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....

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...

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...

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...