Best of BrickNerd - Article originally published September 29, 2021. How do you build round things out of square LEGO bricks, what math tricks are involved, and how does Minecraft play into it all? To help answer those questions, we are pleased to feature a guest article from Deep Shen discussing building LEGO spheres. Deep’s amazing portfolio of work can be found at Towering Brick Creations, on his Flickr page and on Instagram. Round Shapes Out of Square Bricks LEGO is not a medium that is inherently suited to building round shapes. After all, the basic building block – a 1×1 brick has a square footprint and a LEGO baseplate has studs placed in a regular square grid. And yet, there are many wonderful LEGO creations out there that include round shapes – all kinds of cylinders and even spheres. I did not have much experience building these shapes out of...

BrickNerd Patron and guest contributor Karyn Murphy talks about the history of LEGO’s architectural sibling, Modulex, and shares her experience going to their 60th-anniversary event in Billund, Denmark. M For Modulex Sixty years ago while he was the managing director of The LEGO Group, Godtfred Kirk Christiansen came up with a new idea. He thought the LEGO bricks currently in production could be used by adults (specifically architects) to communicate and visualize building projects. However the existing bricks did not have the right proportions for building projects, so he decided there might be a market for a new product. And, the Modulex company was born. From the MODULEX manual showing the size of bricks. The new size bricks were scaled to represent building materials. A 1 x 1 is a perfect cube: 5 mm x 5 mm x 5mm with a stud on top.  A 2 x 4 is thus 5...

In October last year, LEGO announced a contest celebrating 50 years of Dungeons & Dragons. Although I am a fan of board games like Dixit, Mysterium, Gloom, Exploding Kittens and many more, I have never had the chance to play D&D. Of course, I've heard about it mostly from TV shows and people online, and I wanted to do something for that contest myself. Building Character First, I opened Google and searched for Dungeons & Dragons. I read the Wikipedia article on it and discovered that there is something called classes—character classes, to be exact—which got my attention. After that, I started searching for art based on those classes and characters; this is how the initial idea of building characters was born. The whole search took me about an hour, but one can easily get lost in the vast universe of amazing heroes and mighty monsters. I made an initial list...

Picture this: You are from Canada and are on the last night of a cross-country road trip where you just spent several weeks attending LEGO Conventions and sightseeing across the United States. You are alone, your car is jam-packed full of your custom LEGO models, your best clothes, travel stuff, and the results of multiple shopping trips. You stop at a hotel for the night, exhausted after a long day of driving. You know there is no way you can unload the car alone into the hotel. Some MOCs are just too heavy… View fullsize View fullsize You think to yourself, “Well, it’s 10:30 pm and I’ll be up early to get on the road again. I will park as close to the hotel as possible, under the hotel security camera, by the front door… that’s the second safest thing you could do. Plus, the hotel will monitor the parking lot,...

Whether you call them Tokens of Appreciation, Fan Trophies, Trophy Tokens or some other variation of the name, these small LEGO-related items have become well-established at many of the major AFOL events across North America. Although often attributed to the late Arthur Gugick at Brickworld in 2012, there is some evidence of AFOLs leaving tokens as early as 2007 and 2008. The actual tokens vary greatly but can be mini-MOCs, printed tiles, stickers, cards or some other small item given to an AFOL or placed near their display to recognise that you really liked their MOC or some part of their build. This year, Tokens of Appreciation were introduced to the Brixpo LEGO Fan Event in Adelaide, South Australia. The Australian version of the Tokens of Appreciation first appeared at Brickvention 2023 in Melbourne. Aspen Arnold surprised a small number of builders by placing a token near their MOCs. As the...