How we decide if a set is worth it

Every set page on WorthTheBricks carries three numbers we compute ourselves: a Buy / Wait / Skip verdict, a Rarity Score, and an estimated value. None of them is a guess, and none is scraped from someone else’s marketplace. This page documents exactly how each is produced so you can judge the call yourself — and disagree with it where you want to.

The Buy / Wait / Skip verdict

The verdict is deterministic. We never hand-pick it. We start from the lowest-priced in-stock offer across the retailers we track (ties go to LEGO.com). If nothing is in stock anywhere we track, the verdict is Wait with a single note that it isn’t currently buyable — we won’t score a price we can’t see.

When there is an in-stock price, we run five signals and add up their signed weights into a score clamped to a −100 to +100 range:

• Discount vs RRP. A discount of 25% or more adds +30; 15–25% adds +20; 5–15% adds +10; right around RRP is neutral; and a price more than 5% above RRP subtracts 20.
• Retirement timing. A set that is retiring soon adds +25 (a genuine last-chance signal); one that is retired but still stocked adds +10; and a retiring set that is also very rare gets a further +10.
• Estimated value vs price. We compare our estimated value to the live price as a ratio. A ratio of 1.3 or higher adds +25; 1.1–1.3 adds +15; near 1.0 is neutral; and a price well above the estimate subtracts up to 25. This signal only fires when the estimate is backed by at least three observations seen within the last 180 days — otherwise we say so and score it zero.
• Price per piece. Against a benchmark of about $0.105 per piece: $0.08 or below adds +15, up to $0.12 adds +5, $0.12–$0.16 is neutral, and above $0.16 subtracts 10.
• Rarity. A set in the top 10% by Rarity Score adds +10; the 75th–90th percentile adds +5.

The final score maps to a verdict: 35 or higher is Buy, −10 or lower is Skip, and everything between is Wait. We show every signal that fired on each set’s page — including the neutral, zero-weight ones — so the reasoning is fully auditable. See it in action on any best-value page.

The Rarity Score

The Rarity Score is a 0–100 measure of how hard a set or minifigure is to find, computed from how few sets a part or figure appears in, how limited its production run was, and how long it has been off shelves. We then rank each item against its peers and report a percentile: a 95th-percentile item is rarer than 95% of comparable items. It is a scarcity signal, not a price, and we show both the raw score and the percentile it is drawn from. Browse the rarest sets and minifigures.

The estimated value

The estimated value is our own computed estimate of what a set or figure is worth — not a live marketplace price, and not pulled from any third-party price feed onto this page. Each estimate is shown with its provenance: how many observations it is based on and when the most recent one was seen. When an estimate is thin or stale, we down-weight it in the verdict and tell you. We label it “Our own estimate — not a marketplace price” everywhere it appears.

Where the data comes from

Catalog facts (set names, piece counts, themes, minifigure containment) come from the LEGO catalog with attribution to Rebrickable. Rarity and value estimates are computed in our companion app, Brick Party, and mirrored here. Retail prices and in-stock status are pulled fresh from the retailers themselves. We deliberately keep raw third-party pricing data server-side and never publish it — only our own labeled estimates reach these pages, in keeping with the data providers’ terms of service.

Affiliate links and independence

Some links on this site are affiliate links, and we may earn a commission when you buy through them at no extra cost to you. They are marked, and they never change the verdict: the score is computed from the data before any link is attached. A “Skip” with an affiliate button is still a Skip.