Happy new year: Welcome to 2020. I rediscovered playing with LEGO Bricks as my kids were growing up. When we attended a Fan Event in 2009, I discovered that being an AFOLwas actually a thing you could do! I now realise that I have been an AFOL for a little over 10 years, and during that time we have seen a number of changes – this coincides with the opportunity to have a look at some of the changes we have seen with the LEGO sets being sold to us over the last decade.

It feels as though the number of sets has ballooned, and that the number of parts in a set has also increased over that time. And what about Licenced themes: Some days it feels as though they have been taking over the LEGO shelves in the toy stores. But have they really proliferated that much?

Now that we are at the end of the 2010’s, I thought we could approach the decade with 2020 hindsight: Let’s take a look at the data in the Brickset Database, and take a year by year look at the number of sets being produced, as well as the number of sets with high part counts (lets define that as over 1000).

We’ll look at the number of themes over this period as well: how many are related to a single intellectual property (IP)? Some themes relate to multiple IPs, while others remain home grown, within the LEGO group, and are dependent on nothing except the imagination of the designers.

Who knows what else we might stumble across along the way. Grab a coffee. There will be graphs. Lots of graphs…

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