iragm

This was round 1 (Castle in the Forest) which sold out in under 10 minutes. Round 2 had 20000 copies available, I learned from missing out on round 1 and set an alarm for round 2. I will probably sit round 3 out, the only thing that interests me is the Mountain Fortress, and I think I can build it out of spare parts.

Do you have a thread for that, or a least larger images? Did you reverse engineer it (quite an accomplishment!), or did you make a backdoor deal to get instructions from @SleeplessNight? Looks fantastic either way. You are going to want to set an alarm. The last round of sets sold out in 20 minutes, and there were 20000 copies being produced (10k less than this time, but still...). These will be gone long before you wake up.

I fear this is true. I'm pinning my hopes that we can get some kind of generic model ship through IDEAS - a frigate, or maybe if we're very lucky an east indiaman. That stuff is popular with non-Lego adults, and TLG offers nothing remotely like that right now. With all the other models like the globe, typewriter, etc., a classic sailing ship seems like a natural fit. I waited for a sale and purchased on black friday. Mine came with the "do not put on shelves before July" sticker, suggesting sales have been lackluster. Great idea.

My concern here is that the opposite is likely true - this set will do poorly, and TLG will conclude that "people just don't want trains", rather than understanding that people want trains that can be motorized.

https://www.brickstickershop.com/Replacement-Sticker-for-Set-10194-Emerald-Night This sticker sheet includes stickers for the 2x4 printed slopes, on transparent vinyl, so in theory you can recolor the EN and still keep the stripes. I have not yet gotten my replacement EN sticker sheet, but I've gotten other stuff from Brickstickershop in the past and the quality has been good. Not perfect, but considering the price, good.

Most legendary: 6285 BSB, without it, pirates as a theme wouldn't exist. Nearly every subsequent ship owes most of its build techniques to the ones developed here, and it looks good despite being 30+ years old. Best classic build: 6286 SES, it's an upgraded 6285 with better colors and the rudder mechanism. Best small build: 6271 Imperial Flagship. It's a wonderful design, although there isn't a lot of competition when only considering builds using the small hulls. Most useful: 6268 Renegade Runner. This ship is hot garbage, but every time I see one in a bulk lot I buy it. Why? Because I can add some DIY sails, and flip it on eBay with no minifigures for $100. It generally pays for the whole bulk lot. Best building technique: Barracuda Bay ship, and it's not even close. The POTC ships are just a reskinned 6285. As @jodawill mentioned, it has proper tumblehome!

Are the Slope 18 2 x 1 x 2/3 with Grille used for the half timber parts secured in any way? They look great.

Stunning. I would love to see more close-ups.

You are building the actual set, right? It kinda seems like this is designed for powered up -- I wonder what the issues will be once it's motorized. It can't just be that it's too heavy, a single PUP train motor can handle this much weight.

Unbelievable that this isn't designed to be motorized out of the box. I'm not buying a train unless it can be motorized, and I'm sure others feel the same. For the price, this thing ought to include a motor and hub, not a note that says "yeah we couldn't figure it out, maybe fans can, good luck!" I'll wait to see some decent motorization mods before I purchase, I suspect bearings in the wheels might make a difference. (For what it's worth, I think this is actually quite a nice looking set and would have been a day 1 purchase if it was motorizable.)

The promo picture showed light bluish gray, I think. Would be pretty neat to get an additional color. Seems unlikely, but it would be pretty cool. That mould never left, it's been unprinted in various sets for a long time. I am not exactly sure how part budgets work, but it seems like painting/recoloring an existing part should cost much less than a whole new mould. For example, many GWPs include a new torso print, while none of them include a new part.

The Chrome extension Brickhunter will do what you want, and you won't need to type in the part codes one at a time. It can also price compare with Bricklink. There is a learning curve but it's well worth spending half an hour figuring it out.

This is the only set in the current BDP that I would buy. Excellent work.

About 4 months after the set is first released. Source is a comment from an official PAB developer on Reddit. https://old.reddit.com/r/legocastles/comments/14m460j/will_we_have_in_the_pab_lego_dreamzzz_figures/jpzm08u/

I figured the critic window closed when the contest did. I'm not bitter at all about not winning; I entered as a critic solely to improve my ability to evaluate MOCs and the critic winner had a more friendly, conversational, informal tone which probably went over better than my somewhat brusk feedback. It's all good, no hard feelings! A $215 prize was enough to entice me to participate, and I probably wouldn't have put in much effort for less. I think it probably took 15 or 20 minutes an entry, but as with all things Lego, it's more about the fun of doing the thing than the money. If we are being honest, most MOCs fall into either the category of: "holy **** that is next level, the build techniques, colors, composition, photography, etc. are all perfect" or "that looks like it was built by a 10 year old" ...and there isn't much in between. In neither case does it make sense for me to spend time composing a reply, because the first category is so far ahead of my skills that there's nothing I can say by way of advice, and the second category is in need of so much help that it's difficult to see the "constructive" for the "criticism". I do read this forum daily, but I don't comment often for this reason. I like this idea, although as I have mentioned earlier, I dislike a 5000-brick frigate competing against an imperial outpost with 200 bricks. I'd like to have at least some general thematic categories. I 100% agree. I don't see what should have been done differently in this case -- with stuff like CG-NAT, whole neighborhoods can have the same IP. If you're going to ban entries for getting multiple votes from the same IP, I could make a bunch of accounts and vote for any designs that are better than mine, wait for the mods to ban them, and win handily. But obviously future contests need to anticipate stuff like this.

This went pretty smoothly IMHO. Clearly it generated a lot of interest, traffic and engagement, which is the main thing. One issue that I saw is that there were too many things competing directly against each other: someone could build a perfect 1995 pirate set (indeed, I would argue that someone did just that with the Islanders set) and they wouldn't stand a chance of winning, simply because a modern building style is more popular. There should have been multiple smaller prizes for different categories: small ships (classic), small ships (modern), ships > 2000 pcs (classic), large ships (modern), structures and islands (classic), structures and islands (modern). Additionally, voting was a bit awkward. Just use a poll and restrict who can vote to 1 vote per IP and accounts with > 10 or 20 posts and/or who joined before the contest started. I dropped some ideas in another thread with @Jim -- mostly about image hosting directly on EB and about upgrading the forum software to have some newer features. Just modernizing the site would go a long way, especially for mobile users. I have had really good luck with Facebook ads to promote events, and while Facebook is definitely evil, it seems to be the place on the net where people hang out. A well-targeted campaign could draw in a lot of new EB members. To survive, forums need to offer something that FB doesn't, and contests like this are certainly good. Build threads of MOCs that take months/years to put together are another strong point for forums, since FB is very much about the end result, not the process of getting there. It seems like a lot of people didn't get that the contest was to create a modern set. Perhaps some appointed judges could approve/disapprove entries, and then people could democratically vote on them?

This was a great contest, it was so much fun looking at all the entries. Cheers to the winners!

This came together really well, the physical build looks even better than the digital one. Just wonderful!

My pleasure - Sloop Windy was a pure joy to build. Just for you, I've added an avatar.

That door technique is downright amazing, I need to get my hands on some masonry bricks in reddish brown.

Sounds like a death spiral -- can't add features to stay competitive because there isn't enough funding, so users leave for other platforms, removing more funding. You have the Google Analytics (or similar) data for traffic to observe the trends, I assume. I have no idea what you are doing for hosting or ads, but the AFOL demographic doesn't seem particularly well versed in adblock, so there should be a way to keep this site viable. Certainly, the demographic that visits here is a cut above Reddit and Insta, and the quality of the discussions reflect that. It would be a shame to lose this site, only Rebrickable comes close to the content here. Especially when Lego is close to an all time high in adult popularity. 75% of my site traffic is mobile. Having a clean and simple mobile experience is critical for any site in this day and age. If users have to post stuff on Insta or Flickr or Imgur and then come back here to post it again...well, they simply won't post it here at all. It's a minor annoyance on desktop. On mobile, it's a deal-breaker.

If you want, I'd be happy to create instructions from the .io file and add them to Rebrickable (for free, of course). This design deserves to be a real model.

I think the general idea is that ads on the site should cover the cost of hosting, and then some. If you can't make money on images, how do sites like Imgur, Flickr, etc., stay alive? And that's without mentioning videos which use and order of magnitude more of both. Somehow YouTube stays in the black, and it's not venture capital money at this point. I run a small site with no ads and quite a lot of images and it costs me about $20 USD a month. Ads would easily cover that cost and then some, but I dislike ads so I pay out of pocket instead. I get maybe 10-20k hits a month, if it was more than that, I'd probably need to enable ads to cover the bandwidth. Is there a daily poll somewhere? I see polls, but they are on specific forums, and often as part of a review of a set. Admins posting a daily poll and pinning it to the sidebar is a pretty standard way to encourage regular engagement from users. Here are some poll ideas: What's your favorite theme? What's your favorite set from [X] theme? Of these [4 modern sets], which has the best build techniques? Goats: I have one that I did not pay the current price for, I have one that I paid the current price for, I want one but won't pay the current price, I don't care. Who would win in a fight? Roger Redbeard, Johnny Thunder, Jack Stone, Clutch Powers, Brick Daddy The most overpriced feather/plume is [X] The next animal mold should be [X] The worst minifigure is [X] Stickers: I love them, I don't mind them, I don't really like them, I hate them

This is veering quite off-topic, but if Eurobricks wants to expand, the following would help greatly: Add a like button. I see a ton of great stuff but I don't have much to say beyond "great", so I don't comment. This results in a perceived lack of engagement from the original poster, who is less likely to post stuff on EB compared to Reddit, FB or IG where they can see the likes. Add a daily poll, which is always a good way to spark a lively discussion and get people participating. Add image support. It's 2023, bandwidth and disk space cost next-to-nothing. Ideally, EB would not only host images, but would also mirror any images that get added, so if stuff happens (like the original image being removed), it'll still appear in the thread. The latest PHP-BB has support for all of these, and forums I frequent that have these features are thriving while the ones that don't are slowly dying.

The shepherd's crook has already been recolored in the UCS Back to the Future Delorean, and is on PAB now: https://www.lego.com/pick-and-build/pick-a-brick?query=6390370