It’s been a while since we’ve had a LEGO convention here in the San Francisco Bay Area. Bricks by the Bay, which I started in 2010 and ran until 2016, and which continued under able management without me until 2022, is over. But we just had a new convention, Brick Blast, have its first installment here last weekend, and another one is coming in October!
A visit to the San Francisco Bay Area's newest LEGO convention, Brick Blast, at the Santa Clara Convention Center.
Brick Blast is the brainchild of Jared Gella, BayLUG member and former Bricks by the Bay participant. He and his family produced a brand new event from scratch! Being the first year, they kept it on the smaller side: one hall at the Santa Clara Convention Center, and only one day for the show (plus one day for setup). They are planning to go bigger next year though! I was originally planning to be out of town that weekend, so I didn’t sign up until the last minute, and the only thing that I could bring was a single MOC… so I brought my newest one, Angine de Poitrine (blog post about that coming soon…). Many members of BayLUG attended, and a significant portion of our Great American Road Trip collab from 2025, and the Once Upon a Time collab from 2024, were on display, along with various other miscellaneous models. The theme of Brick Blast, Out of this World, was the same as BayLUG’s upcoming collab this December, but we weren’t ready to present those models yet. (However, since Angine de Poitrine self-identify as aliens, I decided that my MOC is on-theme for the club’s upcoming show, which means it was one of very few on-theme MOCs brought to Brick Blast by BayLUG members! I think the only others were Davin White’s Ice Planet and Blacktron MOCs and Neal Whitsett’s huge Blacktron space base.
Anyway, setup happened on Friday, where we all showed up to the convention center to set up our MOCs, while the vendors set up their stalls. In the evening we played a round of Dirty Brickster, which is like a white elephant Christmas gift exchange, but otherwise there weren’t the usual AFOL events one finds at conventions. I think they’ll have a lot more of that kind of thing next year though. On Saturday, we had a great turnout from the public, so I’m sure the convention made up their budget to keep going, and I’m excited to see where they go next. I didn’t take a ton of photos, but I did a video about the event:
The photos I took are here:
Coming soon, Brick Realm will be here in October! Come see us again on Halloween weekend at the Santa Clara Convention Center.
Great job Bill! Love this! :-D