The nominees for the 2023 Toys of the Year Awards have been announced and LEGO has quite a few sets in the running this year. As usual you can submit your picks for a chance to win some of the toys. The winners will be announced on November 20. LEGO has eight products nominated in six categories which you can check out below. Collectible • Disney 100 Collectible Minifigures (71038) Construction • LEGO Disney 100 “Up” House (43217) • LEGO Friends Heartlake International School (41731) Grown-Up • LEGO Art Hokusai – The Great Wave (31208) • LEGO Icons Lord of the Rings Rivendell (10316) Infant/Toddler • LEGO DUPLO 3-in-1 Tree House (10993) Preschool • LEGO Disney Celebration Train (43212) STEAM • LEGO Technic NASA Mars Rover Perseverance (42158) The post LEGO Nominated for 2023 Toy of the Year Awards appeared first on The Brick Fan. Original linkOriginal author: Allen "Tormentalous" Tran

I can hardly believe it is August already, and I am delighted to share once again my perspective on attending Bauspielbahn-Treffen 2023 (BSBT). As a reminder, BSBT is a LEGO fan event dedicated exclusively to trains and takes place in the charming town of Schkeuditz, just 12 km northwest of Leipzig, Germany. My previous BrickNerd articles discussing BSBT are linked here for 2021 and 2022. As always, the sublime quality of layouts and trains exhibited is truly special. BSBT attracts a fellowship of like-minded and passionate LEGO train builders. I cannot think of an event that sparks a similar level of inspiration and excitement from the perspective of a LEGO train fan. Also, I cannot forget to mention the amazing team which organizes and hosts BSBT: LEN-Eisenbahner, a subgroup of LEGO train fans within LBrick.de. It is an enormous amount of work to coordinate an event like this, and BSBT's success is...

Earlier this year, LEGO announced that they will be moving their North American headquarters to Boston in 2026 and they have just revealed the location of where it will be. The new headquarters will be located at 1001 Boylston Street which is just a short ways from downtown Boston and only a few minutes walk to Fenway Park. The office space will spread out over five floors in more than 100,000 square feet with innovation and design being a central focus. In turn, there will be enough space for both collaborative work as well areas for individual work zones. All of the Enfield employees will have a position at the new office and will get relocation assistance if they wish to move. The move will begin in 2025 and is expected to be completed by the end of 2026. The LEGO Group announces location of new Americas office in Boston, MA...

In the past year or so, LEGO has released sets in the LEGO Icons line that pays homage to the classic sets and the latest one is the Eldorado Fortress (10320). It has 2,509 pieces and retails for $214.99. This set is an modern look for the Eldorado Fortress (6276) from 1989. Minifigures There are eight minifigures in the set, six Imperial Soldiers and two Pirates. The Admiral has on a different blue uniform than the others. The bicorn that he wears with the red feather is similar to a minifigure in the original set. There are two female officers that have the similar uniforms but have different colored epaulettes. They also have hats molded on to their hairs. They also have double-sided heads as well. In addition, there are also three soldiers with their classic Imperial uniforms. Each of them have their own unique faces but they all wear the...

Chess has been covered well throughout LEGO history. From official sets to MOCs, there is no shortage of results searching for “LEGO Chess.” Walk through almost any decently-sized LEGO convention hall and you will find a chess board or three. But despite the multitude of creative works, takes, and approaches, the chess set remains a classic. To me, the regal game’s ascetic never gets “old and tired” but rather stays “tried and true.” So over a decade ago, I set out to make a clean simple chess set. This ended up becoming a surprisingly long journey that only time and parts from the future would solve. View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize In the meantime, official sets like the ones above would pop up for purchase. I started my personal LEGO journey as a castle army amasser, so any time a chess set like these hit the shelves, I...

One of the more anticipated sets for me this year are the LEGO Marvel Studios Collectible Minifigures Series 2 (71039) which introduces a new wave of characters from the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The set releases on September 1 for $4.99 each and they include characters from Hawkeye, Moon Knight, She-Hulk, as well as my most hyped show, X-Men ’97. One of the new things that you’ll notice about the minifigures is that they are no longer in bags so you won’t be able to feel for the characters you want. For this wave and possibly for future Collectible Minifigures series, they’ll be in boxes. There’s really no foolproof way of figuring out which characters are in the boxes unless you open them up. If you decide to weigh them in stores, good luck with that as it’s frowned upon, similar to weighing sports card. Some big box stores are even putting...

Best of BrickNerd - Article originally published August 20, 2021. A lot of the community is predominantly focussed on the plastic parts that LEGO produces, but there are also numerous cloth-based items. Sails for ships/wings for dragons, netting/string, minifigure capes/skirts are probably obvious, but there are many others. There is a whole range of Primo cloth items for babies (in fact, enough of those are creature-based for their own article!); clothing/household items in Scala, Belville and Duplo; and, today’s topic: plush/soft toy editions of creatures. My current plushy collection. This is one of those areas on the edge of what is well-documented in the standard databases of BrickLink, Brickset and Brick Owl. It is much harder to know what exists and therefore what you are collecting/searching for. Added to that, information on the things you do find is more limited. In short, there are a lot of unknown unknowns. It is...

Best of BrickNerd - Article originally published August 16, 2022. To help preserve some of the best LEGO content from the community, today we are pleased to share a guest article from Katie Walker who walks us through the evolution of a cheese slope mosaic. Katie was originally one of the main contributors at MosaicBricks, a LEGO blog started by Casey McCoy that ended in 2014. Flash MOC A few years ago, Sean and Steph Mayo came up with the idea of having a "Flash MOC". It's like a Flash Mob but with LEGO models instead where a bunch of models would show up all at once and all following a similar theme. One of these “Flash MOC” ideas was to have a fantasy world filled with polar bear warriors. You can see the results of the group collaboration, including the storyline, in the Urtican Blitz'ard group on Flickr. For my...

Earlier this morning, it was announced that Target will be having their Fall Geek-Out 2023 where they will have various drops for collectibles including LEGO. Starting next Friday and every subsequent Friday after that from August 25 through September 29, there will be drops from major toy manufacturers and LEGO will having theirs on September 1. There’s no announcement yet on what we can expect LEGO to release but since it’s a new month, it could be one of their many September releases. LEGO could even shock us by dropping one of their LEGO Ideas x Target sets they have planned. The Viking Village would be a good guess since it was the first LEGO Ideas x Target set that fans voted for. The post LEGO Announced for Target Fall Geek-Out 2023 appeared first on The Brick Fan. Original linkOriginal author: Allen "Tormentalous" Tran

The Train Bookends by Jimmi-DK is the latest project to achieve 10,000 supporters on LEGO Ideas. The 1,038 piece build features a train making its way through a tunnel with the locomotive on one end and the carriage on the other. The project joins “Big Boy” Locomotive, Retro Arcade, Spartan Helmet of Leonidas, Alfa Romeo Giulietta Spider, The Muppet Show, Red Bull Racing F1 Team RB18 1:12, Scooby Doo Mystery Machine, Western River Steamboat, Dreamwork’s Shrek Swamp, Asterix & Obelix, Venice, Stilt House, Red Bull RB18, Trojan Horse, Red Dwarf: Sleeping Quarters, TaleSpin Seaduck Meeting Seagull, Stud Lane Book Nook, Minifigure Gumball Machine, Greenhouse, Yu-Gi-Oh! Card Box: Dark Magician vs Blue-Eyes White Dragon, Phineas and Ferb Doofenshmirtz Evil Inc., Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, Taylor Swift “Lover House”, The Motograph, Taylor Swift’s Lover House, Disney’s Phineas and Ferb: Perry the Platypus/Agent P, Flying Scotsman – LNER Class A3 4472 4-6-2 Pacific Steam Locomotive,...