Lego Smart Bricks Light Up With Jedi Magic In Coming Star Wars Set — And I’m Obsessed

“I’m obsessed.” “This is even cooler than I imagined.” “I’m a Lego nerd, so I’m psyched to put these to the test.” These are just some of the reactions my fellow CES colleagues made about the Lego Smart Bricks I saw at CES 2026 in Las Vegas. The tech-packed toys include an array of sensors capable of detecting other nearby building blocks, lighting up and playing music. There’s also the coolest Star Wars sound effect tie-in, but you’ll have to read on for more on that. 

Star Wars Lego sets made with the new smart bricks arrive on March 1. And yes, that means TIE Fighters and smart Star Wars minifigures that will interact, making sounds and activating lights.

Lego has had complex robotics kits before in several iterations — I remember when Lego had color-aware sensors in bricks and accelerometers. And I played with the Super Mario Lego sets that had little figures that could bop on other bricks and play games. These new smart bricks look like a fusion of some of those ideas, but they’re also a more advanced way of having bricks recognize and activate inside big builds. Read on to learn about the smart brick sets Lego is showing off at CES 2026.

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Sensor-studded bricks know where they are

The new Smart Bricks, parts of what Lego calls a Smart Play system, are regular 2×4-stud size, but have their own application-specific integrated circuit, or ASIC, chips inside. There’s an array of sensors: an accelerometer measures tilt and movement. There are speakers and synthesizers onboard to generate sounds on the fly, and ambient LED lights. They communicate with each other over Bluetooth. And there are magnetic coils that sense proximity to other special Lego Smart Tag tiles and Smart Minifigures, which have their own embedded tags that the bricks can sense nearby.

The bricks could be used in multiple Lego sets, and can recognize multiple Smart Tags and Smart Minifigures at once. Each one can send code to the brick to generate different lights and sounds.

What does this all look like when you’re playing? Well, I haven’t demoed it yet, but I will soon. I’ll update this story when I do. But I’ve seen Lego’s executives showing off how it works at CES on stage during a keynote presentation, and it works entirely by proximity. Placed on different color bricks, it could recognize those colors. Or multiple bricks can connect and mirror each other. The bricks can recognize distance in 3D space, even at a distance. To activate them, it looks like you give the bricks a little shake before playing.

What’s wild to me is that Lego is promising a distributed network across as many bricks and tags as you’d like to connect with, or games you could invent where the vehicles know their distance from each other. Or, who knows? 

Star Wars sets are getting Smart Brickified

The new Star Wars Lego sets coming March 1, which will debut all this tech, range in price from $70 to $160. There’s a $70, 470-piece TIE Fighter set with one smart tag and one smart minifigure (Darth Vader), a $100, 584-piece X-Wing set that has five smart tags and two smart minifigures (Luke and Leia), and a $160, 962-piece Throne Room Duel and A-Wing set, which has five smart tags and three smart minifigures (Luke, Palpatine and Vader).

The Smart Play ships can light up and make pew-pew shooting sounds as you fly them around each other, and the lightsaber battles work with minifigures getting close to each other as you hold them on sticks. It looks pretty great, honestly, and the Star Wars kits look focused on using the bricks to make vehicles feel like they’re up and running, making Lego sets feel more like a fancier premade toy. It’s bringing back my spaceship toy fantasies from when I was a kid.

Where will it end up next?

What it looks like, to me, is a way for Lego to start getting some of that activated tech inside a wider range of kits, taking a step beyond the specific and larger Mario figures in the Nintendo sets that handled the tech parts before. But none of the announced Smart Play sets coming in March are robotics-focused. Instead, it’s Star Wars that’s getting Smart Brickified first. I’m sort of surprised by that, and I wonder if robotics will be coming in the future. There’s a lot more potential for sensor-studded bricks like this than just play sets.

And I’m also curious how many Lego sets will get these Smart Bricks and Smart Play systems… and how long they’ll last. The bricks promise years of play and have contactless recharging using a mat. I already have a bunch of tech-enabled Lego sets from years past, including models Lego doesn’t make anymore. Legos last for decades, but will Smart Play be able to handle the long lifespan of toys? I’m curious to know more.