We have children across a wide age spectrum in our household, so we have both the larger building bricks and the smaller building bricks in our toy stash.  (You know the ones I mean.)  But let’s face it, they can get pricey.  Enter Strictly Briks.

Strictly Briks has a good selection of basic bricks (in both the classic size and the chunkier size for younger builders), as well as baseplates (in an almost staggering array of colors and shapes), and these nifty silicone bricks and straps.

(These packages are just a couple of examples.  They come in other set sizes.)  As a grown-up kid these struck my fancy, because they add a whole new dimension to building.  They’re flexible, see?

And yes, my 6-year-old daughter thinks wearables are an excellent use for them.

It doesn’t have to be an either/or, because Strictly Briks are fully compatible with the well-known name brand bricks, as you can see in my photos below.  The solid bricks in these photos are all the “other” brand (as is whatever that is Livia used as a jewel on her crown above).

As you can see, they’re a good fit.  The longer silicone bricks/straps also allow for intriguing possibilities like “swinging” bridges.  The set of Big Briks straps are a little different from the other bricks.  They don’t have holes across much of the bottom, and the “prongs” on one end are larger around, to accommodate the prongs.

So these function a little differently than the other silicone bricks, which you can see photographed from the underside below.

Baseplates

Now, Strictly Briks doesn’t carry a plethora of different brick shapes (you know, all the oddball ones that go into the building of specialty designs, etc.).  But it’s hard to overstate how excited I am about the creative possibilities of the variations they have on the basics.  Apart from having affordable sets of basic block shapes, and apart from the flexible silicone bricks and straps, they specialize heavily in baseplates.

Assuming I’m counting correctly, baseplates come in triangular, circular, and rectangular options in addition to three different sizes of squares, and in more than three dozen colors!  (Some styles might not be available in every color, but there are a lot of options.)  And many of the baseplates are stackable, meaning there are connection spaces available on the upper and lower surfaces, allowing columns to be created between multiple baseplates to form something like “shelves” for building on at multiple levels.

There’s also a unique three-dimensional option, The Cube.  The Cube is comprised of six, 6.5-inch baseplates that attach to each other in a hinged manner, allowing for the construction of a complete cube which can then be built on.  These baseplates are designed for standard bricks on one side and the larger bricks on the other, so they can be used with either size (or both).

Although you might want to augment with some specialty building kits from other compatible brands (especially for wheel bases, which Strictly Briks doesn’t seem to have yet), you can definitely build an excellent base collection solely with Strictly Briks products.  I actually wish I’d heard about these earlier (or finished my Christmas shopping later!) because I might have just stocked up on these for the kids!