WhiteHexagon

Price fixing happens with many products from what I've heard/experienced. 'Here's our suggested price if you'd like to be allowed to sell our product'. Video games are the same, if not worse. You can go to 10 different stores and all the prices are within 10 silver studs of each other. LEGO is pretty much the same deal. Only occasionally when a store is having a sale will the prices vary. Toys R Us seem about the best chance of that (at least while I was in Germany the last few years). Does anyone know the store markups on LEGO? I bet it's close to 40% and yet the price won't vary more than 1% between shops. Sadly it's the customers that'll end up paying more when companies get punished for this practice.

I only saw the giraffe :( I'd almost forgotten the castle in Kaufhof! That is well worth a visit!! I don't think my pictures do any justice to this huge creation, and the animation is really nicely done. So much detail too. Peter

I was in Berlin at the weekend and stumbled across the LEGO discovery center. Unfortunately it was closed, so I went back the next day only to discover they were charging something like 37EUR entry! I'm a big fan of LEGO, but that seemed a bit too expensive to me. I'd rather spend that money on some new bricks :) Anyway that's not my primary reason to post. Just close to the discovery center, in the Sony center, there are a couple of xmas themed constructions. A large santa sled made from duplo, and a huge duplo tree, covered in really detailed LEGO decorations. Here are some pix, apologies for quality, having some problems with my camera at the moment... Hope that linking works & festive greetings to all! Peter PS Did I miss much in the discovery center? PPS Gf got me my 1st LEGO advent calendar this year, how cool are they! :)

I haven't been online for a while, but I saw this and just had to share. Just delete is already seen. Cheers Peter

Darn, I just ordered Market Street, think I'll wait till next month for this baby. http://shop.lego.com/Product/?p=4954 Maybe even 3! ;) looks like it has the standard creator 3 build options. Anyone got one yet? Peter

I also missed your review, but now that I found it I really Happy I just ordered the set :) thanks for the pics! Peter

Has anyone reviewed this yet? I just noticed it on S@H and couldn't resist, looks really nice!! 19days for delivery though because I stupidly added some PAB. I really should learn not to do that, but I didn't want to delete the bag after all the work of picking through all those bricks they now offer :) Peter

I just bought 6 of these from IKEA and I'm very pleased with them, they don't take that much space, reasonable price, semi transparent so you can make out what's inside them, stackable with feet that stop them sliding around.

perfect! just the info I needed thanks. Nice that they are expanding PAB, shame its quite expensive.

Hi, I'm just looking at the updated PAB. I found a nice lamp post, but not sure which part goes on top? Element Id: 4119500 do i need some transparent minifig heads for it? or better recomendations? what about on top, I found a Parabola /16 ?? tips appreciated! Peter

cool!!! well impressed, and nice photography work there. That's a set you could really play with AFOL or not. So when you going to start selling them? :) Peter

you might find restrictions buying from amazon.de. I found 4956 discounted several weeks back and then discovered they won't ship outside of Germany! Luckily I have friends in germany where I could order a couple of sets too :) For other stuff from amazon, the customs is normally calculated for you. Here in Switzerland there is only 6?% sales tax, so amazon.de discounts the German 19%Mwst and replaces it with the 6% swiss sales tax. Seems like there is also some border processing charges involved. Dunno if they would do the same because of different sales tax rates elsewhere. Do you pay VAT on Lego in the UK these days? Peter

wow! another must have! and perfect timing. I was just in Hamburg today at the LEGO shop and was starting to think I had everything I needed, and only had Villa to look frward too. And then this set appears! perfect, something to look forward to in June. I think Lego are really starting to cash in on AFOL's :)

what a great idea, bowlers! It would be nice if LEGO did some minifig collector series. 'Collect Them All' tm. Released 1 a month for 3e, you get an individually boxed minifig per country. Or maybe a Mr & Mrs of each country in the world. Would be a nice addition for town builders. :) Peter

Just finnished Cafe Corner. Wow what a great set!! 16+ is a good label though, my fingers are almost falling off from clicking all those bricks :) and the gf was even helping! But... I have to say, besides having some really great bricks in this set, it does suffer from color consistency problems! Dark blues and dark reds were most noticable. But also the gray smooth plates seemed to be of cheaper plastic and look a different color from other sets, although it's too dark to check now. But many of the bricks also looked to be of a cheaper plastic. Bit disapointing for such an expensive set! But overall its an incredible build! and we can only hope Lego have more of these ideas in stock for the future. My only hope is that the quality starts to improve soon, although at this rate I'll have so many shades of every color, moc'ing in single colors just won't be possible and if every brick is a slightly different shade, then maybe it's not as bad as having just a few. Shame though, makes me relluctant to buy new sets until I know the quality. Although I'm looking forward to Villa. Peter

Fully agree with that! If I had my way everything would be minifig scale! :-) But for example, do we really need so many shades of blue? If I had halve the number of colours in my collection I'd have a lot more bricks available for moc ing. Same goes for funny shapped bricks. But I guess there is something for everyone this way. Peter

Hi Gary, Welcome to the site. Thanks for the interesting post and link! Brought back some memories :) And nice to see how simple things were with less color's. I think there are far too many these days, and dont even get me started on the vast number of brick shapes now. I'd forgotten about alphabet bricks though! shame on me. I shall have to add them into my game for sure now :) Peter

yes corner cafe. I read the review and that was another thing that made me want to buy it! I was looking through the instructions book and I quite like the smaller town house idea :) But I decided now to build it with mods, I esp like the set back windows I saw here somewhere!

It finally arrived!! after 3 weeks of waiting. I'm saving the build for next week during my holiday, but I already had a look at the instructions and considering to change so things. I normally prefer to build a model at least once how LEGO intended it to be. With CC there are so many parts I don't know if I want to build it twice! I got to wondering has anyone managed to build it exactly per spec in the instructions? ie no custom mods? just seems to tempting to change something... Peter

Nice topic! Hmm, although tough choice, esp. when I don't seem to have that many colors when I look across my town. Mostly red and white. But I like the dark red in a couple of SW sets I have. I was also impressed with the HP purple, but now a bit tired of it. Translucent red and blue are very nice! if that's an allowed choice :) But being a townie I guess white is my final answer :) although that might change after Villa and CC!! Peter PS we need topics here for fav brick and least fav color and 'ugly brick contest' me thinks!

Congrats on 1000 posts :) Actually it's the game in my sig. ie onscreen colors. I'm busy trying to expand the brick choice and color choice, that's when I hit the 'which colors to support' question. Maybe I'll even use a shorter list for now otherwise I think I might have too many blue ish colors :) Thanks Peter

That's the sort of chat I was looking for :) not too many colors but all the basic/popular ones at least :) Maybe I'll base my game colors on this if you don't mind? Cheers Peter

Wow, that must have taken alot of effort! Took long enough reading the complete thing! Nice work :) Peter

Good point, because so far I've been holding up bricks to my monitor to try and see if they match :) The problem with that approach is I don't seem to have all the colors in brick form. In fact I'm suspicious that many of these colors don't exist as bricks! But I know people here have much much bigger collections than myself, so maybe Ill just post the color chart of the bricks I intend to include in my little project. At the moment I'm thinking to use this color chart (LDraw with some mods and filtering): Rather than the following (because there are just too many and also the Ldraw seems to match my collection better): Peeron But the first chart I think has too many colors that I haven't even seen. eg I only have a RED and RED_DARK in my brick collection so I think I could remove [8] and [10]? Or do those bricks exist in the wild? I'm not thinking of all the exoforce etc funny colors here, just regular city / castle / train / creator type basic building bricks. I'm also not considering to include all the variations due to production quality issues, otherwise I'd have at least 20 grays :) But if you think a color is wrong or missing, or can be removed, I'd like to know. Your help is appreciated in this, I'd like my game to have colors that people are happy building/playing with :) Cheers Peter