Could Lini Cube be the next LEGO?

Lini cubes can be joined from all four sides, resulting in more creative options than when playing with LEGO.

Lini cube vs LEGO (Daniel Stead)

LEGO has been one of the most popular children’s toys for many years, but it might soon have a competitor.

Lini Cube, created by Daniel Stead, a Berlin-based designer from Berlin, is “a beautiful educational toy building block that enables you to be more creative than before,” according to its Kickstarter campaign.

Stead says he came up with the idea in 2014 when he remembered his frustration as a child of not being able to plug bricks onto any side of a conventional building block.

“I knew that if I didn’t do something about it, I would see my grandchildren playing with building blocks from 1939 and struggling with the same limitations. A few minutes later I had a rough idea of how it could work, a few days later a rough 3D sketch of how it could look like,” he wrote on Kickstarter.

Unlike with LEGO, there are 105 different ways you can plug one Lini cube into another. This is more than 11 times more than a traditional building block.

Lini cubes can be joined from all four sides, resulting in more creative options than when playing with LEGO.

“I had the chance to test the Lini cube. It was interesting to see the different approaches children had to building. Some would just build in two dimensions even though they had the ability to build in any direction. Some would create awesome spatial buildings right from the start,” Stead said.

He launched a Kickstarter campaign in December to cover costs and has already raised more than €21,000.

The whole production, from prototyping, moulding and packaging the product, will be done in Germany. The moulds will be outsourced from the Chinese companies.