen + chinese brick sets , all of which are bought from Pakistan ( the chinese brands) and i considered them great value for the money .
Some examples :
Wange :
EIffel Tower
Big Ben
Tower Bridge
Leaning tower of Pisa
The Spaskiya Tower of Moscow
The Petronas -Twin Towers of Malaysia
All of the above are large sets which are between 1100 AND 1800 pieces and about 24 Inch in height on average . Due to the non existence of anything on similar scale from lego with the exception of tower bridge i decided on giving one a try and soon ended up buying the entire series .Cost me about 38$ equivalent per set .
The other i have bought are mostly "Enlighten" pirate ships 4 of them and some Formula 1 type sets i.e large truck , f1 car with champions platform, pit etc. A mid scale Ferrari Spyder which cost me about $10. All of these ,I am yet to build. I may build the spyder right now , i dont think it will compare to my Lego Ferrari Furano 599 or even the Lambo (Police Version) but it might give them stand out more as a set on display .