advent calendar – Page 21 – Bill Ward's Brickpile

Advent 2012 Day 5

Since it was after midnight when I posted Day 4, I’m going to put up Day 5 now too…

In Day 4, we got a staircase with a magic wand in City, so now of course a brick wall with an axe hanging from it is the obvious next step… Obviously. I suppose these are all related in some way to firefighting? The yellow thing could be a fire extinguisher, and firemen use axes, and brick walls are fire-resistant…

I don’t know what the brown thing is in Star Wars… some kind of land-based vehicle I assume. I don’t really know much about Star Wars outside of the original three movies, and I don’t think this was from those.

The Friends set has a lovely little snowman – finally something that makes sense.

Advent 2012 Day 4

I’m playing catch-up on the Advent calendars, having started blogging on December 4th. This is the fourth entry and that brings us up to date (though it’s now after midnight as I write this, so we’re into day 5).

In Friends, we get skis and ski poles, which makes sense. Star Wars brings us a micro Star Destroyer, okay. But in City we have …. stairs? And a magic wand? What is this for?

Advent 2012 Day 3

Day three in the Advent calendars brings us a Christmas tree, a decorative lamp with an ornamental sprig of green, and some kind of Gungan catapult thingy.

I had to double-check the boxes to confirm that the Friends set gives us the lamp, and the City set gives us the tree. The oval shield in trans-purple with the printing on it in the Star Wars set is a really neat part. I really like the streetlamp design, but the tree is a pretty common design – every year there’s one very much like this in the Advent calendar set(s).

Advent 2012 Day 2

The second door in each of our LEGO Advent Calendar sets gives us Jar Jar Binks in the Star Wars set, a pink sled in the Friends set, and a chainsaw with log in the City set.

The chainsaw is a clever build, using two pistols (or gas pumps, or fire hose handles, if you like) and a 1×1 brick with studs on four sides. The sled is pretty simple, but it includes “Panel 1 x 2 x 1 with Rounded Corners and Central Divider” in pink! And the less said about Jar Jar the better.

Advent 2011 Recap

Thanks for following along for the past 24 days as I’ve opened and built the models for the 2011 City and Star Wars Advent calendars. Now that I’ve opened all 24 days, let’s review what we have got. Click each little image to see a full size picture.

First, let’s review all the calendar items, grouped by days:

Days 1-4

Days 5-8

Days 9-12

Days 13-16

Days 17-20

Days 21-24

Both calendars included a wide variety of minifigs and models. Here you see the models organized by type. There were also a lot of extra parts – LEGO always includes an extra one of each of the smaller parts included in any set, and each of these daily mini-sets always came with extra parts just like any other LEGO set. The combined pile of City and Star Wars extra parts is pretty impressive.

Figs

Vehicles

Things

City Police Station

Extra Parts

Advent 2011 Day 24

Day 24 of the LEGO City and Star Wars Advent Calendars for 2011. Merry Christmas Eve!

Today is the final day of the Advent calendars. Both calendars give us Santa Claus.

In City we have a traditional Santa Claus, the same way that LEGO has been producing him for years in Advent calendars. He has a sack on his back with presents (two 1×2 tiles) and the same hat and beard that they usually use. The torso is not printed, which I found a little disappointing. But we also get a cute little fireplace along with Santa complete with hot coals. Some might say that was cheap compared to the flames that LEGO usually put into fireplaces, but to be honest coals are probably more accurate anyway.

Star Wars brings us a cute Yoda Claus figure. Or is it Santa Yoda? Anyway, his head is very detailed, but rubbery – not the Yoda I have from older Star Wars sets. The cute printed torso is awesome, and they should have used the same torso in the City calendar if you ask me, just without the green hands.

Advent 2011 Day 23

Day 23 of the LEGO City and Star Wars Advent Calendars for 2011. Merry Christmas Eve Eve!

In the City calendar we get a dog and two bones. Three elements and one of them is extra. LAME. I like that it’s the new style of dog, but still pretty lame in terms of parts count.

On the Star Wars side, we get a cute little Christmas tree made out of green plates. If you look carefully, you may notice the jumper plates are the new style, with the fingernail grooves. I guess they’re jumper tiles now.

Tomorrow’s the last day of the advent calendar, Christmas Eve. I’ll be recapping the whole series, so check in to see what we ended up with!

Advent 2011 Day 22

Day 22 of the LEGO City and Star Wars Advent Calendars for 2011. Happy Solstice!

City brings us another snowmobile, this one themed in blue and white … a police model, perhaps.

In Star Wars we get another cute little mini ship, the A-Wing (seen in Return of the Jedi) but I don’t think this one is nearly as good as the ones we’ve seen before. It’s just a few parts and I don’t really think it’s as well done as some of the others. Compare it to the Snowspeeder for example.

Here we see the whole family of snowmobiles and trailer:

Advent 2011 Day 21

Day 21 of the LEGO City and Star Wars Advent Calendars for 2011.

In City, we have a trailer for yesterday’s snowmobile.

Star Wars brings us another nifty micro model… this one is the UCS Millennium Falcon scaled down to the size it would be if a minifig built it. (Well actually a bit too big for that, but scale is a fuzzy thing with LEGO anyway.)

Here we see the snowmobile trailer hitched up:

And here are the last two days’ Star Wars models, ready for combat:

Advent 2011 Day 20

Day 20 of the LEGO City and Star Wars Advent Calendars for 2011.

City seems to be switching to a new theme, perhaps for the final stretch toward Christmas.

In Star Wars, we have a UCS TIE Fighter at minifig scale. It seems odd to me that LEGO have never produced a TIE fighter UCS set – they’ve done an Interceptor and Vader’s TIE Advanced, but not a bog standard TIE fighter. Leave that to the fans, though… here’s a TIE Fighter MOC that looks just like what LEGO ought to have made as a set.