LEGOLAND Discovery Center Michigan Review

If you are looking for honest LEGOLAND Discovery Center Michigan reviews, you’ve come to the right place.

Back in March 2020, as part of an overnight trip to Great Lakes Crossing in Auburn Hills, we visited LEGOLAND Discovery Center Michigan. It was one of a few Great Lakes Crossing attractions we checked out on that trip, along with the SEA LIFE Aquarium and Peppa Pig World of Play.

At the time of our visit, the kids were 10 and 12. I wanted to see if they would still enjoy it or if they were starting to age out of attractions like this. It turns out that even at 10 and 12, there was plenty to keep them busy.

Before I get into our full LEGOLAND Discovery Center Michigan review, let’s break down what you’ll find at this location and I’ll share a few tips for making your visit more enjoyable.

Table of Contents

LEGOLAND Discovery Center Michigan Overview
Hotels near LEGOLAND Michigan
What’s at LEGOLAND Discovery Center Michigan?
Our LEGOLAND Discovery Center Michigan Review
Is LEGOLAND Worth It?

LEGOLAND Discovery Center Michigan Overview

LEGOLAND Discovery Center Michigan is an indoor LEGO-themed play center designed for hands-on play. It’s geared toward kids ages 3–10, though older kids may still enjoy parts of it.

Inside, you’ll find themed building areas where kids can play with LEGO bricks. There are also two LEGO rides, an indoor playground, a 4D cinema, a virtual LEGO factory tour, and Detroit MINILAND, which features detailed LEGO builds inspired by the city.

It’s not a theme park, but more of an indoor play center where kids can build and play.

LEGOLAND Discovery Center Locations

There are currently 29 LEGOLAND Discovery Center locations across four continents. In North America, there is one location in Toronto, Canada, and 14 locations throughout the United States, including LEGOLAND Discovery Center Michigan.

Where Is LEGOLAND Michigan?

LEGOLAND Discovery Center Michigan (also called LEGOLAND Auburn Hills) is located inside Great Lakes Crossing Outlets in Auburn Hills, Michigan, about 35 minutes north of Detroit.

Address:
4240 Baldwin Rd,
Auburn Hills, MI 48326, United States

Note: Parking at the mall is free, which is always a win.

Michigan LEGOLAND Hours

LEGOLAND Michigan hours are:

Sunday–Friday: 10:00 AM – 5:00 PM
Saturday: 10:00 AM – 6:00 PM

Note: Entry stops 90 minutes before they close.

How Much is Legoland in Michigan?

LEGOLAND Michigan tickets start at $21.99 per person, with prices increasing to $24.99 on some weekends and holiday weekdays.

Children 2 and under are free.

Tickets can be purchased at the door, but LEGOLAND does limit capacity. If you’re visiting during the summer or school breaks, it’s best to buy online in advance to guarantee entry.

LEGOLAND Michigan Discount Tickets

If you want to save money, there are two options for cheaper tickets.

Firs,t you can look into combo tickets. If you plan to do more than one of the attractions at Great Lakes Crossing, this will be your best way to save money.

Double Combo: LEGOLAND and SEA LIFE (or Peppa Pig World of Play) combo tickets start at $29.99.
Triple Combo: The triple combo tickets for LEGOLAND, SEA LIFE, and Peppa Pig World of Play start at $37.99.

You can also often find LEGOLAND Michigan discounts through Viator here for a couple of dollars less.

Another huge plus is that Viator lets you cancel for free as long as it’s 24 hours or more before your entry time. If you buy tickets directly from the center, they are non-refundable. They only allow you to change the date, but it must be done 36 hours or more before your scheduled time.

LEGOLAND Michigan Annual Pass

Another great way to save money if you live close enough to visit regularly is the LEGOLAND annual pass. It costs $103.99 per person, with renewals priced at $72.99.

Annual pass holders receive:

10% off at the LEGO Store and Café.
50% off walk-up general admission tickets for friends and family entering with you.

LEGOLAND Birthday Parties

Birthday parties start at $24.99 per child. This includes admission, a juice box, and a bag of cookies for every kid. The birthday child gets a special button, and you get 60 minutes in a party room with a host.

For $33.99 per child, you can get the Ultimate Package. This adds a private LEGO character meet and greet, pizza, activity packs, and a LEGO keychain for each child to build and take home.

How Long Does It Take to Go Through LEGOLAND Michigan?

Most families spend about 2 to 3 hours here. However, your time isn’t limited. You can stay as long as your kids are having fun. Depending on your child’s age and interest in Lego, you may need 5 hours or more.

Tips for Visiting LEGOLAND at Great Lakes Crossing

Adults need a kid: You can only enter if you are with a child aged 17 or younger. They do host adult-only evenings for older fans who want to visit without kids.
Best time to visit: Mornings and holidays tend to be busier. Weekday evenings are your best bet if you want to avoid big crowds.
Cashless: The gift shop and ticket booth do not take cash or checks.
No Re-entry: Once you leave, you can’t come back in on the same ticket.
Bring Socks: Socks are required for the indoor playground.
Food: You can’t bring outside food in. The cafe has snacks, drinks, and Starbucks coffee. Check out the LEGOLAND Michigan Café menu in advance here.
Other Dining Options: To see what other dining options there are outside of LEGOLAND, check out my post on Great Lakes Crossing for a list of all the fast food and sit-down restaurants in the mall and area. Or, read my upcoming review of the Rainforest Café to see why it’s my top choice.

Accessibility

LEGOLAND Discovery Center Michigan is wheelchair accessible. But keep in mind that both rides require guests to transfer out of their wheelchairs by themselves or with help from their party.

They offer discount tickets for an ADA Carer for guests who require assistance.

Service animals are allowed, but they can’t go on the Kingdom Quest or Merlin’s Apprentice rides.

Sensory Friendly Features:

This play center is certified by KultureCity as a Sensory Inclusive Venue. The staff have special training, and the center offers sensory bags you can borrow. These bags have fidgets, noise-canceling headphones, and a feeling thermometer. There is also a Digital Social Story you can look at online before your visit.

Hotels near LEGOLAND Michigan

If you are coming from out of town, there are 3 hotels right off the parking lot of Great Lakes Crossing, making them the best option for a hotel near LEGOLAND Michigan.

Holiday Inn Express Hotel & Suites Auburn Hills ($)—My favorite! (read my review).
Hampton Inn Detroit/Auburn Hills-North ($)
TownePlace Suites Detroit Auburn Hills ($)

What’s at LEGOLAND Discovery Center Michigan?

There is a lot to see once you get inside. Here is a breakdown of every area:

LEGOLAND Entrance

The entrance to LEGOLAND Discovery Center Michigan is located on the left side of the LEGO Store inside the Great Lakes Crossing mall. It’s easy to spot. There’s a giant LEGO minifigure cut out of the wall behind the ticket counter that leads directly into the attraction.

LEGO Factory Tour

Your experience starts with a virtual LEGO Factory tour. This room has large screens with control boards. Kids can “design” their own LEGO minifigures on the screen, creating a minifigure face.

Kingdom Quest Ride

After exiting the factory tour, you’ll reach the first of the two LEGOLAND Michigan rides.

Kingdom Quest is an interactive shooting ride. Riders shoot bad guys on screens and physical targets to collect points, following a storyline about rescuing a captured princess.

MINILAND Detroit

Next is MINILAND Detroit, a LEGO city featuring some of Detroit’s most recognizable landmarks. It is definitely one of the most appealing parts of the visit for adults.

Main LEGOLAND Play Area Overview

After MINILAND, you enter the main play area of LEGOLAND Michigan, where the rest of the attractions are located.

In the center of the room is a large LEGO grandfather clock with benches around it. There’s also a dining area with tables and chairs, plus a general building area under a circus-tent-style canopy. This space includes bins of standard LEGO bricks and oversized LEGO blocks.

Some attractions are located within this main room in clearly separated sections, while others are located in individual rooms branching off from it.

Creative Workshop

Immediately to the right as you enter the main room is the Creative Workshop. This smaller building room has two yellow semi-circle tables with built-in LEGO bins and stools around them. It’s a great spot if your child wants to build without as much noise or visual distraction.

Café

Back in the main room, right beside the Creative Workshop, is the LEGOLAND café.

The café is easy to spot with its yellow-and-white striped canopy and splatters of paint throughout. They offer Starbucks drinks for parents and snacks like cookies, Dippin’ Dots, Cheese-Its, and candy. There are also a few kid-friendly meal options, including hot dogs, pizza, and Dino Nuggets.

Merlin’s Apprentice

To the left, along the back wall of the main room, is the second ride.

Merlin’s Apprentice is a sorcerer-themed spinning ride. Riders sit in pairs on bench seats with pedals underneath. Pedaling controls how high the ride goes, so kids can choose how intense they want the experience to be.

Duplo Farm

Beside the ride, tucked into the corner of the main room, is a toddler play area. This farm-themed space has walls decorated to look like a farm, with DUPLO sheep and a DUPLO farmer figure.

The main activity in here is a small climber designed to look like a life-size DUPLO block house, complete with a slide. There are also giant LEGO bricks, bins filled with DUPLO blocks, and tables for building.

Lego Friends

Next is the LEGO Friends area. It’s decorated with large LEGO Friends characters built from LEGO, roughly the height of a 10-year-old, and a Heartlake City backdrop painted on the walls. There’s even a disco ball hanging from the ceiling.

There’s a large table in the middle with a pre-built city, including high-rises, smaller buildings, and a beach with a lighthouse and a cruise ship. At each end of the table are building stations with buckets of LEGO and benches. There are also smaller tables where kids can build their own creations or try to replicate sample builds that are set out on the tables.

Build and Test

This car-themed area has a black and white tiled floor, racing décor, and walls painted with LEGO cars on a pavement-style background. At the front of the area is a long counter with bins of LEGO parts and stools to sit on. Signs show step-by-step instructions for building simple LEGO cars.

In the center of the room are two testing tracks. One track has two steep ramps. Kids climb steps to reach the top, then send their cars down to ramp into a large bucket below. The second track is less steep and allows multiple kids to race their cars at the same time by pressing a release button.

The Great LEGO Race

Then, for an extra $7 fee, you can go on a 4D virtual reality race around a LEGO race track, wearing a VR headset while sitting in two-seater chairs that move, making it feel like you’re really in the race.

Underwater Quest

The last area on this side of the room, in its own room in the corner, has walls that are painted like an underwater world with seaweed, bubbles, mermaid minifigures, and more.

Inside, there are large water-themed LEGO creations, including a life-size LEGO shark, octopus, and sea turtle. There are building tables and screens that show you step-by-step how to build sea creatures.

4D Cinema

Right next door is the 4D theatre, which is included with admission. They play short LEGO animations like Ninjago or LEGO City, using 3D glasses along with 4D effects like wind and rain.

LEGO City Playground.

Past the theatre, in the corner, is a large indoor playground. It’s a police, fire, and construction-themed climbing structure. The play area is fully enclosed, with benches outside so you can watch your kids while they burn off some energy.

Event Room?

Along the right wall of the main room, there was another building space during our visit with signs for the Lego event, Report for Duty. It had tables with built-in LEGO bins, a wall station for building, a large testing table, and bench seating along the wall.

This area is not currently listed on the LEGOLAND website, so it may no longer be available.

Our LEGOLAND Discovery Center Michigan Review

We visited LEGOLAND Michigan on a Saturday during March Break. As you can imagine, it was a pretty busy time to go.

The start of our visit wasn’t too bad crowd-wise. There was plenty of room in the LEGO Factory Tour video room, the kids easily found spots to design their minifigure faces on the screens. The lineup for the Kingdom Quest ride was short, and there weren’t too many people in MINILAND Detroit when we walked through.

But the main play area was a different story.

The kids wanted to ride Merlin’s Apprentice first, and that line was much longer than the first ride line had been. They both enjoyed the ride, but the wait was enough that neither of them wanted to do it a second time.

Since they were feeling a bit restless, we headed to the LEGO City playground. This climbing structure is a decent size. Brie and Zen played in there for over half an hour. I really liked that the area is gated with only one way in or out. It meant I could sit on a bench and relax a bit.

That said, adults weren’t allowed inside the playground with their kids during our visit. Some parents may not love that, since you can’t always see exactly where your child is within the structure.

After the playground, we caught a 15-minute Ninjago movie in the 4D theatre. The kids liked the animation, but they weren’t huge fans of the mist/water effects hitting them in the face!

Next, we moved on to the building zones. Since the LEGOLAND Discovery Center had been open for a while and it was a busy day, every build room was fairly messy with LEGO bricks scattered all over the floors.

The kids both enjoyed the LEGO Friends and Build and Test areas. Zen spent much more time in both than Brie and would have happily stayed longer. She enjoyed building a horse pen to add to the Heartlake City setup and perfecting her car to test on the race track.

Brie, on the other hand, mostly looked around in LEGO Friends. She quickly built a simple car, tested it a couple of times on the ramp, and then was ready to move on. Between the crowd levels and the noise, it was pretty overwhelming for her. We lucked out when we found the room beside the playground was empty. This gave Brie a place to take a “quiet break” away from the chaos while Zen finished up her builds.

Is LEGOLAND Worth It?

Overall, LEGOLAND Discovery Center Michigan was a great experience, even for my kids, who were 10 and 12 at the time. While they clearly enjoyed the rides, the building areas also kept them engaged for longer than I expected. It is well worth the cost of admission for several hours of fun, including two rides.

I originally thought that three hours would be more than enough time. I was wrong.

While we did manage to see everything and try all the attractions, we easily could have spent another hour or two there before the kids were ready to leave.

If you’re visiting with children 12 and under, I’d plan to arrive shortly after lunch. That way, you have the option to stay until dinnertime and give yourselves a longer window to enjoy everything.

If you want to make a weekend of it, there are great hotels near LEGOLAND Michigan. Don’t forget to check out my hotel review of the Holiday Inn Express at Great Lakes Crossing and my guide on things to do with kids at Great Lakes Crossing to plan your full trip!

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