A survey of Communist LEGO 2016

With Communist LEGO, LEGO build you!

Haha beat me to it, I was going to say: "With Communist Lego, Lego breaks you!"

"the quality of clones seems to be improving"
This is what happens when you opens factory in China

The front page of the document is... unsettling at best.

Someone please provide Tomkins with a fellowship, this continues to be brilliant and the only thing that could make it even better would be to give the man more sets and mini(dis)figs to review!

Unfortunately he didn't include the one brand that is the current elephant in the room on this topic, I would have like to have seen that.

EDIT - he did list them as a new brand, but didn't review any of their products.

My favorite thing is reading all the company and factory names and reading about the switcheroos. Takes me back. When I used to go to Southern China a lot as a product manager, sometimes I would stay near one factory for several days to monitor one project. If a larger company like say Burger King was coming out to see a product being made, I'd come back on that day and see the whole place cleaned up, all the workers in uniforms and wearing top notch safety gear, and all the signs of the factory changed from the one I knew to something else. And all the front office personnel were switched. It was nuts. I swear I gotta write a book.

The Cobi T-34 does look pretty bad, the turret seems off, but I have their Panther, and it's amazing.

Brilliantly written and an entertaining read.
As Pedro says, please give Anthony more sets to review!

I'm assuming that "pound shops" are the UK equivalent of dollar stores.

That was hysterical! He should review some Lepin D2C knockoffs, that would be highly enjoyable.

"...an astonishingly high box-to-piece ratio" (p23)

Wonderful stuff, heroic and hilarious.

Other than LEGO, I also collect Masterpiece Transformers. A few years ago, Chinese companies started to produce Masterpiece scale Transformers using different names. At first, the quality was terrible - loose joints, cheap plastic and poor paint application. Now that they have accumulated some money, their quality rivals or exceeds that of Takara-Tomy. It will be interesting to see where this goes with LEGO clones. Takara has been powerless to stop the Chinese clones, so I doubt TLG will fare any better.

Honestly, if the clones evolve to the same level of quality, I would purchase them. Not for current sets, but rather those high-dollar UCS sets that I missed out on. I would like to see the price-gouging on the originals get driven down a bit as well. My preference will always be for the original TLG product, but there is no way that I am dishing out $1,400 for a UCS Y-Wing or $10K for a Millennium Falcon. Maybe TLG will reconsider re-releasing some of these sets in the future.

Seriously, what even is that Block Construction Vehicle Set? A steam powered tractor with an enclosed cab? A steam locomotive with rubber wheels? I'm very confused by that.

Here's the unhappy truth though. These clone brands are never ever going to go away. Hell, even in terms of Lepin ... Lego are suing a Chinese company, in China. Does anyone want to guess about how that's gonna go? I mean, the really worrying thing (for Lego, at least) is that the quality of the clone brands seems to be increasing bit-by-bit. In a few years -- when we're all paying $400 for two minifigs and a fifty-piece set -- the clone brands might actually be able to compete on even ground, and gosh, I wonder why.

I've been trying to collect the character building Scooby-Doo figures, but can't find any place that carries them online anymore or anyone who happened to have bought them. I got their Mystery Machine set too and it wasn't bad at the time. I like that they have a lot more of the monsters that look close to the show.

I love how obsessive compulsive he is with clone bricks! I mean, imagine how OCD he is with actual Lego!

I think the other infuriating thing about these sets is just the sheer waste of resources... when the robots take over the world, they're going to think, no wonder we enslaved humanity, they actually created "best-lock", packaged it and then shipped it halfway across the world! I think this goes for pretty much anything in a dollar/pound/euro/canadian dollar store, kinda of makes me sad

Nice read, but I beg to differ about Qiao Le Tong quality. I bought a little mech from them, only to discover that, in lieu of two pairs of 2x3 wings, I got four right 2x3 wings and bricks, while deceptively the same size of Lego, weren't compatible at all because studs were slightly smaller, thus resulting in badly interlocking pieces.

I also blogged about no-brands minifig here http://bricks.lamboz.net/recensione_minifig_no_brand_lego_snatchers.html (In italian, use Google Translate)

Well Lego is far too expensive for most people.
So I'm not surprised that clone names have evolved.
If Lego lowered their prices people would be able to afford the real Lego and wouldn't buy the cloned sets

For anyone talking about the cost of Lego vs say Lepin, remember that a good percentage of that price (hard to say what, but based on $/brick somewhere between 10 and 25%) for the big name brand sets is going to Disney (Star Wars or Marvel) or Warner or what have you. Lepin don't pay this so of course they're cheaper. If Lepin turned around and started producing their own sets based on their own IP or some license, then they are a legitimate competitor and I'd welcome them onto the market. But while they remain stealing Lego's designs directly, especially those based on licensed IP, they're thieves pure and simple. And they will struggle to be sold anywhere outside China en masse because no legitimate store will touch them.

I'd have given the "Pterodactyl" a minus -20 detraction for lack of basic research. It's either "pterosaur" (for the group) or "Pterodactylus" (for the specific species).

Great read and highlights the Chinese talent for copying and copying badly. If only they could innovate and build quality products. All of these brands should be boycotted.

I haven't seen this particular brand yet and I shop at poundshop a lot. With clone brands I tend to stick with Blok Tech (who also seem to sell under various store 'own brands' names - blox in Wilko for example). I know they were taken to court some years ago over the design of their minifigs and have since changed them to a very distinct look that is cleary different from the little yellow dudes we all love. I don't think of them as a 'dodgy knockoff' but just a rival brand like Megabloks. However there does seem to be more and more 'brands' avalible in the discount shops. Vague brand names, no company details on the box of who actually makes them. I think this is poor judgement from the buyers for these discount shops. Who are they getting these products from? What do they know of their background? On the tv programme Fake Britain on BBC Poundland were shocked to discover that some of the Head and Shoulders shampoo they sold was actually fake (and burnt a childs head). This is because (I think) they get some of their stock via third parties not from the actual makers of the product.

Oh and to BrickyMcBrick, pound shops are shops where every thing costs £1. There are various different companies but the main one is Poundshop. We used to have 99p Stores as well, but they were bought out by rival Poundshop and now we have to pay one whole penny more for our cheap products.

Sorry I meant Poundland. That's what they're called. Not Poundshop.

Block Construction? More like -Bloc- Construction!

I'm going to have nightmares for weeks now.

Since when did Lego make parts in China?

So Chinese companies ripping off multi-billion dollar corporations like LEGO and Disney that can afford an army of lawyers is not OK, but ripping off a tiny company like BrickWarriors isn't even worth a mention (page 43)? Very classy of the author. Very classy.

And if those are genuine BrickWarriors parts - which I doubt - it's incumbent on the author to point out that they come from a company with impeccable ethics.