The LEGO Group’s Deep Fandom Team is calling on the wider LEGO® community provide some opinions about the role LEGO Plays in you life, and how you engage with the company and the bricks!
“At the LEGO Group, the best part of what we do is the community that builds alongside us. We’re exploring new ways to really listen to you, and your feedback is a vital piece of the puzzle. We want to hear about your individual LEGO journey; what inspires you, what you enjoy, and where you think the hobby could grow. While we’d love for you to share this survey with your friends and fellow fans, please make sure your own answers reflect your personal views and habits. We’re here to listen to you.”
Hi Folks, just a quick post to acknowledge that this weekend, we celebrated the 10th anniversary of our first post. What started as a whim one Saturday afternoon blew out over the following 10 years to over 1300 posts on WordPress (including this one), more than 2080 posts on Instagram, and an indeterminable number of posts on other platforms, which I just haven’t got my head around.
This journey would not have been possible without the support of our regular team members – Ann, the Knoller-In-Chief who lays out the elements in our reviews for your enjoyment and Branko, who joined me a couple of years ago when the number of sets coming by to review was outnumbering the number of hours in the day. I also need to thank my children – Harry, who writes up our game reviews, and Tash, who has accompanied me to LEGO events, ensuring that I remember to hydrate and occasionally eat. She is also responsible for the update to Bailey Fullarton’s original logo for the site. I would also like to thank all of you who have followed me, whether in recent times, or for the full decade. What’s your favorite memory from our content?
Over these past 10 years, we have seen the LEGO Company moving from its focus from children’s toys, to marketing toys and sets to just about everyone. You used to be able to count the number of ‘adult-focussed’ sets released each year on one hand. Now I struggle to keep up each month.
We have seen an explosion of third party IP from Star Wars, Disney and Super Heroes to include franschises from Film, Football and Video games.
When I started writing, Space and Castle had all but vanished and NEXO Knights was just beginning. Nexo Knights has gone, but Castle and Space sets still come our way from various directions.
We have seen different technologies put forward: Mindstorms; Spike Prime, Powered Up; Super Mario, Vidiyo, and Hidden Side. Some of these have been embraced by consumers. Others have fallen by the wayside.
Creator 3in1 has embraced detailed creature builds, with studs becoming an almost optional extra.
Why am I still here?
Over the years, we have thought about the LEGO Group’s Past, Present, and Future.
My love of LEGO comes from trying to understand what makes it all work, and how it has come to go this way. Over the years, we have taken a few deep dives, particularly with the storytelling themes in years gone past. Occasionally looking at other statistics within the World of LEGO Bricks. My writing style has evolved, for better or worse, but this does represent nearly 20% or my total life span.
Over the years I have had the joy of joining the LEGO Ambassador Network, meeting fan communities and Fan Media from around the world, and traveling to events around the globe. I am fortunate to have been given the opportunity to meet designers, historians and leaders within the company. I am grateful for the friendships I have formed around the world as the result of my love of the brick: building with LEGO takes on a whole new meaning.
Extra Pieces – the podcast we have made with Jay’s Brick Blog should be back this year. A lot has been going on making it tough to record new content recently. Look for it on your favorite podcast platform. [ special shout out to Jay for his support over the years.]
Finally, I still love LEGO toys, Old and new. I am looking forward to the future, and can’t wait to see how the forthcoming SmartPlay rolls out.
This will be a year of celebration. Over the course of this year, I hope to bring a couple of building challenges along: we missed out for a couple of years there. I also intend to finish up a couple of series that I began a while ago. I would love to know the types of post that you have enjoyed reading here, and what you would like to see more of.
Why don’t you leave your favorite Rambling Brick memories in the comments below,
In the mean time, if you are new, follow the Rambling Brick by signing up to our mailing list, or following us on Facebook or Instagram. YouTube and TikTok get occasional content, but rarely anything exclusive. Finally, thanks for reading this far, and for your support. And thanks to Ann, Branko and my kids for their support and encouragement.
If you happened to drop by a Build a Mini station in a LEGO® Store during the run up to Christmas in 2025, you may well have found the parts for a Golden Santa Claus. If you were lucky, the staff had already assembled them for you. If you have been following some of the long-running minifigure play sets, you have probably seen the tendency of golden minifigures to turn up in commemorative sets during anniversary years, in both Ninjago (10 years, 2022) and Harry Potter sets (20 years,2021).
While golden Santa appears very similar to the current Santa minifigure, which debuted in 2024, he didn’t always look so fine. Read on to find out more.
[Editor: We are due to see the results of the largest LEGO® IDEAS review period, within the next day or so. With 57 submissions to LEGO IDEAS reaching 10000 votes in the lead up to May this year, we have been told to expect the biggest LEGO IDEAS announcement ever, very soon. Now, while LEGO sets are our focus here on the Rambling Brick, we can’t ignore the fact that some of the clone brick brands have been lifting their game over the last couple of years. I was sitting down, having a chat with Branko when he suggested “Some clone brick brands have released a sets similar to some of the Ideas submissions under review.” So, while LEGO IDEAS is always looking for ideas that push the envelope of what can be done with LEGO Bricks, producing something new and innovative, I can’t help but wonder “Is the IDEAS review process influenced by the way they have been taken up by Clone brands? ” and the converse question:”Do Clone brick brands look at submissions gaining traction on LEGO IDEAS and adapt them for their own purposes?”
Read on as Branko takes a look at a couple of LEGO IDEAS submissions that appear to already inspired clone brick brands along the way…]
I enjoy looking through all the ideas that are proposed and reviewed on LEGO ideas, and I have gotten the impression I’m not the only one. More and more am I seeing competing brands release sets that seem very closely related to some LEGO ideas.
Join me as I go over a handful of these. I am guessing that the LEGO IDEAS Review Team will not approve these under their own banner. They are very well aware of their competitors and they have easier targets to choose. This saddens me a bit, since the designs are all great, but let’s face it more sets have always been rejected than accepted.
I will also comment briefly on a few categories that we see recurring in these reviews regularly
Time flies when you are having fun. Or have a lot going on around you. Or…and so on. I can’t believe it is over 3 years since I published my original description of MOPs – Minifigures on Parade/ Minifigures on Patrol – back in July 2022. MOPs is a modular platform for community participation. I initially proposed an 8×16 plate, on a standardized base, including a raised ‘middle 8’ plate. Advantages of the format include the capacity to start simple, and build up, as well as the scope for storytelling within the space available.
If there is one thing that is bound to raise the hackles of many AFOLs, it’s the offer of removing a something that they regard as an intrinsic part of the experience. And yesterday’s survey on the topic of Digital vs paper instructions certainly raised a few hackles. And then, it was mysteriously removed.
Today, we have received an official response from the LEGO Group on the subject.
For the better part of a generation, LEGO® MINDSTORMS has been considered the premier name in robotics education – both as a school-based educational tool, and as a consumer-level product: Even though I was at peak Dark Ages when the first set was released in 1998, I was aware of its existence, and before I had become engaged with the LEGO Community, I had somehow become aware that the RCX had been reverse engineered, with hobbyists developing ways to program it in ways not initially intended. But I digress. Kids brought up with those early sets are now well-established in their careers, which may in part be due to their engagement with MINDSTORMS at a formative time.
A couple of weeks ago, it was announced that the 51515 LEGO MINDSTORMS Robot Inventor, and with it, the LEGO MINDSTORMS Brand, will be retired at the end of 2022 – a little over 2 years since the set’s initial release in October 2020.
This brand, with a pedigree dating back to the 1980s, was being unceremoniously retired. Well, it will be at the end of the year. In part, this retirement means that the app now enters into its sunset phase, where no further development is taking place, but the software is maintained to run on contemporary platforms for two years, as required under European law. But what then?
