Yesterday, LEGO announced a new Restaurants of the World subtheme for the LEGO Icons line with the first set being the French Cafe (10362). This new line of sets have a smaller form factor and the main focus is at the front of the shop. Unfortunately, this comes at the expense of the interior and mainly, the back of the set. Although it is hard to see in the official images, there is a very small interior, just enough to get some details in. On the backside, it’s pretty bad. Of course the images don’t show you the back but LEGO does provide a 360 degree shopper video of the set and you can see the emptiness when it spins around. There are some modified 1×1 bricks with holes so it makes me think that you’ll be able to connect future sets with bars so you won’t get the flat backside....

With the Chinese/Lunar New Year just a few days away, LEGO has recently released some Spring Festival sets and the first one we’ll be checking out is the Good Fortune (80117). The set has 1,021 pieces and retails for $89.99. Build The whole build pretty much sits on a 16×16 plate. You can’t really see it later on but there’s a very intricate design made up of pearl-gold curves. There are some jumper plates and turntables for the various objects in the set. The first of the objects are the three gold ingots. All three are exactly the same and the resemble the yuanbao used as currency during Imperial China. In present day, Chinese use it as a symbol of wealth and prosperity. The next object is the persimmon fruit that is place in the middle of the build. It is actually made up of three sections that are stacked on...

Amazon Japan seems to have lots of 2024 LEGO sets sitting around as they have discounted the LEGO Technic Mercedes-AMG F1 W14 E Performance (42171) by about 24%. The set is listed for $166.84 which saves you $53.15 off the normal retail price of $219.99. As mentioned before, it does ship from Japan so it may take a little longer to get to us but it is reliable as I have ordered from there a few times in the past. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. The post LEGO Technic Mercedes-AMG F1 W14 E Performance (42171) Amazon Japan Deal – January 2025 appeared first on The Brick Fan. Original linkOriginal author: Allen "Tormentalous" Tran

The relationship between LEGO MOCs and AI is a knotty one (one we’ve already looked into here at BrickNerd more than once!). lego-ish dragon designed with playground ai But in this article, instead of tackling the general ethics of AI or the possibility of it taking over the LEGO MOCing community, I’d like to explore something far more niche—the use of AI as a tool for a very specific sort of MOC, one that many of us often struggle with: brick-built animals. Yes, some people seem to have an innate talent for it, but for most of us, looking at something like a fox or a horse and trying to think where to start snapping the bricks together is enough to produce a migraine. Their shapes are so organic, bending and blending every which way with a degree of smoothness you can only drool over, and when it comes to LEGO, it...

Building LEGO creations of manga and anime characters is usually the specialty of MOCers from Asia. It’s rare to come across this style in Europe. I had the chance to cross paths with Benjamin Walter, aka Bad Brick Boy, and chat with him to bring an overview of his fascinating work for BrickNerd readers. Meet Benjamin Sam: Hi Benjamin! We've met at several exhibitions in eastern France, but you're focusing on a theme from a much more distant region—manga? Benjamin: Hi Sam, I’ve been to a lot of exhibitions over the last few years, but my passion for LEGO goes back much further! Even as a kid, I used to reproduce the sets I saw in magazines with the bricks I had at home. Then with time and experience, I was able to turn my ideas into MOCs. For some time now, my favorite theme has been the reproduction of characters from Japanese...

When I think of LEGO builders in the 6 to 8 stud-wide “Speed Champions” scale, one always immediately comes to mind: Jonathan Elliott. He’s an extremely talented builder whose vehicles make constant appearances on various community blogs such as The LEGO Car Blog and The Brothers Brick. A great many LEGO car builders, myself included, cite his work as an inspiration. Jon Elliott’s “2022 Highlights.” I was lucky enough to get the opportunity to speak with Jon on behalf of BrickNerd and pick his brain about real cars, his building style, his earlier work, and his constant drive to push the envelope of what a LEGO car can be. Tom: Why don’t you start by telling me just a little bit about yourself? Jon: Ha! The classic opener. Yeah, wow, that’s a difficult way to start, I suppose. I’ve been around quite a long time, so there’s quite a lot to...

Series 27 of the LEGO Collectible Minifigure (CMF) line has delivered some very cool new prints and molds that will most assuredly appear in future sets and other products down the line. Included in this series is a redesign of a minifigure familiar to AFOLs who grew up with the Classic Castle theme in the late 80s and early 90s: The Wolfpack Beastmaster. The Wolfpack Beastmaster is just one of many minifigures in the last several years to revive classic themes and designs of what many consider to be the golden age of LEGO—and as such it is already demanding top prices on the secondary market. The M-Tron powerloader is definitely a contender for one of the best minifigure remakes This trend of revamps and redesigns is not reserved for just the CMF line. While Basil the Batlord, the Falconer, and M-Tron spaceman are just a few examples of classic minifigures...

Today’s guest article comes from Blake Foster (Instagram/Flickr), a sci-fi builder and member of ILUGNY from Brooklyn. Primarily a spacecraft builder, he has taken more than a year off to build his tower for the New Hashima collab. Building Big I am not a fast builder. As such, when I joined the New Hashima collab about ten months in advance of Brickworld, I did not sign on to build one of the towers—as much as I would have liked to—as I doubted that I would finish on time. Instead, I built the Cybertrain. After Brickworld, without a deadline hanging over my head, I had barely finished sorting the debris from my final New Hashima builds before I was working on the beginnings of a topper for some to-be-determined future iteration (a topper is New Hashima speak for the tower on the very top of a stack of cubes). This would be...

Castles – in some way, shape or form – are probably one of the most common sights in the LEGO fan community. I can still remember being a young kid sitting in my room playing with, in my opinion, one of the best sets ever (Kings Castle 6080). Given how many talented castle-builders there are in the AFOL community, there is a good chance I’m not the only one with fond memories like that! Regardless if someone is talking about LEGO conventions or just browsing through their Flickr or Instagram feed, chances are more than a few great castle builds are going to show up. Castles have been crucial to the development of the LEGO fan community over time, starting with the original Yellow Castle (6075) to the iconic Classic Castle community and beyond. When seeing some of those amazing builds, I often feel it would be interesting to have a...

Have you noticed a change in clear LEGO bricks recently? More and more LEGO fans have commented on perceived changes in the clear materials used for certain parts, and they have called attention to it through forum posts and social media conversations that I’ve seen. Most noticeably, the comments center around three changes compared to older transparent elements: a slight color shift, slight cloudiness, and easier scratching (in the case of the windshield for the Ecto-1, set 10274). Far Right: Cellulose Acetate. Others: variations of PC (Image via Istokg on the Brickset Forum) So let’s talk about this recent shift in transparent LEGO—from the perspective of plastics! This article is not meant to be a deep dive into the history of clear plastics used at The LEGO Group (TLG), though I will briefly touch upon that now. The Clues for a New Clear For context, TLG has been making clear parts...