Legoist

Wait... what did you do??? Did she say yes? ... The AFOL world has a new king!

Great MOC! Amazing solution for creating curved walls.

Both of them are very nice tiny MOCs! This is the first time I see something like this, and it does its job pretty well... I'm always a fan of lighting elements in Lego dioramas.

How do you guys know that NinjaGo theme has been such a huge success? I didn't notice anything telling me so in shops, such as shortage of sets. On the contrary, the individual character sets are constantly 50% off in several shops around here.

That's a great MOC Iorax! TLG should definitely do a gingerbread house as part of their "winter" exclusive theme My favourite part of your MOC is the licorice fence, although the pine tree is also fairly unusual with its plates and it looks great!

The only parts that don't look common to me are the green car roof used for the windows, everything else seem made of fairly common pieces... I think it shouldn't be too difficult to recreate this sets! With 622 pieces, you can probably make it yourself for ~50e.

Thanks Hinckley, that's a fantastic review, couldn't be more detailed... I think TLG is doing a very good job with the new Friends line. I'm not personally interested, but I'm curious to see if my daughter will be. My comments on this set: PROS: - the level of details in the interior design is just really good, how those bar/kitchen furniture and equipment is rendered with small bricks instead of large specialized pieces - all the new molds for kitchenware... these would be so useful in regular City sets and also in Castle (if made in more appropriate colours i.e. brown & grey) - the new colours (I personally hate pastel colours, but I have to admit this is a PRO for most AFOLs) - the minidolls... again I'm not going to be a fan at all, but I have to admit that TLG did a fantastic job with their design and printing, and I really appreciate that they are fairly compatible in size with regular minifigs - I don't see anything offensively stereotypical or chauvinistic CONS: - the price: almost 15c per piece... I don't know if they have to get back the money spent in research & design, or if they simply start high because they expect the novelty of this theme to sell well, but this theme starts more expensive than licensed sets - the red+pink colour scheme, I just don't get it, I really think these 2 colours look bad together; must be me, because my wife & daughter have filled our house with red+pink towels, clothes and bags, so apparently it's a combination that does indeed work for some - minidolls legs not indipendent and minidolls hands not rotating (especially the first is quite disappointing): I think however it is possible for the design to be updated in a couple of years, if the Friends line is successful and lasting I don't mind the café missing the roof. I think the Friends line is supposed to be highly playable, and thus they probably consciously designed the buildings to be easily accessible inside. Maybe research showed that girls like more roleplaying in real-life environment while boys like "swooshing" vehicles more? That's quite strange... considering these parts serve as bottom of the building, there's no need for clutch power. Maybe they are going to use this design for every plate in 2012?

Yes, this has been a shared concern since quite many years by AFOLs. Good to know they've decided to reduce it a little at least, TLG has been asking about this topic in several polls in the last few years... Don't be ridiculous. Just open them

Great! Just half an hour ago I was wondering and went searching for news in their website... I am always scared that the whole LDraw project is abandoned.

Despite the use of fancy words drawn from software engineering, the question is pretty simple With "top-down" I mean planning a layout (small or large) as a whole, choosing what it will contain but without getting too specific in how you will design such content. In the early phase you also decide the size, shape and house placement of the whole thing. You probably create the terrain first, not necessarily in detailed form but at least you choose the location of buildings and structures, which only later you will design and build on the spot. For instance in the City/Town theme it may mean to start with a general idea such as "I want to build a modular street, I'll put a barbershop, an office building, a corner pub...", so you start laying down the baseplates and choosing the locations for your houses, then you build them on the go. In Trains you will probably start by designing the track interconnections together with choosing where to place your important buildings. Whatever the theme, the whole design process starts from the general (i.e. a village, a railroad, a large castle complex, a pirate bay...) while the particular gets built along the way and its design adapts to fit the bigger picture. And "bottom-up" is obviously the other way around, focusing on building individual models such as vehicles and single buildings, and later (or much later, in case you weren't even planning this while building them) put them all together into a layout/diorama which is created to make sense for the already available models, and add whatever necessary to function as a sort of "glue", such as terrain details and additional structures. This case for the same City/Town idea as above may mean you build one standalone modular building and put it on the shelf, then build another, then another... and only after a few you start trying putting them together. For a Train theme it means you focus on building custom locomotives and wagons, for Castle you design individual buildings and only later drop them onto a landscape, and so on. So what is you favourite or most usual way of designing large creations? Obviously if you only build small things for the moment, maybe because that's what your favourite theme focuses on or maybe just because you don't have the time/money/bricks for something on a larger scale, then I expect you don't have much choice in the poll...

Great idea and great results! I agree that this would be more expensive than a regular advent calendar, it has definitely more pieces, some unusual colours, and many plants which I think tend to be somewhat more expensive.

Yes, I also think that redundancy is not a good point when discussing Lego sets. It doesn't matter if a subject has been done before and how many times, because there is always a new generation of children reaching the age of Lego. If "fire truck" is a top-notch subject/concept that pretty much every child would like to have in Lego, then it is right to keep making new "fire truck" sets all the time (could they keep the same one set forever? there is two reason against this: first it's a good thing to update the set models in order to follow how the correspondent real life subjects change; second why not giving the same children generation another model so that they could buy two instead of one?). We should realize that our AFOL perspective is very differente, we are not suitable to judge TLG choices on this.

We have a brand total of 0 licensed sets, the reasons being that our children are still too young to ask for them, and that I still haven't managed to accept the fleshies. This probably sounds stupid to some, but it is ultimately the typical reason why I say "no" to a set. But I see no reason why I should be against licensed themes... They have introduced a lot of new bricks, minifig parts, and unusual colours. The problem is that these parts tend to be excessively pricey on the secondary market because licensed sets are significantly more expensive than normal and don't stick around in shops for very long.

Great work!! The Köf locos have always been my favourite shunters and I already knew one day I will build my own version. In the meantime I'll bookmark your thread for hints and inspiration ;)

I have never done this, but sometimes I've though about it. My thoughts on the topic: - I would never do it as a serious investment, I would never see it as making money but rather as a way to grant myself a discount on all the Lego I'm going to keep instead - I would always buy sets I wouldn't mind to keep, that way if I never find a buyer it won't bother me at all - I would keep it on a small scale, i.e. just keep maybe a couple dozen sets for reselling but not more at the same time: it seems to me that having a BrickLink shop with a lot of stuff on sale would start to require a lot of time to manage your "store", and be always there to respond to orders quickly. I don't want to spend my free time doing this, or going daily back and forth the post office to send stuff. Furthermore, if it becomes a significant business you may actually have to comply with laws and pay taxes. - I would keep track of all the profit I made since the start of reselling, so that whenever I feel guilty of spending too much on Lego, I could lessen the guilt by taking out the profit record and take a good look at it! Bottom line: you have to know your Lego well. I see some BrickLink shops and I don't understand why they are full of City sets or tiny old sets... the only reason why I would think someone would spend 3 times their original prices is the nostalgia factor (maybe they had those sets when they were kids, and they're fine spending a lot to have a couple of them back). But the big money is spent on highly collectable themes, such as Star Wars, modular buildings, trains or pirate ships.

That was a great reading, thanks for sharing! My highlights, good food for thoughts: "Today, girls and boys play equally with Duplo, Lego’s bigger bricks for toddlers. But starting at the princess phase, Lego’s smaller, more intricate kits skew “boy.”" "The research techniques and findings have been controversial at Lego from the moment it became clear that if the company were serious about appealing to girls, it would have to do something about its boxy minifigure, its 4-centimeter plastic man with swiveling legs, a yellow jug-head, and a painted-on face. “Let’s be honest: Girls hate him,”" "(...) defying the consensus that modern kids don’t have the attention span to stick with painstaking challenges, especially during playtime. To compete with the plug-and-play quality of computer games, Lego had been dumbing down its building sets, aiming for faster “builds” and instant gratification. (...) Lego saw it had drawn the wrong lessons from computer games. Instead of focusing on their immediacy, the company now noticed how kids responded to the scoring, ranking, and levels of play—opportunities to demonstrate mastery" "Lego sent its team back out to scrutinize girls, starting in 2007. The company was surprised to learn that in their eyes, Lego suffered from an aesthetic deficit. “The greatest concern for girls really was beauty,”" "Lego confirmed that girls favor role-play, but they also love to build—just not the same way as boys. Whereas boys tend to be “linear”—building rapidly, even against the clock, to finish a kit so it looks just like what’s on the box—girls prefer “stops along the way,” and to begin storytelling and rearranging. Lego has bagged the pieces in Lego Friends boxes so that girls can begin playing various scenarios without finishing the whole model." "The key difference between girls and the ladyfig and boys and the minifig was that many more girls projected themselves onto the ladyfig—she became an avatar. Boys tend to play with minifigs in the third person. “The girls needed a figure they could identify with, that looks like them,”" As an AFOL I have zero interest for the Lego Friends line, I'd certainly hate to have these ladyfigs around with the rest of our minifigs and bricks, and I am not much interested in pastel colours for building either. But as a parent, I am curious to see how my son & daughter will react to Lego Friends.

It's a great idea, I should do the same myself And the execution is very good!

Because you can't build a minifig (unless you take up the side hobby of customization), you can only buy it, while you can build the rest yourself, and usually AFOLs do a much better job than TLG :)

The theme idea itself is fantastic, but I don't like these preliminaries very much. Even tho I am always looking for monstrous minifigs to use in Dungeons & Dragons games, I don't see the point in buying any of these sets except maybe the one with the swamp monster since the minifig is the best of the bunch (except the vampires, but I already have enough from CMF Series 2) and it will be probably only a 7-10e set. The structures use IMHO too many boring parts and colours. I hope the zombies set will be within 30e and has at least 3 of them, or 20e for 2 of them, or at least I hope they don't put more than 1 monster hunter.

I have mentioned this thread and shown this picture to my wife, and she immediately said we should go back to playing D&D soon The 2 things I like most in this picture are (1) the checkered floor, which perfectly matches the D&D rules for distances but still looks totally realistic and (2) the small green baseplate used to keep track of character's stats & conditions, and even the carried equipment! That's as simple as it is brilliant! BTW, I believe that when talking about using Lego (or else) for D&D (or else), it's important to decide what are the main purposes and keep them in mind during designing/building. If we'll ever do that, my purposes would be porbably these: 1) to help handling certain rules, especially in battle: positioning and distance are major factors in a D&D game, and a visual aid (doesn't have to be Lego minifigs of course) makes a huge difference; you don't need to build all the scenery, I think a good starting point could be just to use a baseplate on which you can rearrange a number of 4x4 plates depending on the current location's size and shape 2) to keep track of things such as what is your character holding in hand vs what is he carrying in his inventory, this is something that normally you write on paper but being able to SEE it there makes everything more clear; changing what you have in hands is also something you cannot do with traditional RPG minis; if you drop an item, you also easily see where exactly you've dropped it 3) visually suggest basic tactical choices to the players: here I'm thinking mostly of battleground's features such as cover or higher ground; normally as a DM I need to choose whether I'm going to tell the players in advance about terrain features (which could make the description of the area too long and boring sometimes) or wait until it's the players asking "is there any structure to cover behind? is there any higher ground to get to?"; with a Lego scenario, you just "plop" those things into it 4) inspire the mood... I have no doubt that bringing Lego into a D&D game makes everyone more cheerful

I use the stickers, even if I usually buy sets more for the parts than the model. Once I've put a sticker on a piece, it's not true that I cannot reuse the piece. I can reuse the piece with the sticker on it, simple. This usually works fine in MOCs, with the sticker'ed brick giving you the same potential inspiration/usage as if it was printed. Of course it doesn't look as good as a printed one, I'd always prefer the look of a printed brick over a sticker. But from a usability point of view, stickers are better that printed bricks: a sticker'ed brick can be easily undone, while a printed brick it's more complicated to "reset" without damaging it, so it's most likely going to stay "locked" into the use implied by its print, which will slowly fade and make it look just as bad as an old sticker. I don't understand why should I worry about the possibility that I might need that brick for something else: I'll just get another copy of that brick! Is that so hard? Unless the brick is really super-rare and expensive... but then I would scrap the sticker off and I would be fine, since I'd care more for the brick than the sticker. Bottom line: stickers are meant to be used. Clearly if you just don't like how they look, you're absolutely right to choose not to use them at all! But being afraid of using them doesn't seem very reasonable after all... are you going to keep them in a drawer forever? If you're afraid of wasting the brick, it's not true -> you can easily remove it and wash the brick clean from traces of glue If you're afraid of wasting the sticker -> scan it, and you can have as many copies as you want I think there should be some website where AFOLs would upload their scans of Lego stickers so that we won't ever run out of copies.

swils – Serrus, the Druids' Claw - 1 point Wardancer – Prince Maerendil on Findelhuv - 1 point GeneralTalon – Sir Talon, knight of - 1 point

CorneliusMurdock – German Goat Herder - 1 point Praiter Yed – Brittany, pregnant teen - 1 point Darth Yogi – Aboriginal Hunter - 1 point

2) The Lord of the Rings scene - Elf and Dwarf Warrior Entry (Build by Thor Lund) - 2 points 3) The Mist scene - Skateboarder and Woodcutter Entry (Build by Yatkuu) - 1 point

22) Pharaoh Queen Entry (Build by Dan Church) - 1 point 27) Zoo Keeper Entry (Build by Ninja Nin) - 1 point 35) Godzilla Entry (Build by Cecilie) - 1 point ...this time it was very hard to pick, too many good entries!