Lego Mario Kart got me back into Lego after many years

Confession time: I own a lot of Lego.

As a kid, my mum and grandparents would buy me all kinds of Marvel, Harry Potter and Star Wars sets — the benefits of being an only child. After moving and getting older, they’re now all disassembled in their original boxes in my garage. (That perennial issue of finding enough space for one’s miscellaneous nerdy interests.) That said, my love for the infinite creative possibilities afforded by Lego hasn’t ever truly gone away, and so I’ve enjoyed playing video games like Lego Fortnite to capture that spark.

But of course, Lego has been making a bunch of video game sets in recent years, and nowhere is that more prominent than its partnership with Nintendo. Ever since seeing the amazing Lego Zelda set last year, I’ve had a bit of a hankering to pick up some of these sets, but I just never got around to it. But recently, the opportunity to build a new set came along, and I’m glad I took it.

Enter the Mario Kart — Baby Peach & Grand Prix set, which costs $99.99 and consists of 823 pieces. It’s a particular fun set that includes Baby Peach, Toad and Lemmy in their respective themed karts, Lakitu in his cloud with the flashing lights, a winners podium and even a starting gate plus barricades and arrows to create a mini strip of track.

All told, it’s quite a lot packed into a set that’s under 1,000 pieces — much more than I expected. In usual Lego charm, there’s a bunch of cute little details to further flesh out the set, like the iconic Item Boxes, green and red shells that can be shot out of a launcher when pressed, end bits on each part of the barricade that can be connected and adjusted to make your own custom little track and even a dessert stand with tiny ice cream pieces. All of these components come together to create a set that’s impressively dynamic, especially if you’re planning to display it on a shelf like I (eventually) am.

Naturally, this is only one in a series of Mario Kart sets, and I’m already considering picking up the $39.99 Baby Mario vs. Baby Luigi one to flesh out my collection. Sadly, there’s no set that includes Waluigi, my favourite character, but the big ones — especially Mario and Donkey Kong — are accounted for, and that’s most important.

I will also say there’s a digital element to the whole thing that I absolutely wasn’t expecting. With the official Lego Super Mario mobile app on Android and iOS, you can view interactive building instructions, browse other sets in the line and even play in-app minigames and unlock real-life interactive elements with the $64.99 “Adventures with Interactive Mario” set. That latter point is especially neat; you can tap different specially marked parts of sets to trigger digital reactions like classic Mario sound effects and even collect digital coins, and the Baby Peach set I have is included in that.

Another low-key handy feature of the app is the aforementioned interactive manuals. For one, this is great if you have multiple people (i.e. family members like siblings) wanting to work on a set together. Even in my case, my mum (for some reason) wanted to join me in building the set, and so I let her use the physical manual while I pulled up the instructions on my phone.

But the in-app instructions are also useful in situations where the physical manuals are a bit unclear. I’m not the first to point out that the colours for each piece can sometimes be a bit off, and that was especially true for me with this Mario Kart set. While I was working on Lemmy’s portion, one particularly small piece looked red in the manual but was actually orange in practice — a distinction I only made after using the app, which had better colouring. Without that, I might have thought I accidentally knocked the piece into some unknown place, especially since there’s a little vent underneath the table.

In addition to the more precise colouring, it’s also just nice to have little 3D models of each part of the set that you can fully rotate and resize. I can see kids enjoying that simply because it looks cool, but it can even be handy if you want to double-check that you didn’t put a piece in the wrong spot or something. And perhaps best of all, the app also plays a calming, almost lo-fi version of the classic Mario theme to make things even more enjoyable.

All told, I loved my time getting back in the Lego fold. In some ways, it felt like reconnecting with a part of my childhood, but beyond that, it was just fun to build in its own right. It’s also gotten me even more excited for the new Mario Kart that Nintendo teased with the Switch 2.

Now if you need me, I’ll be looking at what other set I’m going to pick up next.

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