[gattr]

I had such blocks as well. For a recent take on this, I can recommend Kapla, typically come in a large (a couple 100s) box of skinny rectangular cuboids. I had fun doing, ahem, preliminary testing, before gifting them to my niece.

[marcinignac]

I got set for my son after noticing he loves stacking Jenga blocks and generic Kapla gets 10x more usage than Lego.

Can it be that the moment Lego moved from mostly bricks to custom single use shapes for every kit the joy of combining them died? My kids build car, Dino, Harry Potter set once and then gather dust. Bridges, castles, towers and roads from Kapla get rebuild every day.

[nuancebydefault]

When I was young there were fewer types of shapes but a lot of new sets contained a lot of such specialized shapes. I rather played with the lego i found in the attic.

[badc0ffee]

My kid builds the specialized sets, and also makes houses and other structures out of basic brick pieces. But he rarely combines the two like I remember doing.

I remember having an airplane and an airport. I built them once, played with them for a while, and then broke them down to add to the pool of bricks which I built into other things.