Dinosaurs have a broad appeal, from the young to the old. Is it the scale? Is it the lure of the relatively unknown? Is it just because we really enjoyed being terrified by Jurassic Park, back in the day? Today we see the official reveal of the largest Jurassic World set to date: the 3145 piece Jurassic World Dinosaur Fossils: Tyrannosaurus rex (T.rex) set. This is the largest LEGO® Jurassic World set released to date and offers a challenging and rewarding building experience for fans. Featuring a detailed T. rex fossil skeleton, over 1m (more than 3 feet!) in length, this set is sure to impress both builders and collectors alike. The set will retail for $AUD399.99/€249.99/£219.99/$USD249.99
Seven year old me is very excited. Six year old me would have been excited, but not had the patience to consider such a project.
In which I get distracted by nostalgic content included on a sticker in a Ninjago set I don’t have, do some colouring in, review 3265 Sandy Seagull’s Aeroplane and 3697 Flour Mill and Shop, do some figure matching and ultimately spend the weekend trying to reconstruct that sticker in photographic form. Will I succeed?
I’ve been a bit busy away from LEGO® bricks recently. While I have dodged much of the upcoming March Madness preview season, I also failed to mention that the 71837 Ninjago City Workshops is being released on March 1 2025. Had I mentioned this at the time that it was first announced, I would have also most certainly highlighted the fact that the set includes a Fabuland Reference: One of the panels includes a sticker that highlights several Fabuland Figures, a couple of Fabuland sets with the word ‘Fabuland’ plastered across the middle of the poster in Ninjago script. While I don’t have a review copy of the Ninjago Workshops, I do have quite few Fabuland figures and elements lying around the place; accumulated over the years from various sources. Let’s take a closer look at what’s featured in the sticker and see if we can recreate the view in real life.
Today we look at the 10362 Parisian Cafe, first in the latest ICONS subtheme, Restaurants of the World. This set raised some controversy when it was revealed because of its low profile and closed back, in a world where so many sets either occupy a full 32×32 plate or open up at the back like a doll house. So, is this an exciting new direction for LEGO sets – reaching for a new casual audience, with limited display space? Or is there something for the established AFOL as well? Thanks to the LEGO Group for sending this set out for review: all opinions are my own.
Let’s take a closer look. Along the way, we will gain a few insights from Designer Hoang Huy Dang, who I had the chance to talk with at a round table discussion about the set.
LEGO Art has come a long way since its debut back in 2020. What started as a mindfulness exercise in carefully placing dot tiles or studs in pop art mosaics has expanded to a variety of pas relief from Comic Books to Renaissance masterpieces and Japanese woodcuts to modern sculpture. With the release of 31215, we see an ongoing evolution of the theme
How does this model stack up compared to LEGO Art sets that I have put together in the past? In this review, we will take a look at some of the building techniques used, how the set adopts several tricks and techniques used by Vincent van Gogh. Along the way, we will take a look at his fascination with sunflowers, and some of the highlights of the build for me. Finally, we will hang it on the wall. Probably next to Starry Night, and see how it looks.
This set was provided by the LEGO Group for review purposes. All opinions are my own.
The Original LEGO Friends, Stephanie, Olivia, Emma, Mia and Andrea, have all grown up. Thanks to the narrative imperative induced by the Time Skip, they have now achieved a degree of success in their adult lives, while the series now focuses on a new group of friends, including Mia’s daughter, Autumn. Branko has taken a look at the Largest LEGO Friends Set Ever: 42639 Andrea’s Modern Mansion, which has recently reappeared after a few months on Backorder. His story behind the construction might not, technically, be canon, but the information in the episode that brings all the friends back together (Friends the Next Chapter:Series 2 Episode 11 Friends Reunite) doesn’t explicitly say it didn’t happen this way…
This set was sent out by the LEGO Group at the Rambling Brick’s Request. All opinions are our own.
Read on as Branko take a closer look at this Grand Design!
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
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…
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.
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
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
Introduction – and possible Spoilers
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).
