Welcome to Day 17 of our LEGO Advent Calendar countdown. Each day, we’ll reveal the four mini-builds from the LEGO Harry Potter, LEGO Star Wars, LEGO Friends, and LEGO City 2019 advent calendars along with commentary from The Brothers Brick team. If you’re opening one (or more) of these advent calendars along with us, we’ve made sure the pictures and commentary on each day’s models will be behind a jump so we don’t accidentally ruin the surprise. What does Day 17 have in store? For Day 17, we have a Hufflepuff flag stand from Harry Potter and an escape pod from Star Wars. Dave: With this yellow and black flag stand from Hufflepuff, our four Hogwarts house banners from Harry Potter are now complete! I know I was critical of them as “filler” builds and they did get a little repetitive, but I have to be honest… they do look good together...

Bakers were the unsung wizards of medieval times — taking the base material of the fields and transforming it into sustenance by the manipulation of the energies of water and fire. If that wasn’t the advertising campaign of the Bakers’ Guilds then they were missing a trick. Marcel V.‘s LEGO mill is a great example of the Castle building style applied to something other than castles or military scenes. The subtly-textured walls are broken up by some smart wooden trim, and there’s nice parts-usage and building technique on display if you go in for a closer look. Don’t miss the book used for the little roof above the window, the stonework around the door, and the dark brown spears as edge trims. The tiled roof is good too, although it might have benefited from a smattering of some other colour. My favourite touches of detail are easily missed in a casual...

LEGO’s new Creator 3-in-1 31105 Toy Shop Town House and its predecessors remind me of a yearly recurring mini-modular theme for a younger target market. This yearly 3-in-1 tradition has always caught my eye in one way or another, simply because it’s a faint reminder of its bigger cousins the ever-popular Creator Expert Modulars, like the recently announced 10270 Bookshop, but without the hefty buy-in cost. This year we get a 554 piece Toy Shop Town House to explore. Let’s take a look at what’s in store for us. The set is expected to retail for 49.99€, and will be available in January. The box and packaging The set comes with 4 bags, an instruction booklet, two loose plates and no stickers. The build experience The build starts off with a perimeter of wall structures and a few printed tiles of LEGO boxes on the shelves. It’s a nice surprise to...

Welcome to Day 16 of our LEGO Advent Calendar countdown. Each day, we’ll reveal the four mini-builds from the LEGO Harry Potter, LEGO Star Wars, LEGO Friends, and LEGO City 2019 advent calendars along with commentary from The Brothers Brick team. If you’re opening one (or more) of these advent calendars along with us, we’ve made sure the pictures and commentary on each day’s models will be behind a jump so we don’t accidentally ruin the surprise. Will we deem Day 16 keen? For Day 16, we have a chess set from Harry Potter and a Trade Federation MTT from Star Wars. Dave: This Harry Potter Advent is making all the others look bad this year. That chess set is better than the one that comes in the ginormous 71043 Hogwarts Castle! For Star Wars, we have a MTT (Multi-Troop Transport) from The Phantom Menace. This is an ambitious vehicle to do...

Take a trip back in time with Andrew Tate‘s bustling downtown scene, depicting a LEGO city during the 1930s. There’s a corner bakery, a menswear store, and a lovely cinema featuring the Egyptian architectural motifs popular on such buildings at the time. The streets are nicely busy, with a tram and a period-appropriate car, and packed full of minifigure action. In a refreshing change for a model set in such an era, there’s not a mobster to be seen! I particularly like the variety of colour and styling in the upper storeys of the buildings, and the top-most portion of the cinema frontage is just fabulous. The post Everything’s great when you’re downtown appeared first on The Brothers Brick. Original linkOriginal author: Rod