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Duplo bricks
Aug. 13th, 2008 08:05 amI was a big Lego fan back in the day, but Duplo bricks (initially marketed here as "LEGO Preschool") were introduced just a little too late for me, so now that my daughter has some, this is actually my first time playing with them at any great length (my motivations are now clear, if they were ever unclear).
Duplo bricks look superficially like regular Lego bricks scaled up by a factor of 2 in every dimension, but there are actually some other differences in the available pieces and the proportions of the locking parts. Some of these differences are probably to mitigate choking and breakage hazards, and/or make the bricks easier for toddlers to handle; others were ingeniously contrived back in the Seventies so that Duplo bricks would interoperate to some degree with regular Lego sets. They have interesting effects on what you can and can't do with the bricks, and there are some other really subtle design choices that help you work around some of those effects.
The biggest difference has to do with the thin pieces. Thin Lego pieces are, as every Lego-playing kid soon finds out, one third the height of the regular pieces. With Duplo blocks, the thin ones are instead half as tall (that is, they're the height of a regular Lego brick). This unfortunately makes impossible one of the most common nonstandard ways of sticking pieces together, namely jamming one of the thin pieces sideways between the top studs of a block. In general, what Lego fans call SNOT techniques ("Studs Not On Top") probably aren't going to work with Duplos.
There seem to be almost no basic 1-stud-wide Duplo bricks, at least in the sets Jorie has. The ones that do exist are twice normal height; I assume this is to get their dimensions out of egregious-choking-hazard range.
The other exceptions are specialized pieces like the 1x1 flower units. Experimenting with these turns up some other interesting subtleties. The studs and bottom locking tubes are not proportioned the same way as with regular Lego bricks, so you can't jam the top stud of a 1x1 piece into the bottom tube of another brick to get nonstandard centering. (I believe they were instead carefully proportioned so that the studs, which have hollow centers, would allow you to stack a regular Lego piece on top of a Duplo piece.) The great exception to this rule is the flower piece itself: it's got four tiny ridges on the inner surface of the bottom tube, contrived so that a flower piece will stack like a regular 1x1 round Lego piece, either on the stud of another block or between the studs, and so that you can stack flower pieces on top of one another to make a tall plant. Good Lego pieces are generally full of these incredibly subtle, nearly invisible acts of design.
Duplo bricks look superficially like regular Lego bricks scaled up by a factor of 2 in every dimension, but there are actually some other differences in the available pieces and the proportions of the locking parts. Some of these differences are probably to mitigate choking and breakage hazards, and/or make the bricks easier for toddlers to handle; others were ingeniously contrived back in the Seventies so that Duplo bricks would interoperate to some degree with regular Lego sets. They have interesting effects on what you can and can't do with the bricks, and there are some other really subtle design choices that help you work around some of those effects.
The biggest difference has to do with the thin pieces. Thin Lego pieces are, as every Lego-playing kid soon finds out, one third the height of the regular pieces. With Duplo blocks, the thin ones are instead half as tall (that is, they're the height of a regular Lego brick). This unfortunately makes impossible one of the most common nonstandard ways of sticking pieces together, namely jamming one of the thin pieces sideways between the top studs of a block. In general, what Lego fans call SNOT techniques ("Studs Not On Top") probably aren't going to work with Duplos.
There seem to be almost no basic 1-stud-wide Duplo bricks, at least in the sets Jorie has. The ones that do exist are twice normal height; I assume this is to get their dimensions out of egregious-choking-hazard range.
The other exceptions are specialized pieces like the 1x1 flower units. Experimenting with these turns up some other interesting subtleties. The studs and bottom locking tubes are not proportioned the same way as with regular Lego bricks, so you can't jam the top stud of a 1x1 piece into the bottom tube of another brick to get nonstandard centering. (I believe they were instead carefully proportioned so that the studs, which have hollow centers, would allow you to stack a regular Lego piece on top of a Duplo piece.) The great exception to this rule is the flower piece itself: it's got four tiny ridges on the inner surface of the bottom tube, contrived so that a flower piece will stack like a regular 1x1 round Lego piece, either on the stud of another block or between the studs, and so that you can stack flower pieces on top of one another to make a tall plant. Good Lego pieces are generally full of these incredibly subtle, nearly invisible acts of design.