Give Me All the Squid Game LEGO-ish Sets, Please

Mattel-owned Mega delivers an unexpected playset

On the whole, I’m relieved these days when I see an announcement of some new toy online, and I realize I don’t have to rush to write 300 words about it before anybody else. In so many cases, there’ll be something like 15-25 photos to download as well, and they’re good for traffic, but you wind up saying some of the same things over and over. I’m not going to be on the toy news “beat” here, but you can rest assured that if I show you something, writing up its reveal, it’s because I think it’s worthwhile. That’s the only reason to write anything here; maybe I’m a fool for not tailoring things for maximum traffic, but unless I’m guaranteed a living here, I’m going to have the kind of site I want to see — one with long articles about things the proprietor cares about.

And yeah, I care about Squid Game block playsets. These aren’t the first I’ve ever seen — I did once find some mini sets on Amazon that duplicated some of the games, but they weren’t very big sets, and of dubious quality. MEGA, Mattel’s LEGO-ish sub-brand, is sturdy enough. The builds can be predictable — one thing I find unique to LEGO is they make the building process fun, exciting, and non-monotonous by surprising you with the way things come together, and hidden features. Most of their competitors are more WYSIWYG in their approach, although MEGA does sometimes incorporate clever mechanisms, to make moving Pokemon, for example, or the marching henchman in this. MEGA are unique in the mass-market block playset field at present in that they will do R/TV-14/MA properties like Game of Thrones, Call of Duty, and Squid Game. I was told that McFarlane Toys had their biggest licensed property success ever with the Five Nights at Freddy’s building sets, but they seem to have given up and lost Todd’s interest.

I still wouldn’t have imagined any toy company making the M.C. Escher-meets-Dr. Seuss hall of staircases, mainly because of the scale. MEGA here uses the same cheat that LEGO does when they want to make something unwieldy like a complete Hogwarts set — they’ve used mini-minifigs, unposable one-inchers. One regular-scale minifig is included of the Front Man at his desk, which can separate for the playset to display separately with other compatible minifigs, like MEGA’s Masters of the Universe or G.I. Joe characters. The rest of the playset isn’t compatible with the usual scale of LEGO men, but it does include a crank mechanism that lets you march the guards around the structure.

The set is not cheap at $130.00, but nor is LEGO. Have you looked lately? I hope this inspires further work with the license, and full-scale minifigs of the iconic pink guards. They’d have to lean more towards the final levels, so as not to have to include too many characters to be feasible, but the breaking glass platforms would be cool.

On the other end of the spectrum, from violence to peace, I really like the Moomin house by Pantasy. I have no idea what the quality of their bricks is, but given that I was considering buying an expensive model kit version, a brick-buildable one sounds more appealing.

Sadly, it is already sold out. But if you’re asking, “What the hell is a Moomin?” do yourself a favor and check out the books by Tove Jannson.

So what would you want to build with bricks?

(Squid Game playset images via Mattel Creations. Moomin playset image via Pantasy.)