LEGO Sets – Page 28 – Bill Ward's Brickpile

Advent 2013 Day 19

For Day 19 of the LEGO Advent Calendars, we get three little vehicles and a torch?

The Friends thing seems to be like an Olympic torch. It’s a nice construction using an upside-down tile and cone, with a dark brown “flower” piece providing a hole that the flame can connect into. Clever construction but I’m not sure what it has to do with the other models in that calendar. For City, we get two little airplanes, which go along with the Star Wars mini-spaceships we have been getting all along, and today is no exception (Separatist Shuttle).

Curiously it seems that Flickr has made my life harder yet again… as of yesterday, they changed the HTML they generate to provide links to photos to use an <iframe> tag instead of the <a><img> that they’ve always been using (when I’m viewing a photo and click the “Share” icon, the HTML is presented for copy/paste). So while I’ve been just using that option to share the photos on my blog until now, I’m now being asked to give them a frame which who knows what they might try to use it for – ads? tracking? – and so I have started manually generating the link and image tags. Curse you, Yahoo!

Advent 2013 Day 18

We get three new figures for Day 18.

In Friends, we get the cutest little snowman! The body is made from a 1×1 brick with studs on 2 sides, allowing arms to be attached, and instead of the customary black top hat, we get a lavender knit cap! City continues the new color theme by giving us orange 1×1 round tiles, which I have never seen before in that color… also a figure with stubbie legs and a cool Classic Space theme torso, and the best part is we get not 1, not 2, but 3 extra of the orange tiles (and also of the antenna/lever part). Finally in Star Wars we get a scout trooper figure.

Advent 2013 Day 17

Day 17 of the LEGO Advent calendars.

The Friends calendar has a boom box with an iPod dock; City gives us the race car that goes with yesterday’s tires; and Star Wars has another mini spaceship from Clone Wars and Episode III, PadmÃ©’s Naboo Star Skiff. The Star Wars model has a ton of small parts and some pretty good SNOT building techniques. I particularly like the telephone piece that serves as a handle for the boom box, the iPod tile, and the green double-cheese slopes (with an extra one!).

Advent 2013 Day 16

Today’s Advent calendar gives us lots of accessories.

Ice skates, spare tires, and a weapons rack… For Friends, we get ice skates! The model is kind of odd, but I imagine it’s a bench for putting on your skates with a little white table featuring flowers, one of which has a dab of snow on it? Nice to have a bunch of skates though, including one extra. Now LEGO has been giving us two extra of a lot of things this time around, but this time we just get one… wouldn’t two have made a lot more sense here? Sigh. Anyway, City’s model continues the Octan mechanic theme with a set of four spare tires and a barrel of oil or fuel, and Star Wars gives us yet another weapons rack, including a monster gun that looks more like a campy 50s sci-fi movie than a Star Wars weapon but I guess it must be another dumb Clone Wars thing…

Advent 2013 Day 15

For the 15th day of the 2013 Advent calendars, we get two minifigs, a park bench, and a boatload of spare parts.

The park bench in Friends is really simple, though anything that gives us parts in that shade of cyan (which is also the new Maersk Blue color) is worth having. The minifigs include a Star Wars Geonosian Pilot and an Octan mechanic from City. The mechanic includes some brick-built accessories (not sure what it represents) and more spare parts than the parts in the actual set!

Advent 2013 Day 14

The 2013 LEGO Advent Calendars give us three nice little models for Day 14. This time we get a water fountain, wrapped gifts, and another microscale spaceship.

Friends brings us a water fountain, built around a 4L Bar impaled through an assortment of hollow-stud parts facing various directions, and capped with a trans-light-blue rock crystal representing the water (I hadn’t realized you could stick one of those on a 3mm bar end, so that might prove useful in something). City brings us two wrapped gifts to go with the tree they gave us on day 12 (and with the wrapped gifts we got in Friends on that day). Star Wars has a Geonosian Fighter (whatever that is … I certainly don’t remember those in the original 3 movies).

Advent 2013 Day 13

Today is Friday the 13th and we get a weird trio of models…

Friends gives us a sled. It has the new 1×2 panel with the divider which is good for Friends minidolls’ feet, but then it has the stud right under where the doll’s butt would be, so that looks uncomfortable.

Star Wars gives us a battle droid, pretty basic, with two of each kind of arm so you have lots of options there.

But the really weird one is in City. We get a spaceman with a magic wand. Perhaps this is George Clooney’s character from the movie “Gravity”? And just in case we weren’t sure what it was, they included two extra magic wands and an extra helmet. Huh??

Advent 2013 Day 12

We’re halfway there! Here are the LEGO Advent Calendar entries for December 12th:

For once we have two entries that work together! In Friends, we have two Christmas presents, and in City we get a traditional Christmas tree. The Star Wars entry is a microscale Dropship.

Advent 2013 Day 11

Today we have a purse, barbecue, and another mini Star Wars vehicle.

The purse in Friends is a simple bag with a printed $100 money tile and a coin (pearl gold 1×1 round tile), with one extra coin included. Pretty sad in terms of parts count, and nothing really to build (again).

The other two calendars have decently complex builds. The BBQ in City has plenty of trans-orange fire bits and a sausage. The flame shooting out the side seems a little unsafe though… perhaps we need the firefighter to come put that out before the fire gets out of hand? The six-legged walker from Star Wars is a nice mini-model with tons of spare parts.

Advent 2013 Day 10

Today we get tons of loose elements in Friends and City, and two new minifigs.

In Friends we get just an assortment of hair accessories in purple, but nothing to build. City gives us a female firefighter with a sausage on a fork and a nearby fire extinguisher – but a plethora of bonus parts! They give us not one but two extras of the sausage, its holder, and the nozzle for the fire extinguisher, plus a bonus fire hat and yellow cylinder. Star Wars has a clone trooper who probably would like to some of that sausage.