The LEGO Art range has come a long way since the first Pixel art pieces were released a few years ago, stopping off via the Great Wave, and the Milky way, and more recently the LOVE Sculpture. Today, in association with the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, the LEGO Group has officially revealed. the latest model in this series: 31215 Van Gogh’s Sunflowers.
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One of the biggest challenges facing LEGO Fans who have been collecting for any significant period of time is one of storage and display space. I am excited to see that with the latest LEGO ICONS subtheme, Restaurants of the World, we are getting a detailed facade and streetscape, chock full of neat parts usage, yet limited to a depth of only 8 studs. I can smell the coffee from here.
The first set in the series 10362 French Cafe is due for release on March 1st 2025. It has 1101 pieces and will be priced at $AUD129.99/ USD79.99/79.99€/£69.99
Read on for more…
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The Tale of Monkey D. Luffy and his crew, as they seek for the One Piece Treasure, has been one of the most successful manga publications in history. The series has also been in near constant production as an anime series since 1999, with over 1130 episode produced to date. That’s a lot of lore to catch up on and explains why I will probably never fully understand Bionicle. However, a NETFLIX adaptation started in 2023, and with only 8 episodes produced so far, I have a good chance of getting up to date by the end of the weekend – leaving me ready and waiting for season 2 when it drops later in the year.
We don’t know much about any sets that we might be getting, but we have a short teaser animation…
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I built a thing. This is not a specifically unknown concept. Each year, I build an original model for Brickvention, Australia’s AFOL Networking Event, which was held last weekend. I presented a MOC (my own creation) paying homage to the LEGO Adventurers theme from 1998. The amount of Lore that found its way into the MOC possibly warrants a post in its own right. Here it is.
Let me tell you a tale…
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Do you love LEGO?
Are you in Melbourne?
Are you tired of working out what to do with the kids in Melbourne this weekend?
Brickvention 2025 is on at the Royal Exhibition Buildings in Melbourne on 18-19 January 2025. You can still get tickets for the public expo here. Some sessions have sold out, and others are filling rapidly.
I will be showing off my latest build, based on the Adventurers theme from 1998 (A sneak peek below), and I’ll have some Rambling Brick Tiles and a passport stamp.
Jay and I will also be recording some content for the Extra Pieces Podcast – so, keep an eye out. (While you are here, we have a new episode out, discussing some of our favorite sets of the new year!)
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The LEGO Group have just unveiled a new Instagram account on Instagram: @LEGOBuilds. This channel, for builders, by builders, aims to become a destination for all LEGO® Fans, big and small by diving deeper into the world of LEGO Bricks, Spotlighting builders around the world, and their creations, as well as offering exclusive rewards and LEGO Experiences. YOUR MOCs can be featured by tagging @LEGOBuilds, and/or using the tag #legobuilds
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When I first saw gameplay previews of LEGO Horizon Adventures, I was transported back to the early days of TT Games’ LEGO Star Wars: father and son seated on the couch, striving to defeat the Empire. Harry has since grown up, and is a passionate fan of the universe created in Horizon: Zero Dawn. So when a LEGOfied version of the game was released, we went to the shops to pick up a copy for the Nintendo Switch. Around a month later, Sony via the LEGO Group sent through some codes for Steam – which was useful to compare the graphics/gameplay experience. I got distracted by work, and Harry finished playing the game. Here are his thoughts
LEGO: Horizon Adventures aims to be a kid-friendly adaptation of Guerrilla Games’ blockbuster 2017 RPG Horizon: Zero Dawn, a game that was partly about tribal humans hunting robot dinosaurs and a chosen one trying to prevent cultists from unleashing an ancient evil, but was also about how, centuries ago, a guy who legally isn’t Elon Musk accidentally caused the end of the world with rogue unstoppable kill-droids and in the face of inevitable destruction, the world’s governments lied to the civilian population about there being hope so that they would lay down their lives by the millions in the fight to buy time to complete Project Zero Dawn, which the governments led people to believe was a superweapon that would wipe out the robots and save them all but was in fact a project to create a sapient AI and facilities that would, after humanity’s extinction, allow said AI to complete the decryption and transmission of the kill-droid’s shutdown codes, reconstitute the ravaged biosphere, and release cloned humans and animals back into the rejuvenated planet (…err, spoiler alert).
When LEGO Horizon Adventures was first announced, my first thought (after I’d been sufficiently convinced that it wasn’t an elaborate fan-made fake, because I’ve been burned by those before), was that it was going to be an ambitious project, for sure; comparable to trying to adapt Dune as a pop-up book. While I am disappointed but not surprised that Guerrilla Games have chosen to strip out most of what I considered to be the most interesting narrative ideas of the original in the process of abridging it for a younger audience, the end result is a functional and even fun game about fighting cultists and robot dinosaurs for about eight hours that does an admirable job of trying to make high-concept sci-fi accessible to a target audience of ten-year-olds and their exhausted parent(s).
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There are a few things that make playing Mario Kart Fun: one is beating the computer powered racers around the track. Another is thwarting the efforts of your families and friends by throwing bananas and shells at them. The Standard Kart was missing any form of Power-up. Today we look at the 72031 Yoshi Bike. With a Brick-built Yoshi, Yoshi themed cycle, and a new Mario Kart ‘?’ Brick, it has the potential to make the race a bit more fun. How will it turn out? Is it worth adding this $AUD19.99/USD14.99/€14.99/ £12.99 set to grid?
Lets take a look. We will explore the build, look at the power-up – use it in a single-player time trial and a two-player race, and see how the experience pans out for us. We shall also see how legacy powerups (Yellow ? blocks, POW, Time Bonus, Star Power and Super Mushroom) work in this setting.
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If you have been following Rambling Brick for a while, you will know that I was quite taken by LEGO Super Mario when it was first released. The timed gameplay provided interesting challenges, maximizing the capabilities of the Smart Brick/Mario figure. Each subsequent year saw new environments and new capabilities. I drifted away over the last year or so, with too many other shiny things providing a distraction, but the Mario Kart wave has piqued my interest again.
Mario Kart on the Wii was the game my family first bonded over on the Nintendo Wii, years ago. Fifteen years later, we still play on the Nintendo Switch from time to time. I was keen to try the LEGO version, so I dropped into my store and (delighted to see the set on the shelves on New Years Eve), picked up the 72032 Standard Kart. With 174 pieces, and priced at $AUD29.99/$USD19.99/€19.99/£17.99, it felt like a reasonable price of entry to the theme. But is it enough on its own?
Let’s take a closer look…
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This set has been revealed as a gift with purchase throughout January 2025, in conjunction with Spring Festival celebrations later in the month. The threshold for this set has not been revealed at the time of writing, but has been reported as being a relatively high £135. That said, there are lots of new sets about to be released, including the 10355 Blacktron Renegade and the 10350 Tudor Corner Modular Building, along with the international release of the Chinese New Year sets, new sets from City, Creator 3in1, Friends and more, so reaching that threshold should not be too hard.
This set was sent to us by the LEGO Group for review purposes, but all opinions are our own. Let’s take a look, and see what you think.
