These guys are infamous for duplicating LEGO designed models, including Star Wars (Star Wnrs, Star Plan, and Star Union), modular buildings (Builerds), Friends (Girls Club), Technic (Technician), Ninjago (Ninjasaga),and more. For this, they’ve gained fans and anti-fans around the world: the love of many, the loathing of some. What is less well-known outside China is that they also manufacture and sell bulk brick boxes, which also tend to be clones of Lego’s loose brick sets.

I was wanting to get a bunch of bulk bricks to do some free building with my daughter, so I decided to try some bulk boxes. I was curious to venture outside the realm of the fancy sets and see how they did with this sort of kit. What I found was very interesting. I bought two sets: 42011 and 42005. The first is a large kit, consisting of 1,105 bricks according to the box. The second is a smaller kit, consisting of 318 pastel-coloured pieces that I knew would be great to fuel my daughter’s creativity.

I was intrigued to find that in some respects, the clone maker copied Lego exactly, and in another, they did not. The small set appears to be a piece-for-piece duplicate of LEGO set 10694. It comes with a small instruction booklet containing a handful of building ideas, though no one buys these sets from any manufacturer because they want to build only the little demo models on the box. The clone kit contained instructions for the same several small builds. The large kit was altogether a different story: first, I was surprised to see how oversized the box was. A lot of the brick makers have a habit of making their boxes much larger than necessary, likely to project a more appealing presence on the store shelf or in market stalls where they are sold. The loose bricks set was no different there. What was different though is that it is not an exact copy of a Lego-branded kit. Nor is the packaging wholesale copied from a Lego box, though the main photos certainly looks awfully familiar (I want to know who went through and Photoshopped “LEGO” off all the studs in the original photo???). The Lego kit that most closely resembles the content of 42011 is Lego 10698, but the clone kit comes with more pieces: a purported 1,105 versus Lego’s 790! This set is sold as “Puzzle Building Blocks”, which is a label I have not seen on any other sets of theirs Very interesting indeed.

As to the bricks themselves: I was quite happy. They are all the same quality I have been used to. In fact, mixed in with a bunch of Lego bricks, they are nearly indistinguishable except for a slight variance in the lightest blue colour. I absolutely love the pastel bricks: I wish I’d had access to bricks in more than seven colours when I was a kid: black, white, grey, red, yellow, blue, and green was pretty much all that existed then. I like that this set has bricks in new colours such as light pink, dark pink, purple, orange, a lighter shade of green, and two new shades of blue. The translucent bricks look great, too.

If you’re looking to add thousands of bricks to your collection, and have never really considered clones before, I would suggest giving these sets a go, or other bulk kits. There’s really no ethical quandary present for even the staunchest LEGO supporter. Bricks are bricks: they’re not under patent protection anymore, there are no mini-figures here, and no designers are having their work copied. It’s just a box of bricks, with all design work left to the builder. These sets present an excellent way to add thousands of bricks inexpensively to your brick store. 42005 retails for about $17 shipped (versus $40 on Amazon, as Lego has retired their pastel collection). This equals just over 5¢ a piece (USD). 42011 retails for around $35, versus $60 from Lego. The price per piece is therefore an even better value, at about 3.1¢ (USD). Given the wide variety of colours and brick styles in these sets, as well as the other loose cloned brick sets, they do represent an excellent value for the money. Other sets and their Lego roughly-equals include:

42001 equivalent to Lego 10696 – 484 pieces

42002 equivalent to Lego 10698 – 885 pieces

42004 equivalent to Lego 10693 – 318 pieces

42006 equivalent to Lego 10702 – 612 pieces

42007 equivalent to Lego 10703 – 542 pieces

42008 equivalent to Lego 10704 – 945 pieces

42010 appears to be equivalent to Lego 10696 plus a hundred more pieces – 590 pieces

42014 equivalent to Lego 10403 – 295 pieces

42015 equivalent to Lego 10404 – 649 pieces

42016 equivalent to Lego 10405 – 976 pieces

All of these sets have been out for kind of a while, since 2017 or 2018, depending. Once I discovered the cloners had released bulk kits, I ordered these from my friends at BuildingToyStore.com, who special ordered them for me. I always suggest checking with them to see if they can do a special order for you, as their prices are very competitive and their service has always been superb. If BuildingToyStore cannot obtain them for you, numerous AliExpress vendors list various of these sets for sale, though I am unable to vouch for the service or reliability of such stores. (Luckily, AliExpress has a pretty decent money-back protection scheme, as do most credit card issuers, in case something goes amuck.)

Since I bought these sets a few months ago, Xingbao, a less rogue sister brand, have released some excellent “Ideabox” sets, at a very competitive price-per-piece ratio: Xingbao XB-18001, with 1,155 pieces, allows one to build the entire Chinese Zodiac in cute little animal models, for about 4¢ per piece. Xingbao XB-18003 has 676 pieces and comes with ideas to build four dog models. Xingbao XB-18002 has 402 pieces and also some dog ideas including a dog house. Each of these also run about 4¢ per piece. And since these bricks and Xingbao bricks are identical, likely from the same exact moulds in the same exact factory, the quality will be the same, which is to say, nearly identical to Lego quality almost all the time. Another advantage is that Xingbao are not in the crosshairs of the Danish company, so Xingbao products are not being pulled from online stores the same way others are these days, due to pressure from Lego’s notorious “brand protection team”.

As always, if you order from our friends at BuildingToyStore.com, they are offering a coupon for 10 USD off your order, exclusively for readers of Alt-Blocks, in addition to other discounts on their site. Just go to BuildingToyStore.com using this link, create an account (which gets you a 10% discount), and use coupon code K7CXYREL. You may also find a coupon code on their site for an additional 5% discount.

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