One brick to rule them all (Credit: BrickEnvy)

This ultra-rare Lego brick is actually worth more than its weight in gold.

By Christopher MacManus, CNET

These days, Lego sets seem bigger and more expensive than ever, but the most expensive Lego of them all never actually hit store shelves.

From around 1979 to 1981, select business partners and Lego employees (supposedly two per year) who worked 25 years at the brick-building factory in Hohenwestedt, Germany, received one heck of an anniversary gift: a 14-carat gold Lego brick that weighs 0.8246 troy ounces.

Yahoo! editors have selected this article as a favorite of 2012. It first ran in November, and was one of the most popular Yahoo! Games stories of the year. Users were entertained by this optical illusion, as can be seen by reactions in the comments section: "That is just too cool," "Witchcraft!," and "the rubicks cube finds new ways to make me feel stupid."

Several nondescript objects sit on a desk.  Couldn't be simpler, right?  Well, as the below video — the latest opus by Youtube illusion extraordinaire Brusspup — demonstrates, looks can be deceiving:

(Credit: Prague Mindsports Festival)

Got a Scrabble fan on your holiday wish list and a cool $30,000 to spare? The good news is that you can totally afford this gorgeous piece of board-game esoterica. The bad news is that you can't actually buy it.

Between Black Friday and Cyber Monday, an estimated eleventy trillion shoppers will be tearing through inventory in an effort to fulfill the demands of their kids' Christmas wish lists. Show up to the store an hour too late and you'll walk away empty-handed; get the wrong model and it's tantrum time. It's enough to drive a person crazy.

The nonstop barrage of toy commercials certainly doesn't help keep you sane, either, though at least contemporary ads usually make more sense than these eight astounding toy commercials from seasons past. Caution: bad ideas at play.

Guess Who? (Credit: Hasbro)

When Jennifer O'Connell's six-year old daughter was playing the Hasbro board game "Guess Who?" with her brothers, she noticed something was a little off.

The game, which encourages kids to guess which character their opponents have chosen based on facial characteristics, features 19 boys and 5 girls. That, the toddler thought to herself, didn't seem fair, so she decided to hip Hasbro to the issue. And in the end, she proved to be a heck of a lot more cognizant than the corporate automatons she reached out to.

(Credit: MAC/artist Emma Hack/photograher Jacqui Way)

Auto accidents and people don't mix…unless they're the work of Australian body artist Emma Hack, in which case they mix rather beautifully.

Hack used 17 men and women to build the dented car sculpture in support of the Motor Accident Commision of South Australia, who used it to highlight the dangers of low-level speeding. Each person had to stay contorted as Hack applied up to five layers of paint to their body, which took a total of 18 hours to complete.

34% on Rotten Tomatoes. 41% on Metacritic. 6.0 on IMDB. It's fair to say Hasbro and Universal's "Battleship" movie, based loosely on the traditional board game, wasn't exactly a resounding success.

Planned as the first in a string of joint projects between the pair, it was squashed at the box office by The Avengers, slammed by critics, and largely ignored by movie-goers. Once-bitten, twice-shy Universal bought their way out of the rest of the deal -- at a price reportedly well into the millions -- and the board game flick concept was sunk.

Or so we thought.

Image courtesy of Yomico MorenoNo, you're not looking at a cyborg — just someone with unusual taste in body decoration, brought to life courtesy of Venezuelan tattoo artist Yomico Moreno.

Born in Puerto Cabello, Moreno has been honing his craft for almost a decade, and it shows.  Moreno's art has brought him to international tattoo conventions from Caracas to Liverpool to Denmark, where, in 2010, he received awards for "Best Artist" and "Best Color Tattoo."

Moreno's approach is a venerable one, dating back centuries.  Known as 'trompe l'oeil' (French for 'deceive the eye'), it's a technique meant to blur the distinction between art and reality by painting objects that appear to be integrated into the world beyond their frame.  Applying this technique to a human body — rather than to a wall or ceiling, as is more typical — creates a striking effect.