Lego’s New Pokemon Sets Battle Each Other, and the Loser Actually Faints

Leave one of Lego's new Pokemon alone on your desk for long enough and it falls asleep. Snoring included.

That detail tells you most of what's different about the Lego Pokemon Smart Play line, which goes on sale August 1 with sets running from $15 up to $120. Lego's Smart Brick tech showed up earlier this year in a Star Wars collection, and that line was fun in a specific way: you built a scene and acted it out, more director than participant. The Pokemon version does something else entirely. It borrows from the video games.

They actually battle

Put a Smart Brick inside a Pokemon and it makes noise, reacts to nearby Smart Brick devices, and eventually nods off if you ignore it. Set two of them next to each other and they'll chatter back and forth.

The good part: bump two of them together like they're charging at each other and they'll fight. The Smart Bricks track type advantages and HP, so a matchup actually resolves the way it would in the games, and the loser faints at the end. Want it back on its feet? Give it a potion. Some sets include Smart Brick-compatible training equipment for boosting stats, because of course they do.

That's a real design achievement, and it's worth naming why. Translating a video game into plastic bricks usually means building the set piece and letting the kid supply the imagination. This distills the actual game loop, battle, faint, heal, train, into physical objects. Early hands-on impressions from people who've handled the sets describe it as weirdly magical, and it's easy to see why that lands hardest with a seven-year-old.

The details are where Lego earned it

The launch lineup leans heavily on the original 151, with later-generation favorites mixed in: Garchomp, Bidoof, and a Gen 9 starter set with Sprigatito, Fuecoco and Quaxly. Some sets recreate movie moments, like Mewtwo's Lab Break. Others are just a few Pokemon having a nice time, which is arguably more on-brand.

The small touches are the good stuff. You can build a Smart Play-compatible sandwich to feed your Pokemon. Squirtle gets a buggy that makes engine noises. Mewtwo comes with a tiny Lego Master Ball. The Smart Tags carry a portrait of each support Pokemon along with its Pokedex number.

Every Pokemon also has its own cry, though these are not the 8-bit yelps from the Game Boy era or the sound bites from current games. Lego made up its own. They're funny. They are not accurate, and if that bothers you, it will bother you every single time.

The honest ledger

The main complaint is the faces. Lego leaned hard into a squared-off look, and it works beautifully on Pokemon that were already blocky. Geodude looks great. Bidoof looks great. Jigglypuff and Jolteon land somewhere in uncanny valley territory, where the shape is technically right and the result is still slightly off. The bespoke builds mostly fix this: Lapras and Charizard look correct, aside from a neck joint on Charizard that draws the eye. Mewtwo's face reads like it's missing a piece.

Then there's the price ladder. $15 gets you in the door. $120 does not, and if a kid wants the full battle experience with multiple Smart Bricks and training gear, this gets expensive quickly. That's the standard Lego licensing tax and nobody should be shocked by it, but it's worth knowing before the pleading starts.

Who this is for

Not the adult collector chasing display pieces. The display crowd is better served by the big static builds. This is for the kid who plays Pokemon games and wants that on the floor of their bedroom instead of on a screen, and for the parent looking for something screen-adjacent that isn't a screen.

What's interesting here is bigger than one collaboration. Lego has spent two years figuring out what the Smart Brick is for, and the Star Wars line was a decent first answer. Pokemon is a better one, because the source material already had rules. Whatever gets Smart Play next, the lesson is sitting right there: give the bricks a game to play, not a scene to pose.