It’s 9:30 at night and I have yet to finish an article that’s due in the morning. I should be polishing up my rough draft and checking facts, or at the very least, stressing about it with a glass of scotch in my hand. Instead, I’m two hours deep into playing with LEGOs. And I have no intention of stopping.
You remember those big-ass 500-piece LEGO castles you put together when you were a kid? Feeling your patience tested as you searched for the one piece you swear they left out of the kit? Or almost finishing, then having to pull apart the entire castle because you left out a small, but vital, piece about three hours ago? This is the anxiety that was triggered when Paste agreed to let me write an article about putting together LEGO’s 3,000-piece S.H.I.E.L.D. Helicarrier. If the trauma of sifting through 500 pieces for a single block was enough to make me shudder 25 years later, putting together this behemoth just might drive me insane.
Fortunately, it turns out LEGO has done some growing up in the last few decades as well. The kit (the newest of a series of licensed projects that includes iconic set pieces like the Death Star, the Tumbler from Batman Begins, and Boba Fett’s Slave 1 ship) doles out the 2,996 pieces in about 25 separate plastic bags, all numbered in the order that you’re supposed to open and assemble them.
It’s a great tactic to prevent the user from getting overwhelmed at the sheer volume of tiny bricks, but the inch-thick instruction manual (400 pages!) made me skeptical about just how much I’d actually enjoy putting this bad boy together. I took a deep breath, took a swig of coffee, then snapped the first two pieces together.
The excitement of playing with LEGOs for the first time since I was a kid should have faded into tedium after the first hour, but that hour faded into two before I had to quit for the night. The Helicarrier was nowhere near done, but was that an outline of the hull sitting on my table? You can bet your ass it was.
