Suitable LEGO Sets For Adults To Collect

No matter what your age, LEGO Toys are fun to own, build and collect. There are even LEGOs specifically made for adults these days. I`m an adult LEGO Collector and it’s fair to say that I now have a lot more respect and love for the toy I grew up with and adored as a child. There are some great advantages to playing with LEGOs as a grown-up:

1. More Resources: As an adult, you have more money at your disposal, so LEGOs suddenly become more fun and exciting to collect, with a lot more options than were available to you as a child.
2. Build on Your Own Terms: Finally, there’s no more waiting for Christmas and birthdays with the hopes of getting that newest set to add to your LEGO toys collection. When you see a new set that you love, you can get it no matter the time of year, and you can spend whatever amount of time you like working on it.

Personally, I love to collect sets in the LEGO City theme but I am also a keen collector of all the more elaborate and detailed sets which are suitable for an older, more experienced builder. 
These sets often have unique bricks and technical instructions, and many of these sets have a minimum age recommendation of 16 on the box. Here I will present and review a few of my favorite adult LEGO sets.

My Favorite LEGO Collector’s Sets

Name	Age	Number of Pieces	Pricing	Category
Green Grocer	16+	2352	$900	LEGO City
Cafe Corner	16+	2056	$800-$2235	LEGO City
Seaside House	7-12	415	$60-$70	LEGO City
City Police Station	6-12	854	$125-$185	LEGO City
Ferrari 430 Spider	9-14	559	$70-$400	LEGO Racers
Unimog U400 Snowplow	11-16	2048	$305-$340	LEGO Technic
Tracked Crane	8-14	218	$55-$85	LEGO Technic
Mindstorms EV3 (robotics)	10+	601	$340-$400	LEGO Mindstorms

These are the basic stats for the sets listed in this article. This is a great starting point, but only the beginning of the options available.

LEGO City: The Builder and Architect’s Dream

LEGO City is my personal favorite LEGO collection: all the different building sets are complicated enough to spend hours on, and they all fit together so that you can keep adding buildings to a single town that you build over time, piece by piece. Here are a few of my favorite pieces.

The LEGO Cafe Corner

Lego Make & Create Café Corner includes every last detail of a real town restaurant. It has bistro tables with umbrellas, striped awnings, a sign, menus, costumer seating, and even trash cans.

Suggested for people over 16 years old, this LEGO model is not easy. If you prefer a challenge, this 2,056 piece model will not disappoint. The finished product is pretty large, but if you build it in sections you can always take it apart in segments for basic transportation and storage. Once you’ve finished, you may even want to remove the roof to show off the indoor rooms, staircases, and handrails.

Perfect for LEGO-lunatics and collectors, the design plan of the Cafe Corner allows you to expand its place on the avenue with a connected residence or other business. The connectors at the base even allows four Cafe Corners to be combined into a single, massive restaurant. The sky’s the limit when it comes to the Cafe Corner’s urban design possibilities. It’s an essential addition to your LEGO neighborhood.

The LEGO Green Grocer Set

This grocery-themed LEGO set offers a supermarket and connected lofts that can be designed, reconstructed and adjusted to suit your particular LEGO town.
The construction modeling incorporates sensible inside structures, yard access, a top terrace, bunches of windows and entryways, and even emergency exits. With 2,352 pieces, this LEGO set is a rewarding challenge for even the most experienced LEGO builder.

The supermarket features a blue and white overhang, shelves for bread and vegetables, a cooler, and a tiled floor. You can mix up the building’s design with items such as cove windows, a chimney, a pendulum clock, and windows that open to the emergency exit. The set also incorporates four LEGO Townspeople minifigures.

This particular set is a great way to begin your epic LEGO model neighborhood. Manufacture an avenue by joining together LEGO Green Grocer with LEGO Market Street and the LEGO Cafe Corner for a really fun business district!

LEGO City Police Station

This set is a great way to add action and variety to your LEGO city. You can set scenes from police procedures here, stage a prison break, or simply have a great time exploring all the different ways you can build this police station, which comes complete with jail cells, an office area, various stair cases and entrances and even several mini cops and prisoners.

As with all the sets in the LEGO City collection, the Police Station easily connects to your avenue and other buildings in your neighborhood. It pairs well with the Fire Station (shown above) and even the Hospital.

At 854 pieces, the Police Station ranks at the upper mid-range difficulty level. It has unanimous positive reviews. 

The LEGO Seaside House

This seaside house is a popular Lego Creator set for adult builders on Amazon. Multiple houses can be set up as a whole seaside village of plastic brick buildings. Even one house can be built in a whole variety of different ways: as a seaside villa, as a cottage with a grill area, patio, and detached pool house, etc. It comes with a little surfer dude and its own LEGO beach, surfboard, and lawn area. After all, if you can’t go on a relaxing holiday yourself, you might as well go on one in your imagination, with the personalized self-built vacation home of your dreams.

With only 415 pieces, this set is more affordable than any other building on the list, and what it’s missing in difficulty, it more than makes up for with its creative potential and multiple possible designs. 

One reviewer says:

I am 43 (next week). I grew up in a time where there were “girl toys” and “boy toys”. I have never nourished the building, creating side of my mind. And then came Lego. My husband and I decided to build a Christmas Village in November and have since converted a 6′ counter into a semi-permanent Lego play land. Did I mention we have no kids? lol

In any case, after Christmas was over, we needed to come up with a new direction. We “free-built” an ocean, river and lake with coordinating landscapes around them.

He just gave me the Seaside House as a birthday gift. I looked at the 3 in 1 options, decided I would build all 3. Once I got my hands on these beautiful blue bricks, my mind went wild, we modified the beach and ocean set up to use our pre-existing landscape, which gave us more square inches for that area. The directions on the kit are exceptional, the touches endless and the roof blew my mind.

Racers and Trucks: LEGOS for Car Lovers

Love cars, trucks, tractors or heavy machinery? Unfortunately, personal collections of high-end vehicles are far out of most people’s price range. LEGO collectible cars, on the other hand, are designed to be exact imitations of real automobile models, so for those of us who have always wanted a Ferrari, Lamborghini, or Mercedes, building our own LEGO collection can be a rewarding and fun alternative.

LEGO Racers: Real Model Cars in LEGO Form

Lots of people love to build model cars and fortunately for the LEGO lover there are models of real designer cars that can be built with the popular plastic bricks. I recommend starting with the beautiful Ferrari (just because it happens to be my favorite), but expanding to include more LEGO Racers.

There are several Lamborghini cars available as well as convertibles and trucks. If you’re feeling particularly creative and/or blasphemous, you can even take apart your perfect model designer cars and combine them into a Frankensteinian Ferrari-Mercedez hybrid monstrosity. Not that you would.

But you could if you wanted to. The Ferrari (and presumably the other cars as well) includes a detailed engine with a hood and rear bonnet that pops up, a moving steering wheel, and adjustable mirrors. It’s incredibly fun to play with even after construction is complete.

LEGO Technic Tracked Crane

The Technic sets are a great idea for the adult who loves those big vehicles that do the heavy work. These are particularly fun because once you have built your LEGO Crane, you can set it up next to any unfinished LEGO buildings that you are currently working on and make it look like a real construction site. The Technic Tracked Crane is really a two-in-one design that can be rebuilt into a bulldozer. It features tons of moveable parts, including the extendable arm, steering wheel, and treads that really roll.

Mercedes-Benz Unimog Truck/Snowplow

Reviewers love the realism of this model truck as well as the flexibility: it can be rebuilt into a snow plow and the crane can be moved to the front or back. With 2048 pieces, this vehicle is far more challenging than the other two vehicles on my list, and offers an incredible list of features, including a pneumatically-powered, articulated crane with working grabber and winch, realistic steering, four-wheel-drive, and suspension. This LEGO set is actually an incredible deal considering its detail, accuracy to a real-life model, and motorized features. It’s incredible rewarding to build, and equally fun to take apart, rebuild, and play with.

LEGO Mindstorms: Our New Robot Overlords?

I’ve saved the absolutely coolest LEGO option for last. Did you know that LEGO has an entire line of robots that you can not only build, but also program to respond to stimuli, navigate obstacle courses, and more? A LEGO Mindstorm robot is a must for any robotics enthusiast, and if you’re a LEGO builder who has always wanted to learn about robotics or build your own robot, this is the place to start.

The LEGO Mindstorms EV3

Build your first robot in 30 minutes, then spend as many hours as you like designing and programming tasks for it to impress your friends. This robotics unit offers the latest robot models, customization, and mechanics. It incorporates 16 entertaining construction and modification challenges, and teaches you to create countless tasks and obstacles for your robot to navigate. You can use the remote control that comes in the package, or download the app and control your robot from your smartphone.

Mindstorm EV3 combines the flexibility of the LEGO framework with a shrewdly designed microcomputer block and pre-existing programming that you can change to suit your needs and imagination. The unique 2.0 toolkit offers every little item you need to make your first robot. It includes 619 pieces and was developed for kids and adults 10 and up. It includes a touch sensor, color sensor, and infrared sensor, as well as instructions for building your robot in pretty much every shape you can imagine.

Lego Book for inspiration

Want to learn more about all the LEGO options available? There are some great books that have been written about the toy phenomenon, from histories of the toy and its famous corresponding theme park, LEGOLAND to design idea books that I can get lost in for hours. These books make great gifts for LEGO enthusiasts, and are particularly fun if you enjoy creating your own LEGO designs.

The LEGO Ideas Book

Some LEGO Trivia

In 2010 there were approximately 22 billion LEGO Blocks manufactured in the LEGO factory in Billund, Denmark.
This is equivalent to 2.5 million LEGO pieces being made in an hour or 42,000 in a minute.
Now that’s amazing!

Have you had enough yet? More complicated lego sets for adults