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.

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.

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…

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!

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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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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!

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.

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 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.

Click for the full Feel Guide

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.

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.

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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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.

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.

Create-a-calendar contest ends Saturday night! [News]

Ho, ho, ho! This is a friendly reminder that the Brothers Brick Create-a-calendar building contest ends at midnight this Saturday, December 17th. After that, judging will begin so that we can announce winners on Christmas Day. We’ve already seen some great entries in the contest Flickr group, so now you know what you’re up against! There are some cool prizes to be won, so dream up a theme and get building those tiny Advent calendar models today.

Pantone Fashion Color Report reveals trending colors for the upcoming LEGO building season [News]

LEGO has spoiled us with an enormous choice of colors over the past couple of years, most notably in the Elves and Friends lines. So it would be foolish not to keep an eye on new trends in the color industry. Now that LEGO has unveiled most of its lineup of sets for the first half of 2017, it’s about time we looked at them in terms of colors using the Pantone Fashion Color Report. This annual report, presented by the Pantone Color Institute, the world leading provider of color systems, predicts the top 10 trending colors for the upcoming 2017 spring season.

Based on a list of the most popular colors seen on the world’s hottest fashion runways, this guide includes hues described as natural and vital, rustic and relaxed. According to Pantone’s press release, the selected colors are perfect for portraying the warmth of a sunny day (with PANTONE 13-0755 Primrose Yellow) or conveying the feeling of breathing fresh mountain air (using PANTONE 18-0107 Kale), while PANTONE 14-4620 Island Paradise represents the tones of some far away exotic location.

And naturally, each of these trendy shades can easily be found amongst the LEGO color palette! Here’s our totally fabulous LEGO version of the list, showing rough equivalents of the Pantone colors:

Clearly any self-repecting, fashion-conscious LEGO fan will want to stock up on next season’s trendiest colors as fast and efficiently as possible. So which sets should we begin hoarding in the new year? We browsed the Spring 2017 themes to create the ultimate shopping list for a multi-colored and diverse refresh of your LEGO collection. We’ll start with some basic options and work all the way to the most fashionable new sets. Feel free to use the current official LEGO color chart to compare the selected colors with the wide range of the colors available.

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