No matter how old you are, when you sit down in front of a pile of LEGO bricks, one thing never changes: you want to snap a few bricks together. Why this happens is not a mystery. LEGO bricks, like grains of sand on a beach, are meant to be together.

But what are the best ways to join bricks? That depends, of course, on what you’re building. Official LEGO literature goes to great lengths to point out the many possible ways to connect your bricks. For example, they suggest that if you take six 2x4 bricks, you can arrange them in 102,981,500 different patterns. (Someone at LEGO has a very good understanding of geometry and mathematics or just way too much time on their hands.) Figure 2-1 demonstrates just three of the millions of possible combinations. I’d need an enormous number of pages to show pictures of every pattern.