The LEGO Group hosted a LEGO SMART Play launch event in London where the company showed off the new technology infused LEGO Smart Brick and explained what it was all about. Here’s a rundown of the new platform’s introduction…
On January 6, 2026, the LEGO Group followed up the big presentation from CES in Las Vegas with an event in London’s Piccadilly Circus for invited media. It offered the opportunity for attendees to hear about LEGO SMART Play, see product demos, get some brief hands-on time with the new sets and interview spokespeople from the company.
The event kicked off with host Ali Plumb introducing LEGO Senior Vice President Core Business Lena Dixen, LEGO Senior Vice President New Business Federico Begher and The Walt Disney Company Senior Vice President EMEA Claire Terry.
Each took to the stage to introduce aspects of LEGO SMART Play, the new system that the LEGO Group is launching to complement traditional elements.
“As a company rooted in play, we wanted to inspire and encourage kids to play more, to experiment more, to be more creative with their sets, but first and foremost, to play more, to extending and enhancing kids’ playtime,” Lena said.
“Through our research, we have been learning how kids are increasingly expecting their toys to react to being played with. A vision formed of making LEGO creations come to life, to make the LEGO sets play back with you, to play with you, so to speak. We have an amazing Creative Play Lab team in Billund and with many other people across the company.”
The core of the experience is the SMART Brick, which is packed with technology at a smaller scale than in typical toys. It includes a synthesizer, a speaker and LEDs, so it can produce light and sound, but it can also detect motion, other SMART Bricks, orientation. There are also colour and pressure sensors build into the tech-filled element.
That SMART Brick is utilised in combination with SMART tags and SMART minfigures, which are typical looking 2×2 tiles and minifigures embedded with instructions for the SMART brick. When you place one of them on or near the SMART Brick, it changes its behaviour.
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“At the heart of it is the LEGO SMART Brick,” Frederico explained, holding up the new element. “At a first glance it might look like a normal 2×4 LEGO brick. It is not. I would never describe this as normal.
“It’s probably best described as a technological marvel and it has been years in the making. But what’s really more exciting about this beyond the technology is the type of play and magic that it allows for kids to feel when they play with this.
“It is fully compatible with everything that we have in our LEGO System. This is not something that sits in the corner, that you can only play with this and nothing else. You can grab any brick for your thing, grab any element of a LEGO set that you have got, and it will connect to them with all of the very demanding quality specifications that we have.”
In practice, that means that you can place a SMART Brick into an X-wing Starfighter, then add a relevant tag so tell the brick that it’s in an X-wing. As you swoosh the fighter around, it will create relevant lights and sounds. Alternatively, you could place Luke Skywalker next to the brick and it might light up blue and make lightsaber swooshing sounds.
These examples are relevant because the first batch of products will be Star Wars themed. Three core products will include the SMART Brick and the charger for it, plus minifigures and tags, then additional products are expected to include SMART tags and minifigures but no SMART brick (which is likely to make them less expensive than the starter kits).
75421 Darth Vader’s TIE Fighter
75427 Throne Room Duel & A-wing
“For many fans, their first experience of Star Wars is not from a movie or watching something streaming on Disney+, but is sat on the floor of their bedroom flying an X-wing or wielding a lightsaber,” said Claire. “Films give fans the characters and stories that capture their imaginations, but toys give them the opportunity to take stories home and continue them.”
The LEGO Group have been working on this for a decade – and as Blocks readers will know, the thinking behind technology added elements goes back much further than that. Issue 134 of the monthly LEGO magazine looks at the long-running quest to add electrical components to bricks, then Issue 135 looks at how the company began to seriously explore technology infused products.
Because so much foundational work has gone into SMART Play, it is being touted by the LEGO Group as a system rather than another product (like Super Mario). The idea is that children will be able to combine SMART Bricks, tags and minifigures in different ways to elicit different responses and ‘build’ reactions within their models. Federico referred to those three components as the “initial elements”.
That suggests that, as with the LEGO System, the company will be building on the platform going forward. While lights and sounds are the starting point for the system, there will almost certainly be more than the bricks can do in the future – it’s easy to imagine that there could be functional pieces to add to this system, so that when a certain response is triggered in the SMART Brick, it activates something within the model.
In the meantime though, fans can start getting their hands on 75421 Darth Vader’s TIE Fighter, 75423 Luke’s Red Five X-wing and 75427 Throne Room Duel & A-wing. They are not polished display models or even as movie accurate as typical Star Wars sets, because they have been designed to be extra sturdy to withstand tough play.
Check back here at the Blocks website to find out more specifics about the functionality of LEGO Smart Play and be sure to read upcoming issues of the premium LEGO magazine, which will cover the ins and outs of SMART Play in more depth than anywhere else.
In the meantime, you can see answers to five of the biggest questions here, as well as an in-depth look at the upcoming sets here. You can read reactions to the new sets too – whether they are too expensive and what potential SMART Play offers for the future. Blocks has also visited the 5 News studio to talk about this new development.
And if you want to find out when new LEGO sets are announced, sign up to our free newsletter. Of course, if you really want to upgrade your LEGO hobby for the true insider experience, take out a subscription to Blocks, the premium monthly LEGO magazine for fans.