LEGO Ideas and CUUSOO

Tales of the Space Age

Four little brick postcards that turn 1980s sci-fi poster art into something you can hang on a wall.

Brick Rated Score

4.1/5

Set 21340 · 2023

Pieces690

Minifigsn/a

Year2023

Set number21340

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The verdict

This is one of those sets that made me rethink what a LEGO build can even be.

Instead of a spaceship, you get four framed scenes (a comet over an observatory, a dark moon above a rocky world, a shuttle tearing off the pad, and a black hole) built like retro paperback covers. The colour work is the whole point, and when all four sit together on a shelf they have real presence for something so small. If you love LEGO as a display object more than as an engineering puzzle, you'll adore it.

Best for: Grown-up builders who want retro sci-fi wall art on a $50 budget

The full review

What it is

Tales of the Space Age is the 48th LEGO Ideas set, based on a fan design by Jan Woznica, and it throws out almost everything you expect from a LEGO box. There are no minifigures and nothing that rolls or flies. Instead you build four brick-built 3D postcards, each one a little scene pulled straight from 1980s sci-fi paperbacks and movie posters: an observatory watching a comet, a dark moon hanging over a rocky planet, a shuttle blasting off, and a black hole being watched by a tiny alien civilisation. The first panel is what got me. Seeing a comet trail rendered in nothing but stacked plates, and realising it actually reads as a comet, is a lovely little moment. All four measure roughly 15cm tall and 9cm across, so they are small, but they punch well above their size thanks to those bold retro colours.

The catch

I'll be straight with you about the build itself, because this is where the set divides people. Creating those smooth colour gradients means placing a lot of plates and tiles in careful rows, and after the second panel that repetition starts to show. It's a relaxing, low-stress build rather than a clever one, and you'll likely finish all four in an afternoon. The panels also lean hard on colour, so sorting near-identical shades can be a real struggle if you have any colour-vision or eyesight limitations, something a few builders flagged. And while three of the scenes are beautiful, the black hole panel (the one LEGO added on top of the original three-scene submission) is the runt of the litter. Several reviewers felt the set would have been even tighter, and maybe cheaper, if it had simply shipped the original pitch.

Who it's for

So here's how I'd call it. If you treat LEGO as a way to make art you can display, and you have a soft spot for vintage space illustration, this is an easy recommendation and one of the best-value Ideas sets of its year. It looks fantastic grouped on a shelf and it plays nicely next to other space sets. If what you love is intricate engineering, satisfying mechanisms, or a build that keeps surprising you, this one will feel thin, and the repetition may test your patience long before the last plate goes down. Know which kind of builder you are and this decision makes itself.

The parts story

What the build is actually like, and the pieces worth knowing about.

Building this is less like assembling a model and more like painting with bricks. Each postcard is essentially a flat mosaic built up in layers, so most of your time is spent placing plates and tiles to blend one colour into the next, using offset rows and small slopes to soften the transitions. It's calm, almost meditative work, and the printed instructions are crisp and colour-coded, which helps a lot when you're staring at three similar shades of blue. The trade-off is that it rarely challenges you technically, so the reward here is watching each image resolve rather than solving anything.

The value lives in the colours rather than in exotic new moulds. You get a generous spread of plates, tiles and cheese slopes in punchy, poster-friendly shades, and pulling those apart for your own mosaics and starscapes is a real draw for parts collectors. At 690 pieces for $49.99 the per-part maths is fair rather than remarkable, but the specific palette (the oranges, the deep space blues, the crisp whites) is what makes the box worth raiding. If you build your own artwork or space dioramas, this is a tidy little pot of exactly the right elements.

Fun facts

01It's the 48th LEGO Ideas set, based on a design by Polish fan builder Jan Woznica, who works in IT when he isn't building.
02The original Ideas submission had only three scenes (a rocket launch, a dark moon, and a comet); LEGO added the fourth black hole panel during development, with input from Jan.
03There are no minifigures at all, which is unusual for an Ideas set, because the whole concept is buildable retro sci-fi poster art.
04Released in May 2023 at $49.99, sealed copies have since climbed to around $93 on the aftermarket, up roughly 87 percent.