Gobricks

Gobricks is a brand of Shantou Golds Precision Technology, one of several Chinese companies cloning contemporary Lego elements.

Compared to genuine Lego elements, they're cheaper, available in more colours (pretty Technic gears, anyone?), and sometimes manufactured for longer, still making some parts that Lego has long since discontinued.

Most importantly for people making MOCs, you can submit exact parts lists to their resellers as a CSV file of part numbers, colour numbers, and quantities. It took Lego's Pick a Brick section until 2024 to catch up with this handy feature. Indeed, Gobricks doesn't make sets at all, only elements.

Compared to using a site like Brick Owl to buy second-hand Lego elements, there's less postage to pay because all the parts are coming from a single place, and of course the elements are brand new. The prices are often similar too, with small and ubiquitous elements often costing about a single penny either way.

Gobricks's main downside is shared with both second-hand suppliers and Pick a Brick — with so many elements available, some are inevitably going to be out of stock at any given time.

They don't sell some of the more fringe parts such as pneumatics, and can't sell minifigs, due to the EU's rather dubious legal decision to let any given shape be trademarked indefinitely, rather than just patented for twenty years.^[1] Still, they sell blank heads (part 3626), in 30 colours no less, and designing the rest of a body out of regular parts can be half the fun.

Naturally, this doesn't affect people working in microscale, the BrickHeadz style, or Technic. Indeed, microscale builders might be interested to note they sell bridge-esque part 20309 in the colour of rusted copper, something Lego doesn't provide.

In my experience, Gobricks can feel a tad brittle and stiff, but not overly so. Tiles can also be a bit scuffed, on a par with fairly well looked after second-hand Lego parts. This isn't ideal, but certainly needn't be a dealbreaker — you can have just as much fun designing neat models with them as you can with Lego parts.

Most curiously, the 2×2 jumper plate (part 23893) has a little inset square in it. The only other significant difference in mould design I noticed was the refreshing lack of logos on all the studs. It makes The Lego Group seem a tad insecure by comparison.

All in all, Gobricks are a pretty decent attempt at cloning Lego parts.

References

"The General Court Upholds the Registration of the Shape of Lego Figures as a Community Trade Mark" General Court of the European Union, Jun 2015

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