Sick Bricks, a new collectable toy-game hybrid was unveiled at New York Toy Fair yesterday. Drawing inspiration from Skylanders and Angry Birds Telepods, Sick Bricks delivers the sort of cross over experience Lego has so far failed to deliver.

Sick Bricks are small Lego-looking figures that come in a range of different shapes and characters. There are monsters ranging from Harry Fangface’s werewolf get-up t0 Vlad Von Vein’s vamprie stylings. There are more traditional humans like firefighter Smokey Burns or policeman Officer Kuffowitz as well as fantastical characters like the ninja Silent Shadow and of course a wide variety of that video-game staple, zombies.

On toy trend, they are tiny, interchangeable and leverag both a brightly engaging video-game app and related Cartoon Network show. Supported by the wider fiction of the cartoon, the brick toys can be scanned into a related app video-game that not only offers general entertainment but also rewards and incentivises the ongoing collection.

Sick Bricks isn’t nibbling at the edges of Toys to Life leaders like Skylanders, Disney Infinity and Amiibo, but has moved right into the centre of this growing genre. In many ways it delivers an experience I had expected (and hoped) Lego would have considered in recent years.

At the same time it injects some irreverent humor illusive to thses bigger competitors who must to adhere to the more conservative rubric of big name brands. The blocky characters, their names and the game-world combine to make it hard not to smile whilst playing.

 

 

You can buy the brick figurines individually for $2.50 in foil blind packs or in a two pack for $4 and in sets of five for $9. Like any of these hybrid toy-games you don’t need the full collection for a substantial video-game experience but children will soon want to build a large collection. And certainly it’s a line of toys that will no doubt expand as we go through the year.