About Chris

Chris Malloy (porschecm2) has been a LEGO fan nearly all his life, having started with System bricks at age 3. He is the co-author of Ultimate LEGO Star Wars, and his creations have been featured in several books and The LEGO Movie. He also helped develop the first LEGO Minecraft set, 21102 Minecraft Micro World: The Forest, which has gone on to inspire a whole theme of sets. He's been active in the online community since 2002, and regularly attends LEGO fan conventions such as BrickCon and BrickCan. He enjoys building in a wide range of themes, but keeps returning to Castle, Space, and Pirates. Check out his LEGO creations and photography here.

Posts by Chris

Good things come in small bottles

How many pieces does it take to build a good model? Not many at all, if you’ve got a little ingenuity and a good imagination. This tiny build by “Big Daddy” Nelson would make as good a desk display as the official LEGO Ideas 21313 Ship in a Bottle set, especially if your desk is spacially challenged like mine. In fact, I’d love to have a whole lineup of micro sets to display. The ship itself is made of fewer than 15 elements, and the bottle is around the same. Its design is made possible thanks to the new 4×4 half-sphere elements that debuted in 76391 Hogwarts Icons Collectors’ Edition a few months ago, which form both ends of the bottle.

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LEGO Star Wars reveals 6,800-piece Ultimate Collector Series 75313 AT-AT that’s actually minifigure scale [News]

LEGO has just taken the wraps off its next Ultimate Collector Series Star Wars set, a minifigure-scale version of the Empire’s most fearsome walker, the AT-AT. With 6,785 pieces, 75313 AT-AT stands over two feet tall and features a fully detailed interior. It includes nine minifigures, two speeder bikes, an E-Web turret, and enough firepower to take out a Rebel shield generator with ease. With a retail price of US $799.99 | CAN $949.99 | UK £749.99, the UCS AT-AT is taking its place along the 75192 UCS Millennium Falcon as the most expensive LEGO sets ever released. It is slated to be available starting Nov. 26.

We’ve already got our hands on one, so be sure to check out our full review: LEGO Star Wars 75313 UCS AT-AT Review.

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LEGO Star Wars Ultimate Collector Series 75313 AT-AT — The Empire truly strikes back [Review]

LEGO’s tremendously popular Ultimate Collector Series (UCS) models have been the flagships of the Star Wars theme since they were first introduced back in 2000. Most of the models have been large-scale interpretations of various ships, such as the 75275 UCS A-wing. However, a small handful have been closer to minifigure-scale versions of larger vehicles, notably the 75192 UCS Millennium Falcon and 75060 UCS Slave I. LEGO’s latest UCS model follows in the latter vein, bringing fans a proper minifigure-scale model of the Empire’s fearsome beast, the AT-AT. 75313 AT-AT is the second-largest Star Wars set to date, with 6,785 pieces, falling short by fewer than 800 pieces of the UCS Millennium Falcon. It features nine minifigures, including Luke Skywalker, General Veers, two AT-AT pilots, and five Snowtroopers, and will be available starting Nov. 26 for US $799.99 | CAN $949.99 | UK £749.99.

The LEGO Group provided The Brothers Brick with an early copy of this set for review. Providing TBB with products for review guarantees neither coverage nor positive reviews.

Click to read the full, hands-on review

LEGO reveals two Chinese Festival sets for 2021 Lunar New Year [News]

LEGO has just revealed the 2021 Chinese New Year Festival sets. For several years LEGO has created sets celebrating the Chinese Festivals, and this year the two sets will be 80108 Lunar New Year Traditions and 80109 Lunar New Year Ice Festival. The sets were revealed at the China International Import Expo, which begins today, Jay’s Brick Blog reports. There’s no word yet on the pricing for these sets, but they’ll be available starting Dec. 25 in China and the Asian/Pacific region, while the launch will follow a few days later on Jan. 1 for the rest of the world. LEGO also revealed one new Monkie Kid set as well.

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Teeny tiny Titanic

With the release of LEGO’s massive 9,000-piece 10294 Titanic set, the century-old fated ocean liner has seen a lot of renewed interest. We’ve already seen one tiny Titanic model made for a more modest budget, but this one by Corvus Auriac just hit all the right notes for me with its clean design. The use of the tiny ball joint on the end of the Harry Potter wands to made the ship’s masts properly tilted is a lovely bit of detail. It’s a digital build but Corvus says it can be built in real life if you’ve got the parts.

The sky pirates have returned in this epic mashup of Ninjago and Pirates

Ninjago has done a lot of settings over its decade-long run, but for me, by far the coolest wave was the Skybound storyline from 2016, which was basically a Ninjago mashup of steampunk and pirates. It’s the LEGO theme we never not from Disney’s Treasure Planet. So this fan redux of some of the sets by Markus Ronge just ticks all the right boxes for me. Markus has taken the already-fantastic idea from Ninjago of sky pirates and turned the dial up to eleven, with slightly more “realistic” designs (you can call a flying pirate ship realistic, right?). The color scheme is on point with the browns and oranges, and check out that bone dragon figurehead on the revised Misfortune’s Keep. I reviewed the original 70605 Misfortune’s Keep back in 2016, and as cool as I thought that set was, this would have blown me away.

But what really blows me away about Markus’ model is that it’s not just a redux of the Skybound sets, but it’s also a mashup with the LEGO Ideas 21322 Barracuda Bay Pirates set, another set I loved. The Misfortune’s Keep ship breaks down into a sky pirates wrecked base!

And let’s not overlook the splendidly simple yet beautifully stylized way Markus has chosen to display the models, with a simple graphic and brick-built stands.

LEGO reveals first sets from Disney’s Encanto movie [News]

With no fanfare, LEGO revealed a pair of sets from the upcoming Disney animated movie Encanto on their website today. The two sets are in the style of the other Disney sets, with the larger of the pair featuring minidolls, and the smaller as part of the book playsets lineup with microdolls. Encanto is slated for release Nov. 24, while the LEGO sets will follow on Dec. 1. There are a few new pieces that are sure to interest builders, too, such as new 3×3 macaroni tiles and a 1×1 round tile with a new clock print.

Click to see all of the Disney Encanto sets

How Aaron Newman went from being a LEGO fan to a LEGO set designer [Interview]

LEGO fans take many shapes. Some enjoy building official sets, while others dive into their imagination. Still others take great pride in hunting down every minute variation of 2×4 brick, or in capturing beautiful images of minifigures. For some, though, LEGO is a career path. Aaron Newman has been building with LEGO all his life, and has successfully navigated the dream that many fans have: not just building with LEGO, but getting paid to do it. Aaron has been on a rocket trajectory, moving from fan to full-time LEGO artist and then to a contestant on LEGO Masters Season 1. We’ve interviewed Aaron before about his work as a fan and on LEGO Masters, but now he’s moving to Denmark as the LEGO Company’s newest designer, so I caught up with Aaron once more to learn about his journey and how he approaches building.

Click to read the full interview

When the world is going to pieces, build your own doomsday bunker

Do you sometimes feel like the world is going to pieces? Like we’re building to the apocalypse that will be the downfall of civilization as we know it? If so, maybe you should try building your own desert bunker, just like the guy in this LEGO creation by hachiroku92. This cross-sectional vignette lets us get a good look at how this prepper will ride out the collapse beneath the desert sands. And as far as doomsday bunkers go, it’s pretty nice. There’s a sturdy reinforced access point, plenty of provisions, and even a nice sitting area. I’m less clear on what the voids above the bunker are, though, but maybe I’m not up on my doomsday prep.

And I wasn’t actually kidding about building your own doomsday bunker. While it’s not quite a parts list and instructions, Hachiroku92 has made a build video if you want to follow along at home.

All right, you know the drill

TBB alumn Simon Liu definitely knows the drill, as this nifty LEGO bot shows. In a striking yellow and dark blue industrial color scheme, this bot looks like what I always hoped LEGO’s various mining themes would be (first Rock Raiders in 1999, then Power Miners a decade later). It does sport that huge chrome drill that only ever came in a pair of Rock Raiders sets, and subsequently doesn’t get used in fan creations nearly as much as I’d like.

Oh, and did I mention the bot is modular? And that Simon has built more than one?

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4,000-piece 21330 Home Alone House unveiled as biggest LEGO Ideas set ever [News]

Not a lot of movies from the early 1990s have stuck around as household names, but surely one of the oddest is that childhood classic from 1990, Home Alone. It has found its quirky, lovable place among our holiday favorites, and today, LEGO is revealing that the newest Ideas set is based on the film. 21330 Home Alone House features the quiet suburban McCallister house that Kevin (Macaulay Culkin) has rigged with all manner of booby traps for the would-be burglars. The LEGO set has a full interior thanks to its 3,957 pieces, making it the biggest product to date based on a fan design from the crowd-sourcing platform Ideas. The original Ideas project was created by fan Alex Storozhuk, whose Home Alone project reached the requisite 10k votes back in December of 2019, and was approved by LEGO to become a set in June of 2020. The new set will retail for US $249.99 | CAN $349.99 | UK £229.99 and will be available starting Nov. 1.

Be sure to check out our full, hands-on review of the LEGO Ideas 21330 Home Alone House!

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How low can you go?

Just how tiny a vehicle can you make that completely contains a minifigure and still looks sleek and sci-fi? This little beauty by Inthert has got to be near the limit, and it’s wonderfully slick. The main part of the body is formed by two of those new curved slopes that debuted in the 10295 Creator Expert Porsche 911, and when set at a 90-degree angle to each other they perfectly nestle a bubble canopy—trans dark blue, of course, for Space Police. And don’t miss the fantastic pod-engines with bucket handles on the intakes!