Tag Archives: Contests

Contests and build challenges are often a great way to get creative juices flowing. Check out our coverage of new contests here, and congratulate the winners of contests that have finished.

Win LEGO with the TBB Server Downtime Contest! [News]

Here at The Brothers Brick, we run the site in our spare time, funded by our loyal readers who support costs like our servers and bandwidth by clicking through from here when you make LEGO Shop and Amazon.com purchases. For months at a time, our servers just hum away happily, until something goes terribly, horribly awry. Since last Thursday, the site has gone down four times, with total downtime of nearly a day. Yikes!

We’re all a little sad about this here at the TBB Compound (especially that pesky Lemur, who gets particularly mopey), but you can help cheer us up by building or drawing something funny that illustrates TBB server problems.

By the way, that’s Linus Torvalds on the right. TBB runs on Linux, Apache, MySQL, and the rest of the usual Open Source stack. Linus invented Linux and named it after himself. I’m pretty sure our downtime isn’t his fault, but I’ll use this minifig of him to illustrate this post anyway.

To enter, submit your photos or artwork to the TBB Server Downtime Contest pool on Flickr. Questions? Ask away here or in the discussions on Flickr…

Here are the prize categories:

TBB is Down Again! Build or draw something showing what happens when Brothers-Brick.com goes down. What’s happening behind the scenes at the TBB Server Farm on the TBB Compound? What do you do yourself?
404 Page Not Found Build or draw something illustrating the age-old website error.
A. Lemur did it! Build or draw something putting the blame squarely on A. Lemur. It’s probably his fault anyway…

Unlike most LEGO-related contests, we welcome brick-built creations, well-rendered virtual creations, and artwork — if you’ve spotted A. Lemur in the wild, we want to know!

We’ll run the contest through the end of the month, and the top prize will get a LEGO set in the $100 range, to make this worth your while (with more cool prizes for the other two winners).

Get building!

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TBB cover photo: March 2015

This month’s winner of our informal TBB cover photo contest is Tim Schwalf, with this delightful scene entitled “When Life Throws You A Curveball“. There’s lots of great details and techniques throughout this build, but the cleverest bit has to be the use of a brick separator as a baseball cap.

Remember, you can keep up with the Brothers Brick by liking us on Facebook or following us on Twitter. And for occasional extra goodies, you can also follow us on Flickr or subscribe to us on YouTube. And keep those cover photo submissions coming!

HELP! The Brothers Brick needs a new cover photo

I knew hiring primates as interns would come back to bite us – literally. After following a bizarre trail of blue droppings through the Brothers Brick compound this morning, I discovered the Lemur had gone and eaten our Facebook cover photo! I checked our other websites too, and they’re all gone. At least he got a tummy ache, so hopefully this will be a learning experience for the pesky little fellow.

So this seems like a great time to revive the TBB Cover Photo Contest. We’re asking you, dear readers, to submit photos of your original LEGO creations to be featured across all Brothers Brick social media. At the start of each month we will pick one new image to use across our Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Google+ and YouTube pages.

Find out how to enter →

Countdown to MocAthalon: 2015

With just over a week and a half left in February, builders from around the world are gearing up for the annual MocAthalon competition, where teams of 5 attempt to tackle 30 different build categories in a span of the month of March.

I competed in this contest in 2013 and it was certainly one of the more fun and challenging events I’ve done – there was a lot of great comradery among my team and animosity towards other teams that still exists to this day, and I would recommend people try it to flex their so called building muscles and build in some zany categories.

You can find out more details here and there’s still plenty of time to form a team, just head over to here if you’re looking for a few teammates.

The Wait of the Warrior

According to his creator, this samurai warrior by MSP! is waiting for something. And given that it was built for the ongoing Symphony of Construction contest, maybe he’s waiting for some competition! The field is still wide open, but the contest ends March 1st. The Brothers Brick are providing $50 LEGO shop-at-home gift certificates for the winners, so listen to the theme music and see what it inspires you to build.

Competition entries should be submitted to the contest’s Flickr group.

Symphony of Construction contest

Symphony of Construction is a telephone game that alternates between the mediums of LEGO and music. Already 3 rounds have produced interesting results, and now it’s your turn show us your creativity of interpretation. Check out the Symphony of Construction contest, where you have until March 1st to build a creation inspired by a piece of music and possibly win one of four LEGO gift certificates donated by The Brothers Brick.

Take a look at a sample of the works from the most recent round:

TBB Chibi Micro Contest Winners!

The TBB Chibi Micro-Fighter Contest wrapped up with a bang with 242 entries. WOW. Nothing micro about that!

Thanks so much for everyone that entered. It was incredible seeing what everyone came with chibi-ing some of our favorite vehicles and LEGO sets.

Our first place winner, and the soon to be recipient of the exclusive Fan Expo Ghost Starship with Kannan Jarrus #460 and full set of Star Wars microfighters: Letranger Absurde (Vitreolum) with his Chibi Serenity:

In Second place, and winner of 4 Star Wars MicroFighter sets: Kyler Wilson and his Chibi Ecto 1:

And lastly Third place, and winner of 2 Star Wars MicroFighter sets: John Kupitz (Phuonom) with his Chibi Earth Defense HQ 1:

We had a hard time choosing from so many that we had to do several rounds of judging to narrow down the eventual winners… And there were so many that we really liked and deserve special mentioning (in no particular order):
Rod Gillies’ Jurassic Park
Letranger Absurde’s Chibi Mutt Cutts (again!)
Bentbricks’s Borg Cube
Jacob Unterreiner Now This is Chibi racing

Thanks again to all the builders and stay tuned for our next contest!

Teslord Chase

Does this look a bit familiar to you? I knew there was something about it when I saw it, like I’ve seen this build before. That’s when I realized Dead Frog inc built a steam punk version of Inferno Interception:

There’s some really great techniques in here and there’s just enough great steampunk conversion while paying tribute to the original source material. And you might notice a few other steampunk builds floating around this month, that’s because when Rod Gillies isn’t off building an amazing steampunk metropolis, he’s running the Agents of the Imperial Crown – Steampunk Competition.

Breann Sledge wins 24k gold grand prize in the Bionicle Battle for the Golden Mask Contest

This mask was up for grabs in a multi-site contest, designed to welcome back the Bionicle theme. Each of the sites involved ran a contest and the winners went head-to-head for the grand-prize.

Breann Sledge won the gold mask with this highly detailed bad boy, Akutahn the Makuta of Okoto. I think I detect a bit of Breann’s Alaskan roots in that name. Standing over 20 inches tall and loaded with all the awesome detailing and posability that we expect from Breann, this top-notch villain is totally a winner.

Check out the other incredible finalists after the break!
Continue reading →

Bushidō – Way of the Warrior

German builder Disco86 recently completed his triptych of builds focused on medieval Japan, for the 12th annual Colossal Castle Contest over at Classic-Castle.com. And I think it’s fair to say he saved the best for last, with this beautiful and colorful diorama. (Can you spot the lurking ninja?)

Flavor of the month

Monthly building challenges seem to be all the rage these days. And they result in a flood of awesome builds …sometimes too many for us to keep up with. Old faithfuls such as SHIPtember, MAkTober and Novvember are behind us now, as is the newer FOODcember. Meaning that now it’s time to focus our attention on… HARDuary!

All this month, builders from around the world will be recreating everyday objects out of LEGO. After pretty much shutting down the FOODcember challenge, Indonesian builder Kosmas Santosa is already knocking it out the park with some killer inanimate objects:

But things just got real, because freshly-minted LEGO designer Carl Merriam has entered the fray. Carl is well known for amazingly accurate LEGO builds of mechanical devices and scientific instruments, and is already showing great form with this old wooden office chair:

So pull up a seat (wooden or otherwise), and let’s see how this plays out!

Chibi Micro LEGO sets

There’s still one lazy Sunday left to enter the TBB Chibi Micro Contest! We’ve seen tons of fantastic ‘Chibi Micro Fighter’ versions of lots of planes, trains and automobiles from all over the film, television and videogame properties. But don’t forget, you can also rebuild your favorite LEGO sets too!

Here’s a round up of some of my favorite LEGO sets, now in Chibi form:

A Classic Space set the 6989 Mega Core Magnetizer by Andrew Lee (onosendai2600):

One the newer Space sets: 7066 Earth Defense HQ by John Kupitz (Phuonom):

And last but not least, 9446 Destiny’s Bounty by Robert4168

So break out those bricks! You have one more day to build something. Full rules and entries can be found in the Chibi Micro Flickr group.