Posts by Jake Forbes (TBB Managing Editor)

LEGO Icons 10375 How to Train Your Dragon: Toothless – Big smiles, no bite [Review]

When Toothless first showed up in 2010’s How to Train Your Dragon, the injured Night Fury dragon instantly stole the heart of Viking teen Hiccup as well as audiences worldwide. Over a trio of animated films, multiple TV series, and now a live-action remake, Toothless has continued to charm (and incinerate) everything in his path. Now Toothless is ready to come home in a new form with LEGO Icons 10375 How to Train Your Dragon: Toothless. Branded for 18+ and designed more for display than play, this version of Toothless looks a little different from his on-screen counterpart, with chibi proportions and no rider. Does the dragon’s loveable personality come through and is it fun to build?

How to Train Your Dragon: Toothless contains 784 pieces and will be available July 1, 2025. You can pre-order now for US $69.99 | CAN $89.99 | UK £59.99. July 1, after which point it may also be available from third-party retailers like eBay or Amazon.

Saddle up, viking! We’re going to review this dragon!

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DOOM: The Dark Ages Skullcrusher slays in LEGO

The DOOM franchise has introduced some memorable epic weapons, going back to the original BFG (“Big Friendly Gun), but the newly released DOOM: The Dark Ages introduces the most metal weapon of all: the Skullcrusher. This weapon does what it says on the tin, crushing literal skulls and using the bone fragments as deadly projectiles. Dicken Liu built a roughly life-size version in LEGO, complete with a pre-ground skull to feed into the chipper. Even if it’s not motorized or sharp, that maw of gears and rotating blades fills me with dread. Whether a sly joke or serendipity, the gun is decorated with the headpiece of Bionicle baddie called Skull Grinder. How perfect is that?! Dicken is no stranger to gaming tributes, although they tend to be of a slightly more family-friendly flavor, like this adorable Baby Bowser.

To learn more about the builder and his creations, check out our interview with Dicken Liu from earlier this year.

Gourmet Taiwanese food builds in LEGO that look good enough to eat!

For the grand opening of a new LEGO Store in Tainan City, two of our favorite Taiwanese builders celebrated with delectable brick-built versions of local dishes. Hsinwei Chi, fan designer of the LEGO Ideas Jazz Quartet, created a trio of dishes. Starting from the top, we have shrimp rolls, a fried snack of shrimp, fish paste, and vegetables wrapped in tofu skin. Next, shrimp rice is an iconic bit of home cooking with shrimp, shallots, and white rice stir-fried with soy sauce and rice wine. Last is a mouth-watering bowl of danzai noodles, with roasted pork, mashed garlic, and shrimp sitting atop chewy wheat noodles in a deep, savory broth. In case you’re curious where those noodles come from, they’re yellow flex tubes exclusive to the DC Heroes Bumblebee Helicopter set.

James Zhan showed up with two dishes. First we have a pair of guan cai ban – Taiwanese “coffin bread” – in which a thick slice of white bread is hollowed out and fried and filled with a creamy stew. James employs a fun mix of parts for the stew texture, including white bananas, large clamshells, and technic ball peas.

Fittingly, our last dish is a dessert – beh teung guai, aka Taiwanese churros. The fried dough of glutinous rice flour is similar to Japanese mochi, with a chewy interior, and flavored with sugar and crushed peanuts. For both dishes, James elevates the presentation with elegant serving trays and leafy garnishes.

If these Tainan comfort foods leave you hungry for more LEGO cooking, check out our food archive for more delicious models. (Especially this street food noodle cart that seems like a great place to enjoy some of those danzai noodles!)

Buka’s Brick Bestiary is the ultimate guide to LEGO fauna [News]

With thousands of different elements in dozens of colors, some with prints, most retired, and new parts appearing every month, how best to categorize LEGO bricks in a way that is useful? For Pinar, who runs the Buka Bricks blog (in both Turkish and English!), the answer is to approach bricks less like an engineer and more like a naturalist. For years, Pinar has written about and categorized LEGO animals with the drive of a modern-day Linnaeus, creating a taxonomy and history that is as fun to browse as it is exhaustive in its coverage. Last week Pinar updated the Brick Bestiary with a new index and updated listings through 2025 sets.

Pinar’s efforts not only make it convenient to browse through all of LEGO’s cat or insect variations in a single scroll, but her scholarship and passion make the Bestiary an engaging and enlightening read. Where else will you find useful dog size guides like this…

Alongside cursed history like this?

Thank you, Pinar, for this invaluable resource.

A day of knights from LEGO stars [Minifig Monday]

Where I live in Sweden, we’re in that time of year when day never ends, which has me craving ~~night~~ Knights! For this week’s Minifig Monday, we’re rounding up enough white knights, royal champions, and bullish bruisers to surround a round table, and a strong dose of NEXO Knights!

We start with Sir Candrel, the Luminous Flameknight, from Linus (minifigurebuilds). He may equip NEXO pauldrons and shield, but this knight works with wax, not wires. I love the use of Shakespeare’s neck frill atop the helmet and the fur collar on the axe for dripping wax detail.

Sobek Bricks is back with Calanthia the Dragon Slayer, a half-elf knight with flower maidens to hold up her flowing cape. I don’t know what I like better about Calanthia’s combo – the curved horns on the helmet, or the winged goat by her side.

None shall pass without my permission! Okay, you have my permission. Read on.

Picture Perfect – Life in LEGO Polaroids (Guest Feature)

This started as a quick contest entry. Just one little diorama for the LEGO Ideas “Picture Perfect Memories” challenge. I thought I’d build a single model—frame it up like a Polaroid, submit it, and move on with my life.

Instead, I made six.

And who among us hasn’t gotten carried away and spent the whole night building? For me, there was something satisfying about having small ideas in my head that I could actually finish. Each one took a couple of hours. Nothing sprawling. Just compact moments, built quickly and intentionally.

I like building small. It forces you to be economical, which I think can be more impressive than going big. It also lets you focus on what really matters—telling a story.

Each of these builds is based on something that happened in my life, or something close to it. They’re impressions. Memories, simplified and captured in plastic. And in sharing them, I hoped to set a kind of template—something other people might follow to build their own.

Take a look at the story behind each of the six Polaroid vignettes and maybe be inspired to make your own

Sixties cool meets serious horsepower with LEGO Icons 10357 Shelby Cobra 427 S/C [News]

Has there ever been a more effortlessly cool roadster than the Shelby Cobra? Combining cheeky British body design with a beast of an American engine, the AC Shelby Cobra remains one of the most sought-after classic cars among driving enthusiasts, and this July, it becomes slightly more affordable as the latest LEGO Icons car model. LEGO Icons 10357 Shelby Cobra 427 S/C promises a sophisticated build that captures the legendary car’s signature curves while packing in enough details to please the pickiest Top Gear critic. Racing into stores on July 1 for Insiders (July 4th for all), the Shelby Cobra is built from 1,241 pieces and can be pre-ordered now for US $159.99 | CAN $199.99 | UK £139.99.

The full gallery and set details follow after the break!

Don’t lose sleep trying to count these electronic sheep

If you thought Blade Runner was a visionary mind trip, it’s positively prosaic compared to the novel its based on: Do Androids Dream of Electronic Sheep by Philip K. Dick. Builder Pierthviv pays tribute to the master of consciousness-questioning sci-fi with a book cover built from a truly eclectic mix of LEGO elements. While not directly referencing any cover I’m aware of, Pierthviv draws on very Dickian iconography, from the eyes in the machine, to the syringes in the cyber background, to the lenses upon lenses of the Voigt-Kampff machine.

A wider angle lets us better appreciate the builder’s craft. The constraction-style figure seamlessly blends organic musculature with cybernetic elements in a way that feels straight out of and 70s pulp sci-fi art. The Dreamzzz brain, exposed as a robot claw lifts of the top of the skull, is especially chilling. The sheep in the monitor is the only source of color and escape in this dystopian vignette, matching the theme of the novel.

Pierthviv created this chilling model for the first round of the 2025 Bio-Cup with the theme “Dreams.”

Baba Yaga won’t be contained in a LEGO book nook!

Mixing LEGO and books is in vogue right now, but who says the bricks need to go between your volumes? Roman Shemis built this spellbinding witch’s hut emerging from the page of a brick-built book, which looks great stacked atop books of the paper variety. Based on the Cyrillic text, I can only assume that Baba Yaga herself lives inside the chicken-legged cottage. Technique-wise, it’s that tree trunk on the left I’m pining over! Roman only recently started sharing MOCs, but we’re already big fans of the builder’s skill and range. (Especially the technique Roman employs for this cobblestone street). I’m sure we’ll be seeing a lot more from Roman in the years to come!

If you want to add a bird-legged hut to your collection but don’t know where to start, the Never Witch’s Midnight Raven is one of my favorite sets in recent years.

Return of the Mon Calamari Cruiser

Once again, we find ourselves writing about an excellent LEGO diorama by swbuilds. And once again, it’s a Mon Calamari Cruiser full of life! After finishing the bridge, this build apparently followed close behind. But I’m not going to talk about Star Wars here. Instead I’m going to reference another space-faring LEGO theme: Life on Mars. For that is where all that glorious sand purple comes from! This is one of those colours with an extremely limited colour palette: only 18 designs, and six of those are minifigure parts. Fortunately, many of those other 12 parts were larger ones, so you can make them go a long way, as swbuilds does here. I’m particularly fond of the overturned pump from 7317 Aero Tube Hangar in the background!

Sakiya Watanabe’s quest for excellence as a LEGO creator [Interview]

The secret about overnight successes is that it takes years of hard work to get to that “overnight” success. Sakiya Watanabe, who builds under the handle n.a.b.e_mocs, does the work. In the six months since he started sharing his creations online, Sakiya’s MOCs have earned kudos on this site and from AFOLs and professional builders alike, even as the young builder studies Organic Chemisty at university. We sat down with Sakiya to learn about how he prepared for this “overnight success,” and what drives him as a builder.

TBB: Your work caught our attention from the very first MOC you shared, but you must have been building a lot before reaching that point. When did you first discover LEGO and what excited you about building?

Sakiya Watanabe: Thank you for giving me this opportunity. First of all, my parents gave me LEGO SpongeBob Krusty Krab set (3825) when I was around 6 years old. Also, at the time, I was obsessed with the Lord of the Rings, but LEGO didn’t sell Lord of the Rings sets yet, so instead, my parents often bought me sets of the LEGO Castle fantasy era. And I often reassembled them to create the world of Lord of the Rings. This may have been my first works.

TBB: It sounds like you were making your own creations from the start. When did you become aware of the creations of other builders?

SW: I got into LEGO Star Wars when I was about 9 years old, and started making my own creations(MOC) around that time. At the time, I was always watching speed builds of sets on YouTube, and I would create MOCs while referring to the techniques used in the sets. This is a picture when I was 10 years old.

Our interview with Sakiya Watanabe continues…

“Get away from her, you bricks!”

Like James Cameron, here at the Brothers Brick we never turn down an opportunity to show off a good power suit. Take this Minilander-scale Power Loader from Aliens built by Marco DeBon – equally adept at moving cargo and battling Xenomorphs. This model requires a Class-2 license to operate, but is a class all its own in terms of design, with pleasingly chunky arms and a great use of tiles for a clean look.

Ripley can step out of the loader and is fully poseable. She looks like she’s been training with Chun Li before joining the mission to LV-426. I almost feel sorry for the poor Alien queen that has to face her!

From the side, we can better appreciate Marco’s judicious use of greebles and the excellent application of printed and stickered tiles.