The LEGO® House: Experience Zones (Part 2)

Part 1 went through the green and yellow zones. Now it’s onto the red and blue zones. In no particular order…

Starting in the blue zone, the City Architect area highlights city planning and how bricks can be used to map out cities. The activity here involves a digitally projected city. The city has red, yellow, blue, and green people running around it. Each type of person has different needs which are represented by colors. I forget which is which, but there are trees, homes, and industry.

In order to “play,” you look for an area on the digitally projected map where a lot of people of the same color are building up in an area. I found a bunch of red people. I went to the red tower and found a red 8x8 plate. Then I built my miniature building. After you build your building, take a picture of it at the kiosk, you put your building down on the digital map. The people see it and then they go inside your building and happiness abounds.

My 5-year old didn’t appreciate this one as much as building with plates isn’t quite for 5-year olds. I enjoyed it as an adult. The only challenging part was trying to build. The piles of parts are all white and clear. It was hard to find the exact piece you wanted as there was no change in color. Despite that, it was definitely something different and fun.

The City Architect area

My addition to the City Architect area

More of the City Architect area

Here is the “play” area for City Architect. You can see some of the buildings created by others and some of the pre-made buildings like the stadium. You can see the different colored people walking around the city.

Right next to the City Architect area is the LEGO® DUPLO® Train Builder section. My almost 2-year old loved this section. It was just a giant pile of tracks, engines, train cars, some train drivers, and a few DUPLO bricks. Not much to it other than free play. There were a few tracks set up… not sure if they were from previous guests or if some of the workers pre-build the tracks at the start of the day.

Unlike many places, all of the train engines had full up batteries and worked well. I wonder how often they make sure everything is charged?

My little one wasn’t the only one playing there and I think LEGO did it right to mix in some of the DUPLO activities near the brick activities so older kids and younger kids could have fun in the same area.

Next to the City Architect area is the Robo Lab. There is a screen at the entrance that tells you when the next game will start. There is space for a line to form, but we never had to wait as there were always slots open whenever they were starting a new game and we wanted to play. The worker scans you in and you get assigned a screen. My 5-year old found a stool to stand on and the worker was able to scan my NLS or I in with my kiddo so we could help out.

So the game… it is based on the CITY Arctic theme. The story goes that a scientific research vessel is trying to go get some woolly mammoths and they get caught in a storm. The mammoths and minifigures are frozen in the ice. Your job is to steer a robot around the ice to unfreeze the minifigures so they can break the mammoths free.

The controls are pretty easy to pick up. You can go forward, backwards, turn either way, freeze something (if you need to build an ice bridge over the water), or melt something. You can adjust how much you turn too, but that was a bit more challenging for my 5-year old and the adjustment button didn’t always cooperate.

Time starts, you watch an intro clip, your robots do a dance, and then you get to it. With some help, my 5-year old enjoyed it. Every time you free a minifigure, there is much rejoicing. The system will let you program around 12 moves with the robot. We stuck to 1 or 2 with my 5-year old, but there were some adults there putting more moves in. During one session there were a number of younger kids on our side of the play area and the worker came over to “help” us out.

In the end after the celebration because you got all of the minifigures out and the mammoths were freed, you get a picture sent to your file saying that you did a “great job!” Much like the City Architect activity, this one was quite different and I liked it. It still involved LEGO, but it involved problem solving and thinking in different ways than the building activities. I’m curious if this activity will evolve over the years?

The playing area… some robots out looking for the frozen minifigures (shown by the gray-ish blobs). The larger white hunks are the frozen mammoths.

We did it!

Here we are using the flame thrower to unfreeze a minifigure. You can see the control screen. The top line is where you drag the commands and then hit play. The next row is the different commands that you can drag up to the top row.

The last part of the Blue Zone is the Test Driver area. There are 2 sections. The one shown below is the race track. With a pile of bricks and wheels, you build a car, put it up there against others, and race it to the bottom. You set it up against a gate, there is a button to press, the gate goes down, and you watch to see who gets to the bottom first. Then you can adjust your car to make it better.

The other part has a ramp that is angled downward. It then hits a jump and you have to get your car to go through a circle while airborne. This is where I should have taken a picture of it, but I didn’t. We built a few cars with not much success. A worker stopped by and saw my 5-year old having some trouble and then gave a building tip to help ensure success. It worked and we got our cars through the circle. I won’t say what the tip is in the event you go and want to try it on your own. This part was fun only I found it odd that there is a video that plays if you are successful, but it is not your car. It's some other random car going through.

You can also take pictures of you holding your car with your wrist band and the kiosks there.

Onto the Red Zone. The main part of this section is the LEGO® Brick Builder area. This is essentially a free build area. There are a large amount of pieces and you can build whatever you want. The main area is right next to a brick built waterfall. This area had all sorts of colors of pieces. Some people leave their designs for others to see and some attach their designs to the waterfall. The LEGO® House even has a few fan built creations on display for others to see. Also in this area is a LEGO® Movie 2 build station for Queen Watevra Wa'Nabi. There are a number of different faces and then a bunch of pieces to go with it. Think of it as a giant set #70825-1: Queen Watevra’s Build Whatever Box. Next to those is another area with just yellow pieces for you to build with.

Free builid area next to the brick waterfall

Queen Watevra Wa'Nabi - Build Station

Yellow brick building area. You can see a bunch of the fan sets on display in a case in the back right of the picture. In the back left, you can see 2 of the kiosks for scanning your wristband and taking some pictures of your builds.

Also in the Red Zone is the LEGO® DUPLO® Brick Builder area. There is a DUPLO waterfall and then a large amount of DUPLO pieces to build with. We built a large “road” for my 2-year old to stack the DUPLO figures on. We must have found around 50 to put on the road.

The last section of the Red Zone is the Creative Lab. In looking at videos online, it looks like the LEGO® House changes what they do here often. Our visit was a large castle build. There were tables full of 2x4 bricks of all sorts of colors. You could pick a 16x16 or 16x32 base plate and then build a “brick” that was 10 bricks high out of bricks. It was just the outside, you didn’t have to fill in the entire base plate. My NLS built a 16x32 brick and my 5-year old built a 16x16 brick (with help). My almost 2-year old played with some DUPLO that the awesome LEGO® House worker brought over for him. We did not see the completed product, but by the end of the day it looked they they’d finish the next day.

A LEGO logo in the area.

A description of the Creative Lab

This is where the “castle” was at when we left.

Sign for the Creative Lab

The LEGO® House worker building the castle. You can see a table with bricks to the right.

Here is the instruction booklet for the final product.

I still have more posts about the LEGO® House, but I wanted to include this part and wasn’t sure where to put it so it’ll go here.

As you leave the Experience Zones you pass a machine that makes 2x4 red bricks. You can watch the process in action (it was running one of the 2 days we were there). It spits out the new bricks, bags them, and shoots them out into a box. Then you scan your wrist band, it generates a card with your name, and a design for how to assemble the 6 bricks. The worker there told us the exact number… 900 million-ish if I recall correctly. And if you are wondering they have a DUPLO 6 Bricks bag too. My almost 2-year old got a DUPLO bag, but not the card with the build because he was free to enter the Experience Zones.

Brick building machine

The new bricks on a conveyor belt.

This is where the final product came out.

The card you get with your build and the combination number

Here is what you get. Set number 624210-1: LEGO® House 6 Bricks.

Awesome! That’s my wrap up. As an AFOL, I had a blast in the experience zones. My kids had a blast too. And she even admitted it, my NLS had a great time too. It was definitely worth the time and expense to get there.

That wraps up the Experience Zones. A few more things left to cover. In the mean time, happy building!

The LEGO® House: Experience Zones (Part 1)

There are multiple ways to leave the Masterpiece Gallery and you can go into the different Experience Zones which are color coded (green, blue, red, and yellow). If you want a full up tour, there are plenty of videos on YouTube that show you everything. I will just go through the experiences my family and I had in each area.

So not in any particular order…

The green zone has a character creator section where you there are a number of bins of minifigure parts. Besides legs, torsos, craniums, and hats/hair, there are also a lot of accessories. There was everything from weapons to skate boards to foods. It actually made the task of building a minifigure rather daunting as there were so many options to choose from.

Once you build your minifigure, you can go over to the kiosk, scan your wrist band, and then it asks you to put your minifigure into the background. It takes a picture of it and then you can pick from a number of magazine backgrounds. My skiing, bread holding, mug holding minifigure with a green hat is on “MINI” magazine for being the “minifigure of the year.”

A few notes:
-You can take as many pictures at the kiosks as you want. I originally thought it was limited and if you took one, it would erase the last one. In actuality, it stores them all and then you can download them all through the LEGO House app after your visit. I think my 5-year old took around 8 pictures of minifigures.
-In the character creator area, they have a number of spots with various base plates set down. This allows you to create a whole bunch of minifigures and place them down. A few people made full armies of the same minifigure. Some just made random groups.

Also in the green zone is the Story Lab. This section allows you to make your own stop motion movie. There are about 20 stations or so and on the day I went, there was no line. If there is a line, don’t worry as they limit you to 20 minutes. I was told that if I needed more time they would give it to me since there wasn’t a line.

You watch a short video at the beginning that explains how it works and then you get to it. There are 3 cameras and you take pictures based on what part of the scene you are working. They also have a few special effects that you can throw in.

My 5-year old and I focused on using just one camera in the center of the scene. A tip for everyone… we had too much going on. We wanted to use all of the vehicles and people they gave us so it took too long to adjust everything. At the end of 20 minutes, we had only taken maybe 25 shots so our video was very short. I recommend focusing on moving just 1 or 2 things each frame. Still, it was a lot of fun. In the end, you get to see your video. They add an intro in, you get to select your title, and at the end your name(s) are in the credits. Since my kid and I both worked on it, the credits used me as the producer and my kid as the director and so on.

Your video is tied to your wristband. The worker scans your wristband with a phone to log you in and the video gets saved for downloading later. So don’t worry, you can keep it forever!

Next in the green zone is the World Explorer section. For this section, the kiosk is tied to a bunch of small cameras set up inside of some giant brick built displays. You can rotate the camera and it puts you (a minifigure you) in the scene wherever you take the picture. Then you get a scrap book of all of the pictures you took.

I only did the scrap book thing once as I spent most of my time just looking at the scenes. They are packed with detail, creativity, and humor. If you look closely, you can see a lot of fun things that designers did. Every few minutes, the scene changes to night time and it lights up. Then it switches back to daytime and the lights go off.

A giant ship yard at night

In the center of the shot is a cinema. I like the Octan logo on the building to the top left. It’s also pretty cool how all of the cars have lights that light up to include even the smallest ones.

Another part of the CITY.

The billboard says “got bricks?”

The city again at night

The city in the daytime.

Mountain scene with a castle on top.

The city area with some skyscrapers.

There is a screen with a view from the front of a train going through the city. The odd part was that the train wasn’t even running so it’s obviously pre-recorded.

The English Pub. You’ll notice the minifigure coming out of the pub has a LEGO logo on it. If you watch the video by “What’s Inside,” they interview Stuart Harris who at the time was the Senior Experience Designer at the LEGO® House. He points out his minifigure and we learn that if you work at LEGO, your calling card is your own personalized minifigure. We found another 2-3 of these minifigures throughout the display to include one that was bungee jumping.

The beach, forest, volcano, amusement park scene.

A better shot of the volcano and Fabuland park with a giant fish that the minifigures can explore.

Throughout the LEGO® House, there are numerous display cases with various MOCs inside. Most have signs next to them (like these) that say who built it and where they are from. Some are just items built in one of the Experience Zones that were left and someone at the LEGO® House decided to display them.

Here are a few pictures of fan models. They are covered in glass so I apologize for the reflections you see.

Some small scenes with minifigures

A brick built LEGO museum

A brick built ad for “The LEGO Movie”

Onto the yellow zone… first up was the critter creator. You can build some sort of creature to live in the brick vegetation. There is also section (that I didn’t take a picture of) where you can build creatures and they go on a table. Every few minutes the table lights up, music plays, and it vibrates. The workers said the game is to start your figure on the outside and see if you can race someone else to the center of the table. My 5-year old just enjoyed dancing to the music and we have a video of one of the workers dancing along. You can also race your creatures down a slope with these snake things that move. We didn’t have as much luck with this section.

Here is my critter

A view looking back… you can see the slope where you can race critters down past the snake things and a build area.

Here is the picture I took of my critter at the kiosk

Next in the yellow zone is a Flower Artist section. This section was made up of various yellow pieces to make flowers. They have most of the stems pre-made and then you just create what you want. It was interesting to see what people came up with based on the bricks available. I pictured my flower below. If you go to the LEGO® House website, you’ll see that they are building with colored bricks so they must switch out the bricks after a while so you can build different types of flowers.

Also, be sure to look up while you are there as they are some brick built butterflies flying overhead while you build the flowers.

Next in the Yellow Zone is the Fish Designer. You build a sea creature out of bricks that fits in a specified space, you scan it in, you pick out digital eyes and a mouth, and then on the screen, you watch your fish swim through a pipe into a big fish tank. My 5-year old enjoyed this section the best. We may have around 30 pictures of various sea creatures from my kid.

My fish on the screen swimming through the tank.

One of the many my 5-year old built. This one is an eel.

My fish from the picture the kiosk gives you. The scan didn’t catch all of the angles very well so my tail shows just as a 1x1 brick versus a slope.

One thing I did not capture is the DUPLO® contributions. In going to the LEGO® House, we were concerned that my 2-year old would not have much to do. We figured that my NSL or I would have to hang with the younger kiddo while the other one went around with the older one. We were proven wrong. It seemed like every zone had a DUPLO® play area. The yellow zone had the LEGO® DUPLO® Mood Builder section. They had some stop motion videos playing of Simon the Snail and a few other creatures and they change their emotions based on what happened. Then in a giant pile, you could build your own creature with various faces/emotions. Most importantly, the younger kiddo could play while the older kiddo played. This worked out great! I have some pictures of the other DUPLO® sections that I will post in part 2.

My wrap up for this first post… what a great experience! The activities were great for kids, but even as an adult I enjoyed them. I do wish I had more time to look at all of the fan-built MOCs throughout the Experience Zones, but kiddos don’t want to do that when there are all sorts of fun activities to do. I’ll post more on the Experience Zones soon. In the meantime, happy building!