Posts by Jake Forbes (TBB Managing Editor)

2025 LEGO Advent Calendar Spoilers: Day 11 [Feature]

Our favorite holiday tradition is opening all six LEGO Advent Calendars, one day at a time, with you, our readers! Along with spoiler pics of the daily gifts, we include commentary and alternate builds to celebrate the season and creativity.

We have an all-star cast of custom minifig creators leading our Advent adventure this year. Fool’s Figures is wizarding his way through Harry Potter and Frozen calendars. ExpansionBricks is launching Star Wars and Friends. And beyondb0nes is digging into Minecraft and City. Now let’s open some doors and see what gifts are in store for today!

Click here for spoilers of today’s builds!

The Brothers Brick is funded by our readers and the community. Articles may include affiliate links, and when you purchase products from those links, TBB may earn a commission that helps support the site.

Creating cozy Christmas memories in LEGO

Lucy1021lego is a Japanese builder who reconnected with the hobby, like so many adults, during the pandemic, when lockdown had us nostalgic for cozier times. Since then, Lucy has been photographing scenes of everyday life filled with amazing brick-built decor and the occasional non-brick detail, most starring her freckled Paradisa sigfig. Christmas scenes have been a staple of every year’s creations, so with the holidays approaching, what better time to cozy up with Lucy’s many holiday memories?

The weather outside is frightful. Come on in, won’t you?

See all of Lucy’s holiday memories after the jump

2025 LEGO Advent Calendar Spoilers: Day 10 [Feature]

Click here for spoilers of today’s builds!

A year of Mech-ing around with RigWalkerMocs [Interview]

Here at The Brothers Brick, we feature hundreds of builders each year. Many of those builders are familiar faces whose MOCs have been impressing audiences for years, but it can be especially exciting when a new account pops up with a fresh style and an eagerness to experiment and grow. RigWalker Mocs and Mechs is such a builder. Since joining the AFOL community one year ago, “Rig” has shared dozens of mechs, joined his local LUG, participated in collabs and challenges, and displayed at events. Rig’s bold mech designs have earned him many fans, including our guest-interviewer Zakar.ion who sits down with Rig to reflect on his first year of building with the community.

Our interview between these two mech MOC makers follows

LEGO Ninjago 71861 The Old Town 15th Anniversary: black frogs, stickers, and ninja nostalgia galore [Review]

Hey gang, Brickbot Studio here with an oversized review of LEGO Ninjago 71861 The Old Town 15th Anniversary, a massive addition to the Ninjago Legacy line. This sprawling 4,851-piece set is packed with easter eggs, fun play features, cool details, and a whopping twenty-three minifigures that take you right back to where Ninjago began 15 years ago. Old Town is one of the most iconic locations in Ninjago lore, a place rich with history, quiet corners, rambunctious villains, and the sort of architectural charm that feels like the foundation of everything that came later. It is a living museum of LEGO’s long-running series, packed with nostalgia, but not without its faults. So let’s dive right in with our review.

LEGO Ninjago 71861 The Old Town 15th Anniversary | 4,851Pieces | Available January 1, 2026 |US $299.99 | CAN $399.99 | UK £269.99

Our full review of The Old Town follows

2025 LEGO Advent Calendar Spoilers: Day 9 [Feature]

Click here for spoilers of today’s builds!

LEGO Collectible Minifigures Series 28 Review: We built a zoo [Review]

Animal mascots have been a staple of the Collectible Minifig line going back to Gorilla Suit Guy in series 3. Love ’em or hate ’em, animal mascots have continued to push the envelope for whimsical designs with bold custom headpiece molds, a range of tails, and even fins and wings as alternatives to minifig arms. For CMF series 28, LEGO is going all in on animals with a menagerie of minifigures guaranteed to bring a smile to your face. You can collect them all starting January 1. Not sure if these collectible critters are for you? Our full review follows.

Collectible Minifigures Series 28: Animals | Available January 1, 2026| US $4.99 | CAN $5.99 | UK £3.49

Are these minifigs more fun than a barrel of monkeys?

2025 LEGO Advent Calendar Spoilers: Day 8 [Feature]

Click here for spoilers of today’s builds!

Servicing AFOLs around the world isn’t easy, but BrickLink owed its users more [Guest Editorial]

On November 21, BrickLink – the largest community of online resellers of LEGO bricks, owned by the LEGO Group as of 2019 – quietly changed its policies on which countries would be allowed to operate stores on the platform as of December 12 (now updated to January 31) with 35 countries, including most of South America, Africa, and the Middle East. As the community learned of these changes, heartbreak and anger have rippled throughout the community, both for the poor way the changes have been communicated, but also for the reminder that, for as much as Bricklink and LEGO celebrate their global reach, in practice, much of the world lacks the services that other countries take for granted. Today we’re sharing the experience of one fan affected by the change, Pinar, a builder from Türkiye who runs the BukaBricks blog and maintains the LEGO Bestiary.

Pinar’s editorial follows

Arcane cityscape joins Lord of the Rings and other immersive LEGO masterpieces from jnj_bricks

Immersive scenes in LEGO transport you to a universe where everything is made of plastic bricks but feels alive. Creations like these not only require building on a large scale but also need a keen eye for perspective and lighting to create a convincing world. One of the very best builders in the format is Joe (jnj_bricks), whose epic scenes over the past five years have consistently left us spellbound. For his latest, Joe visits the opulent city of Piltover from Netflix’ Arcane show. (Keep your Stranger Things, this is the Netflix show I wish had official sets!). Joe explains that the scene was prompted by his wife, who build the teal-roofed building on the left. The remainder of the majestic cityscape uses a clever mix of scales, starting with minifig scale for the rooftop where Vi and Jinx survey the city (love the subtle mosaic work!), to midi-scale pavilions of glass and gold and aristocratic residences, to distant towers in microscale.

Joe’s Arcane tribute is just the latest in a long line of LEGO vistas from this RebelLUG legend. Let’s take a look back at some of Joe’s other immersive builds, starting with those based on the builder’s favorite film saga: The Lord of the Rings. The seven-tiered Gondorian city of Minas Tirith is famously immense, yet Joe finds a way to pull off the epic impact of a Peter Jackson bigature in Microscale with incredible forced perspective.