Somewhere in most households with children — or former children — there is a box. It might be a storage bin, a cardboard box from the last move, or an IKEA TROFAST unit repurposed for the occasion. Inside: years of Lego. Mixed. Sorted by no one. Without instructions.
The question the box asks, every time you open it, is: what should I build?
That question is surprisingly hard to answer.
The problem with a mixed box
The standard advice for mixed Lego is to sort it first. By color, by type, by brick size. This advice is not wrong — it does make building easier. But sorting a large mixed box takes time. Sometimes a lot of time. And when you finally finish, you’re tired and the original urge to build something has evaporated.
There’s also a subtler problem. When everything is sorted neatly, the blank canvas is overwhelming. You can build anything, which means you don’t build anything.
Constraints help. Instructions give you a goal. A specific pile of parts gives you a creative challenge. But a sorted, organized box of ten thousand bricks is actually harder to start from than a chaotic one.
Swooshability
There’s an unofficial metric in the Lego community for builds that are satisfying to actually use. Not just look at — actually pick up, hold, fly around the room, make sound effects for. The word is “swooshable.”
A swooshable build has good proportions, feels solid in your hand, and rewards the act of holding it. Spaceships are the canonical example, but the concept extends to planes, vehicles, mechs, anything that benefits from being picked up and moved through the air while making engine noises.
Brick Now is built around this idea. Not every build needs to be swooshable — some are display pieces, some are architectural models, some are just fun to assemble — but swooshability is a useful filter when you’re staring at a box and trying to decide where to start.
What Brick Now does
Brick Now is a web app for exactly this situation. You describe what you have — a general mixed box, some Technic pieces, a partial set, a specific theme — and it suggests builds worth attempting given your actual inventory situation.
The suggestions are practical. They account for the fact that you probably don’t have every part, that mixed boxes skew toward certain colors and types, and that starting simple is usually better than planning something ambitious and running out of steam.
It also supports the opposite problem: you have a classic set in pieces (bought secondhand, inherited, rediscovered in the attic) but no instructions. Brick Now can help you find recreations or alternatives for that too.
MOCs and starting points
A MOC — “My Own Creation” — is Lego slang for something you build from scratch without instructions. The Lego community produces an enormous number of MOCs, ranging from incredible museum-quality models to quick fun builds you can put together in twenty minutes.
One of the harder parts of starting a MOC is the blank-page problem. You have parts. You want to build something original. But original from what starting point?
Brick Now provides prompts. Not instructions — just starting directions. A silhouette, a concept, a constraint. Something to push against.
Why I built it
I built Brick Now because I had exactly the problem it solves: a very large box of mixed Lego and no idea what to do with it. Every time I sat down to build something, I’d spend more time deciding what to build than actually building.
The site is live at bricknow.se. It’s an ongoing project — the catalog of suggestions grows, the filtering gets better, and the whole thing is more useful the more specific you can be about what you have.
If you have a box of mixed Lego gathering dust, give it a try. You might be surprised what’s in there.