I attended BrickCon virtually from 7 through 10 September 2023 and had a blast as a third time attendee. This year I applied for, interviewed, and was selected to be a part of the virtual staff. In the past, I have done posts about all the activities I participated in. This year, my focus was more on making sure everything went smoothly in virtual land so I don’t have too much to post about specific presentations. I do have a bunch to share though.
Con Printed Program
This year’s theme was “Journeys” as the convention moved from it’s prior location in of many years in WA to the Meydenbauer Center in Bellevue, WA. I had never been to the previous location, but we got a virtual tour of the new location and it looked like a great facility. The wifi there was better too which helped for Zoom connections.
Virtually we started with to tour of the facility, we got to see MOCs being set up, and we got an insider look at the Swag bags and convention model.
As mentioned, I didn’t participate in a ton of presentations, but I did get to participate in a number of the games. We had a 150 piece free build to a theme (pick any 150 pieces in your collection and build to the theme in 1 hour). We also had attendees go out and get set #31135-1: Vintage Motorcycle. We did a number of games with this set to include a speed build of an alternate set found on rebrickable.com, a sock build of one of the models, a sock unbuild of the main model, an alternate build with your own background using any parts in 45 minutes, and finally the free build with your own collection of parts to a theme within 1.5 hours. They were a lot of fun to host and watch and I think the participants enjoyed themselves. We had a lot of talented and creative builders.
One new thing we did this year was hold a Virtual AFOL Spotlight. This was an opportunity to either share pictures or take your web camera and show some builds you were working on or sets you had on display. A bunch of us had a great time chatting and showing off bricks. Hopefully we can continue this event into the future.
Screen shot of Robein Sather’s opening slide from his keynote presentation
This year, the keynote speaker was Robin Sather. He is a LEGO Certified Professional from Canada and a super talented builder. He brought a bunch of large scale Duplo builds to the convention (and there are some videos out there of him crashing it after the show ended). His presentation went though the history of AFOLs, his building history, and his involvement in LEGO Masters New Zealand. Below is a picture of one of his Duplo builds from his presentation. Overall, his talk was great and well received by the virtual attendees.
Picture of a build by Robin Sather from his BrickCon 2023 presentation.
One of the highlights I always enjoy is the swag and merch from BrickCon. Here’s a quick rundown of everything I ordered.
Here’s the convention t-shirt. I thought the logo was great. I like the sea monster in there.
There was another string back pack this year to carry all of the swag. The biggest item was a notebook with a pen and some sticky notes inside. It says it’s for travel plans to conventions and to put down ideas for future MOCs.
This year included two stickers. One from the Brothers Brick and the other being the BrickCon logo.
Also included was a lanyard from Bricks and Minifigs and then a retractable brick separator clip which was awesome.
We got a few items from vendors to include a pack from Brick Warriors with some custom minifigure hair pieces, some printed bricks from the Brick Chick, and some custom capes/aprons from Cape Madness.
Similar to last year, we got a buildable BrickCon logo. Then we got some parts for trading. At the convention attendees can swap parts. As a virtual attendee, you just keep them all unless you have friends to trade with.
Lastly, there was a small build of a minifigure scale moving dolly, a bunch of printed parts from various sets, a custom printed tile with the BrickCon ‘23 logo, another BrickCon custom printed part for a box to carry with the dolly, and then my printed bricks that I ordered.
I also purchased the BrickCon convention model, but I’ll do a separate review on that one another time.
Sorry, not a detailed post for this year. I highly recommend you attend next year. It was only $25 to register for the virtual session so it’s pretty affordable. Hopefully the price remains the same next year. You can follow updates for 2024 and sign up for the mailing list here. I hope to see you in virtual attendance in 2024!
Happy building!