LEGO® Minifigures: they add life to our sets and our MOCs as well as a little personality to the benchtop. Over the last few years, since the advent of the first Collectable Minfigiures, they have become increasingly intricate in their designs. In the life of a casual LEGO Reviewer, I realise that I have been making photographing my minifigures for reviews unnecessarily challenging for myself.
We recently looked at the building experience for 10316 Rivendell – the upcoming LEGO Icons set. It is big, with over 6000 pieces and 15 minifigures (+6 statues)! I thought I would take a closer look at the new minifigures, and compare them with the original Lord of the Rings figures from 2012-13.
I might be finding aspects of my LEGO® life a little chaotic at present. Some of this is of recent doing. Some of it relates to things I did over a decade ago.
I am quite excited by the new LEGO of The Rings: Rivendell set. I can’t wait to share my review with you. It will probably be the highest part count set I have ever put together. Before I do that, however, of course, I will have to build it. and I thought I might like to compare the minifigures with those from the initial release, a decade or so ago. And then one thing drove out another, as it were.
As I mentioned in the announcement of the set, Middle Earth has a special place in my LEGO MOC history. I came out of my Dark Ages and started exhibiting at back in 2010, but that was just a simple, somewhat quaint and primitive modular terrace house, built without enough time to get all the right Bricklink orders in before the due date. As such, it is decorated in the style of a student share house, somewhere in the 1970s or early ‘80s, complete with a poor choice in decor.
The LEGO® Town, and later LEGO City themes have been charged with presenting kids with the things they see in real life, in an easy-to-build format, to trigger role-play moments. It is now apparent to me that I don’t get out enough, and that my kids have now grown up, as I had not realised that a Gaming Truck is a real thing. They attend major events, run tournaments at expos and, on a smaller scale, even make appearances at kids’ birthdays, when in the past we might have had a fairy, magician or gymnastics coach. How things have changed!
Part of the early 2023 LEGO City wave includes the first example of such a truck in LEGO Form. The set comes with 4 minifigures, 344 pieces and has a retail price of $AUD69.99/£39.99 / $USD39.99 / 44.99€. So, how does the experience shape up? The LEGO Group sent a copy of the set over for me to review – let’s take a look: as always, all opinions are my own. Read on for more details.
It’s been a little while since it was announced – LEGOCON 2021 to be exact – but the LEGO® Ideas Table Football is just about set to arrive. Suffice to say it is a little bit different to what people might have been expecting. The original submission by 16-yo Hungarian LEGO fan Donát Fehérvári as part of the We Love Sports challenge in early 2020 was for a close to full size table, with 11 players per team, on 3 rails. The challenge to ensure that submission would translate to a robust set, tha would stand up to the rigors of friends and family battling out their different fell to LEGO Designer Antica Bracanov, also responsible for realising last year’s Home Alone set, after several years working on LEGO Friends. Antica and the rest of the LEGO Ideas team outlined some of the challenges face at the recent Recognised LEGO Fan Media Days.
Welcome back to our continuing journey through the decades of the history of the LEGO Group, as we approach the 90th anniversary of the company on August 10, 2022.
Today, we enter the 1990s, the so called System Era, where we started to see playthemes diverge from the standard Town, Castle and Space. The company also starts to introduce new technologies, as well as embarking onto the World Wide Web.
At LEGOCON today, we got a sneak preview of series 23 of the collectable minifigures.
Designer Esa Petteri Nousiainen and Minifigure Governance maven Tara Wike took us through the design process before revealing 3 figures from the next series of 12 figures.
The recent arrival of the 2022 LEGO City Space sets has left some people myself included, wondering if the spirit of Classic Space has returned, while others remained unsatisfied, stating reasons of not enough blue and grey, an absence of transparent yellow, or that the blue in the windscreens was just not dark enough. But what does Classic Space actually mean?
Virtually everyone will agree that the period began in 1978, with the release of the first LEGO Space sets to feature minifigures. But when does it end? And what is it that makes those sets ‘Classic Space?’
When Jay from Jumper Plate software reached out to offer me a set of his Nostalgic Monochromatic Minifigures to give away, I bought another set for my own use. Proceeds from the sale of these figures go to help Jumper Plate to further develop their software which is designed to support the administrative needs for people running LEGO User Groups.
But, there is a market for monochromatic minifigures, and when these figures come with a nicely printed nostalgic torso, harking back to the 90s, I suspect that market might be expanded. I don’t run a LUG, but I know plenty of people who do, and I am happy to help support anything that might make their job a little easier. So, I put my order in (this was pre release) and after a few local postal delays – international air travel is still a bit slow for packages – they arrived yesterday. So did my set to give away. you can read more about that here.
Today, the LEGO Group have revealed the forthcoming Marvel Collectable Minifigures range. Featuring figures from Marvel TV Series on Disney Plus – Wandavision, the Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Loki and What If…. There are some characters here that might not feature in sets of their own, but which will certainly inspire creativity amongst builders. There will be 12 figures in the series, which will be released on 1st October 2021. Read on for full-size images and my thoughts.
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