Category Archives: News

Stay current on the latest news and information about LEGO, from sales & deals to new set announcements. We also cover LEGO events and conventions all over the world.

TBB Weekly Brick Report: LEGO news roundup for December 24, 2016 [News]

The Brothers Brick comes across so much LEGO-related news each week that we’ve decided to package up all the interesting stories we’ve written and the content that’s grabbed our attention into a Weekly Brick Report for your reading enjoyment. Some weeks there will be lots of links to share; other weeks there will be hardly any stories out there–that’s the fickle nature of the news. But these are some headlines worth sharing.

So without further adieu, here’s this week’s Brick Report:

10255 Assembly Square

REVIEWS: TBB’s hands got tired this week between building this massive modular and feeling out a full case of minifig bags.

White House Christmas

TBB NEWS: We have the news you want (LEGO Gingerbread houses at the White House! Win a Death Star!) and the news you don’t (UK LEGO prices are going up, up, up!).

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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.

New LEGO Batman Movie Batmobile, Batwing mini-sets revealed [Review]

We’re continuing our coverage of The LEGO Batman Movie sets with a pair of the smallest sets, 30521 The Mini Batmobile and 30524 The Mini Batwing. These sets haven’t even been officially revealed yet, but LEGO kindly sent them to us so we can bring you an early review. We don’t have any official word on their pricing yet, but we expect them to be in the $4.99 USD range. They should be available Jan. 1, 2017.

Update: LEGO is currently offering the 30524 The Mini Batwing free with purchases of $35 or more on the LEGO Shop Online through Jan. 15, 2017.

30521 The Mini Batmobile, 68 pieces

30521 The Mini Batmobile

30524 The Mini Batwing, 79 pieces

30524 The Mini Batwing

Click to read our hands-on review

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.

Shortlist announced for Brothers Brick LEGO Creation of the Year 2016 [News]

For over a decade the Brothers Brick has been bringing you the best LEGO creations, and 2016 has stood out as a bumper year. To celebrate 12 months of great models, the Brothers Brick team has looked back over everything we’ve featured and pulled out the best LEGO builds of 2016.

LEGO Creation Of The Year 2016

Take a look at these ten amazing shortlisted models, and stay tuned for the final announcement of our LEGO Creation Of The Year 2016 on New Year’s Eve!

LegoJalex‘s brilliant ET model wasn’t just a great bit of character building, the surrounding room was wonderfully done too…

E.T. is getting the idea to build the communicator

Letranger Absurde‘s Room With A View sneaks into contention — although it was posted on NYE 2015, we didn’t blog it until a couple of days later!

Room With A View

Click here to see the rest of the Shortlist

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.

LEGO’s biggest modular yet: 10255 Assembly Square [Review]

2017 is a year of anniversaries for LEGO: it marks 40 years for Technic, and the 10th year for LEGO’s Modular Buildings. These highly detailed sets clock in at over 2,000 pieces and are most definitely fan favorites. In October, LEGO announced 10255 Assembly Square to celebrate the decennial anniversary of the line. LEGO sent us an early copy, so today we’re pleased to bring you a full hands-on review. It’s packed full of Easter eggs celebrating 10 years of these fantastic sets, and is the largest modular yet with 4,002 pieces. 10255 Assembly Square is available now on The LEGO Shop for $279.99 USD.

10255 Assembly Square

So just how impressive is this set? Read on, because we’re going to tell you all about it.

Click to read the full review of Assembly Square!

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.

LEGO Star Wars: The Freemaker Adventures, Season One now available [News]

With Rogue One dominating the news, we wanted to highlight that LEGO Star Wars: The Freemaker Adventures, Season One is now available on DVD and Blu-ray.

LEGO Star Wars Freemaker Adventures DVD cover

For those of you unfamiliar with the popular Disney XD show, The Freemaker Adventures is about a ragtag band of rebels tracking down a mythical lightsaber while the Empire goes about building the second Death Star brick by brick. In typical LEGO humor, expect to see cameos from all around the Star Wars universe, Palpatine’s gift shop, baby wampas, Buffy the Vampire Slayer meta-references, and a George Lucas lookalike named “The Maker” who’s gone into seclusion because he’s tired of space wars.

The DVD and Blu-ray sets are both available at Amazon on sale for around $25 — a steal for five hours of quality entertainment.

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.

That’s no moon! Win the LEGO Star Wars Death Star to celebrate TBB’s 100,000th follower & the release of Rogue One [Giveaway]

The Brothers Brick’s Facebook page recently passed 100,000 followers, making it the most popular LEGO fan page on Facebook. While our sympathies here at TBB lie with the Rebellion, we acknowledge that this milestone just might make us the Death Star of LEGO blogs. It’s all very confusing for us, so here’s a Death Star that’s also a BB-8 in TBB colors giving a thumbs up. If big numbers and deeply silly mashups don’t make you as giddy as they seem to make us, perhaps a chance at winning the new 75159 Death Star will instead! Enter to win by January 20th, 2017.

TBB Death Star + BB-8 cropped

You can enter to win from this link, or by clicking the Contests section on our Facebook page. The winner will also receive a snazzy green (of course) TBB logo T-shirt, stickers, and other swag.

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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.

41149 Moana’s Island Adventure [Review]

Disney’s newest addition to their wildly successful Disney Princess franchise, Moana, is in theaters now, and is itself wildly successful. Worldwide, Moana has brought in over $240 million USD, with that number expected to rise. LEGO has release two sets for the movie; we’re reviewing the first of these for you today: 41149 Moana’s Island Adventure. This set is 205 pieces, $24.99 and available now.

We’re going to talk about the film a bit in this review, so be warned of spoilers ahead.

Click here to read our review!

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.

UK LEGO prices to increase 5% in January [News]

It may be time to stock up on LEGO if you are in the UK. Due to the falling worth of the pound in the post-BREXIT world, LEGO has confirmed that all prices in the UK will increase 5% as of January 1st. While that is only a few extra coins on smaller sets, it represents an extra £20 on the Death Star, currently priced at £400.

UK LEGO Prices up 5%

The price hike was announced in a letter from LEGO’s UK and Ireland’s general manager and vice-president, Fiona Wright. The letter explains the increased prices are the “direct result of the continued devaluing of the UK pound,” and that prices may increase again in the “event of a further negative trend.”

For context, since the UK voted to leave the EU in June, the pound has decreased 16% against the U.S. dollar. Due to these fluctuations, many companies and manufacturers have been increasing prices across the UK, especially on imported goods.

Image created by TBB’s own Elspeth De Montes

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.

The LEGO Batman Movie Collectible Minifigures Feel Guide [Review]

A few days ago, we brought you our hands-on review of The LEGO Batman Movie 71017 Collectible Minifigures. These 20 unique figures are due to release Jan. 1 for $3.99 each, but a few lucky fans are already starting to find them on store shelves. Like other Collectible Minifigures, the Batman Movie minifigs are packed in sealed bags so you don’t know which characters you’re buying — unless, that is, you use your dexterous digits to determine the contents by feel.

And that’s exactly what we’ve been doing. We’ve stayed up late working our fingers numb sorting a whole case of blind packs, so our Feel Guide is based on actual experience finding and verifying figures. Not every piece is easy to determine by feel alone, and some pieces are easily confused with others, so use this guide to help you find a complete set of 20 figures, or to get extras of your favorite character.

The LEGO Batman Movie 71017 Collectible Minifigures are available now on Amazon and  on the LEGO Shop Online.

Lego Batman Movie Collectible Minifigures Feel Guide

Click for the full Feel Guide

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.

Pentatonix’ Christmas classic “Up on the Housetop” is a VR-enabled LEGO movie [Video]

Famous a capella group Pentatonix gets LEGO-ified in their new music video for the Christmas classic “Up on the Housetop.” The video uses YouTube’s new 360° functionality, meaning you can pan around in the video to see in every direction. While the graphic fidelity won’t be winning any awards, being able to see what’s “behind” the camera is pretty cool even without VR, and will look even better if you have Google Cardboard or another VR device.

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.

It’s the 10th anniversary of Brothers-Brick.com! [News]

In 2015 we marked the 10th birthday of The Brothers Brick, and today marks 10 years since we launched the Brothers-Brick.com domain. I promised we were making some changes here at TBB, and I highlighted a few of the changes in our 11th birthday post six months ago.

TBB10

But rather than focusing on the improvements we’ve been making — not least of which are several new contributors who just joined yesterday and the server migration that will be complete by the end of the year — I wanted to go back to something I’d shared with our readers in years past.

Brace yourselves for website analytics! Oh wait, that’s not very interesting. Ahem. It’s all about you, our readers!

(There will still be charts and graphs. And numbers. Maybe just a little bit of metadata. Mmmm, metadata…)

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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.

New digital LEGO building software, BrickLink Stud.io, now available [News]

Those of you who build with digital bricks now have a new option. BrickLink launched a CAD-like digital LEGO building software earlier today called Stud.io to compete with current programs such as LEGO Digital Designer and LDraw. The software was demoed for builders at BrickCon 2016 and is now available for free on both PC and Mac computers.

Bricklink Studio Logo

We have a review of the software coming, but at first glance, there are quite a few features to get excited about.

  • Direct integration to BrickLink’s catalog to make finding LEGO parts easier
  • Color check as you build to see if a part even exits in the color you want
  • Continuous price estimates to see how a part affects the total estimated price of the model
  • Simultaneous real-time building with multiple people
  • CAD-like controls to allow for building in any direction (including illegal connections)
  • Ability to import your current projects from LDraw and LDD
  • Integration with BrickLink to export a digital model to a wanted list

The Stud.io software is an open beta test right now, so you can expect a few bumps and more updates to come, but we’re always excited to see a new tool for the building community.

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.