Lego has released several sets around the launch of the most recent, highly anticipated Indiana Jones film Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, including a new playset featuring many play features and moving parts.

You may remember Lego as a series of bricks of various shapes, in a handful of colors, which allowed your young, fertile imagination to run wild, building houses, cars, airplanes and monsters that looked exactly like houses, cars, airplanes and monsters—only in your mind. Because you were restricted to those sharp rectangles.

No longer. And not for some time. Now it is not uncommon to see whole Lego sets designed to build one specific toy—with detailed plans on how to do so, and often with pieces specifically shaped to make it work.

Is this a selling out, though, of the child's imagination? Giving them 1,000 Lego pieces and an instruction booklet seems as counter to everything Lego stands for as it would be to give a child a 1,000-piece puzzle with a key to putting the pieces together one by one.

Except we must remember that along with that one planned-out toy, those 1,000 pieces can create a countless array of other things, things that the clever engineers at Lego never foresaw.

Coming in a large 2-foot-long box, the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull set features 929 pieces, many of which are specifically designed for this set, including several skeletal figures with crystal skulls. The set also includes a large custom-molded base and a sheet of stickers to apply to certain pieces as you build. The set also comes with the puzzle key—two books of instructions, each just shy of 80 pages long.

The step-by-step instructions lead to the construction of a vehicle, an archway and a major temple filled with pitfalls and traps and plenty of play space and features to keep a child busy for longer than it would take for him or her to build it.

Coolness that's crystal clear

The first thing you will notice when you open this box is the specially formed base, which measures 15 inches by 10 inches, molded in beige. The second is the hefty documentation required to put this thing together.

The manual has few words in it, preventing the necessity of printing manuals in various languages.

Starting simple, it begins with the construction of the various characters, including three skeletons, Indiana Jones himself and six others, and it moves on to a small, six-wheeled tracked vehicle made up of 45 pieces. This uses the parts from a single bag, which the instructions inform you to open when needed. Mixing pieces would be a nightmare—finding the one piece you need among the 929.

Moving on to Bag #2, we now build the arch with the Tiki-god-like face, and the firing missiles. A cute graphic warns about possible eye damage if you shoot the missiles into an eye. Don't.

This bag also includes the first module of the Temple itself, and the first trap—a stairway that collapses when you rotate two serpent-like heads near the base.

Bag #3 is where the real fun begins. And from here it gets more complicated, with gears, moving shafts and parts that form more complex machines that allow you to rotate traps and hidden features to form a fully playable temple, including hidden compartments and areas to hide the skeletons of Spanish explorers, as well as a seeming radar dish and a platform with several thrones and crystal-skull-capped skeletons, which rotates as you spin a shaft.

The manual tries to explain the traps and moving mechanisms photographically, but it's not really successful. Without language you can only go so far. However, I think the real triumph here is that you discover the moving parts as they are constructed—as you put together a moving wall, it becomes easy to see how it is triggered, and even without the manual's help it isn't difficult to figure out what's what after you've built the whole thing yourself.

And with that in mind, it's easy to see that the construction of this toy is only the beginning of the fun. And that is, after all, what Lego is all about.