Full confession… I have never attended a LEGO fan convention before. I have been to a few shows where people display their MOCs, but that’s about it.
I heard about Brickworld Virtual 2020 that was held back in April after the fact and was excited to see it would be held again in May. I registered online and “attended” my first fan convention on 16 May 2020.
A bit of history… Brickworld was started by Bryan Bonahoom and Adam Reed Tucker with its first show back in 2007. Since then it has grown to Brickworld Chicago convention/expo and then expos in Milwaukee, Ft. Wayne, outside of Detroit, and Indianapolis. It was recently purchased by Mark Larson who had the misfortune of buying it during a global pandemic.
Not willing to give up, Mark has put together a virtual convention. You buy a ticket ahead of time and at the time of the convention, you log into your account and can join various ZOOM rooms to see presentations, MOCs, and interact with other fans.
Before I get into my list, if you missed out you can still attend virtual shows on 27 June 2020, 31 October 2020, and 12 December 2020. So you didn’t miss out if this sounds cool.
If you need more persuasion, keep reading…
1. Interact with your fellow fans of LEGO in real time.
I don’t live near an English speaking LUG and I don’t have any friends who are AFOLs. My brick interactions are with my kids, with my Non-LEGO Spouse (NLS) who tolerates my obsession, and one sided interactions with Recognized LEGO Fan Media (RLFM). This show was a great opportunity to interact with fans like me and as far as I know, COVID is not transmitted over the internet.
Not going to lie… I was super pumped to be a fan after the “convention.” It’s great to see I’m not the only fan out there.
2. Minimal cost compared to attending Brickworld Chicago in person.
My ticket to attend was $9. Granted that didn’t include my internet service provider fee, but I pay that regardless so I don’t think it counts.
If I were to go to Brickworld Chicago, I’d have to fly the ~4,300 miles to Chicago, figure out lodging, transportation, food, and be 7 hours off of my normal time. Instead I hooked my NLS’s laptop up to the TV, entertained my kiddos for a bit, had dinner, got my kiddos to bed, and logged back in for more brick fun without spending any funds I wouldn’t have spent on a normal Saturday evening. No complaints from me there.
As a joke, the Brickworld website says parking is $50 per tire. I thankfully parked offsite and avoided that fee.
3. Participate in presentations by various experts in the LEGO fan world.
There were 10 presentations by various experts. The May show included the following:
-Fractals and Functions and Knots, Oh my! with Brian Hirt from LOLUG
-LEGO Vines with Barbara Hoel from WisLUG
-Homeschooling with LEGO bricks with Maddie Jones from VirtuaLUG
-Building LEGO Domes with Peter Strege from EuroBricks
-LEGO® – Community Q&A with Jan Beyer, Community Manager from the LEGO Company
-Train Community Roundtable led by Nate Flood from LOLUG
-LEGO® – My Life in LEGO Bricks with Sam Johnson from the LEGO Company
-Medieval Roofs by David Gregory from IndyLUG
-LEGO® – Build a Tower with Your Bricks by Bo Stjerne Thomsen from LEGO Chair of Learning
-Flexible Surfaces with Barbara Hoel from WisLUG
I wanted to attend most of these, but wanted to see other things too so I missed out on a bunch. My NLS home schools my oldest kiddo (even before COVID) so she attended the homeschooling presentation and got a few ideas for things to do in the future with school. You can see my LEGO based home school day here. I also caught the end of the Community Q&A and the full LEGO® – My Life in LEGO Bricks presentation, but I’ll mention them later. Some good info was shared by many. Thank you to those who presented!
4. See amazing fan built creations in real-time and interact with their designers
Modular City - Peter Strege
-If you missed the May 2020 Brickworld Virtual, you should check out his Flickr stream. It is here on Flickr. He makes some amazing MOCs to include some impressive building MOCs with cool domes and eye catching color schemes. Definitely take a look!
Bricks in the Middle - Kevin Hinkle
-I missed this one…
Great Ball Contraption (GBC) - Bob Luzenski
-More on this one later…
Star Wars® Creations - Carey Warren/Kevin Wagner
-I couldn’t find the display online that I saw to post a link to, but it was an impressive Tatooine display with the Cantina and creatures outside. I didn’t get to ask any questions because there was an excited young fan peppering the builder with questions. It’s all good. Great work and thanks for displaying!
Harry Potter® Creations - Eric Krans
-I found a clip of Eric’s display online. Go to the 2:45 mark if you don’t want to watch the whole thing to see the Harry Potter display. It’s pretty impressive and includes a lot of moving parts… some of which aren’t shown on the linked video. Thanks for displaying Eric!
Guilds of Historica - Eurobricks
-I didn’t spend too much time in this room, but the people involved in the Guilds of Historica forums in Eurobricks shared some of their builds. They had a schedule over the convention of who shared over which time block. I spent about 10 minutes watching a builder show his stuff. If you want to see more, you can check them out on Eurobricks here or on Flickr here.
Smurfs / Futurama - Kevin Lauer / Matt DeLanoy
-I did not see the Futurama display, but I did see the Smurfs display being shown by Kevin Lauer. I found an older post talking about it on the Brother’s Brick here. I’m not sure how much has changed since this older post, but it was cool to see. I spent most of the time watching it trying to explain to my 6 year old what Smurfs were…
Dragon Bricks & Activities - Alysa Kirkpatrick & Mark Haase
-I didn’t make it to this room…
Art and Mosaics - Abbie and EJ Bocan - AbbieDabbles
-I briefly checked into this room, but they were talking about some custom minifigures that they were selling. I didn’t spend much time here.
Still Life Creations / Blacklight Creations - Barbara Hoel
-I got to spend a few minutes in Barbara’s room when she was showing a blacklight creation. For those of you not familiar with Barbara’s work, you can see her Flickr page here. The display she showed was actually shown by the Beyond the Brick team back in November 2019. You can see that video here on YouTube. I wanted to ask a few questions, but my kiddos were ready to move on at that point. Barbara, I’ll bug you some other time…
Brick 101 - David Pickett
-I didn’t catch this one…
There was one other room and I’m not sure which one on the list it was. The individual was showing off a center build while explaining how to build various things. My kiddos were around when I went into the room and they didn’t find it interesting so we moved on. I would have liked to have watched for a bit to see if I could learn any good building techniques.
5. Hear from and ask questions to members of the LEGO Company
I think the LEGO Company has done a great job getting its employees out and about to interact with the fan community. With the pandemic, they’ve been doing lots of live streams and interviews with the RLFM teams around the globe so we get to hear about the company straight from the source. Brickworld Virtual had multiple LEGO Company employees present, but I only caught part of one session and then a full session of another. The first one I watched was of Jan Beyer.
Jan is listed as the Manager of AFOL Network Events (such as Brickworld). I unfortunately missed his talk, but I caught the end of the Q&A session.
Question one was related to regional releases and why items can’t be purchased everywhere. The response was that sometimes LEGO can’t get the product license everywhere and sometimes retailers in some locations don’t want those products. He did mention that LEGO was working to get rid of regional exclusives as we have seen recently with the Chinese New Year sets.
Question two was related to regional exclusivity and the LEGO® House sets. Why could they only be released in Denmark, the UK and Ireland? The answer was with the packaging. It was not built for worldwide releases as the plan was to only sell them at the LEGO® House in Denmark. I own all three sets and could not tell you what is different on the packaging, but there you have it. Jan mentioned LEGO is looking to correct this in the future.
The next talk I saw was called “My Life in LEGO® Bricks” and was given by Sam Johnson. If you’re not familiar with Sam, he’s currently a designer on the Ideas team and has worked on City, Jurassic Park,
Legends of Chima, Nexo Knights, and Harry Potter. The picture is a few years old as it is from when the Dr. Who set came out in 2015, but it’s the same person.
His talk was about how LEGO goes from concept to actual sets. He used NEXO Knights and described how it was created, showed some concept art, explained the processes used, showed some initial models, and then showed some of the prototypes that eventually became one of the final models. I found the talk pretty interesting as it was cool to see how they go from idea to a final model.
There were a bunch of questions about Q&A. I asked if they were seeing any design delays due to having to work at home. He said he didn’t think so as they are used to connecting through digital means and future sets seem to be on track. He also mentioned that designers who like to build with physical bricks versus the digital design programs they have can go into HQ to get the bricks they need to build at home. Not a bad deal if you ask me.
Two others that stuck out to me:
-He said something to the effect of the LEGO Ideas Playable LEGO Piano is coming soon and it is awesome.
-While he was not involved with the Bricklink AFOL Designer Program he said it was a great program and LEGO did not see it as a competitor to the LEGO Ideas platform. I see that as good news. We can hope it picks up again someday.
6. Interact with LEGO Masters contestants
I checked into this room to see it quite busy. At the time there were around 45 people. The hosts were from a Bricks and Minifigs store. Contestants that I saw at the time were Boone, Jessie, and Emmanuel. At the time I checked in a number of younger viewers were asking questions to the contestants. There was a decent line in the chat to ask questions and I didn’t have a burning question so I left, but I was glad to see them taking the time to encourage younger fans.
7. Talk to vendors about their LEGO based products and maybe score some deals
I didn’t sign up to attend with the hopes of buying things so I didn’t visit any of the vendors present, but there were quite a few listed who were selling their items. Had I been looking for something, it definitely would have been a good opportunity to hit up some vendors.
In addition to the vendors, Brickworld was selling its own swag. I bought the convention printed 1x8 brick for $3.50 (including shipping). I’ll add a picture of it to this post once I get it. They also had some shirts for sale which looked pretty cool, but I did not buy.
8. Show off your own MOCs to the Beyond the Brick hosts
Joshua & John Hanlon from the YouTube.com channel Beyond Beyond the Brick led a session called “You Show Us!” This was your opportunity to present what you were working on to the hosts. Both times I checked in, it was just Joshua. He was building one of the BrickLink AFOL Designer Program sets while talking with people. The first time I checked in, someone was showing him pictures of some original Star Wars helmets he had built. The second time, a younger builder was doing his best to show a build he was working on.
I put a few questions into the chat window for Joshua (lesson learned… I put “Josh” in the chat… sorry!) and he got to them when he was done chatting with the kid in front of me. I asked if Beyond the Brick had any plans to change at all and if they plan to continue the live stream format they have been using during the COVID-19 period. The answers were they plan to stick with the format they have for now and they plan to continue with live streams.
9. GBC!!!!!!
If you have never seen a LEGO Great Ball Contraption (GBC) in action, you are missing out. There are some very talented builders out there who have figured out the mechanics to move balls through various features and they are very creative. I found a few videos of parts of what I saw on YouTube here and here. My kiddos and I watched the GBC for a bit and we saw it with the room lights on and then when the lights were off and it was lit by glow in the dark balls and LED lights. It was very cool!
10. Play interactive an interactive robotic game online.
I’m aware that most LEGO Conventions have games you can play and while many of them are hard to do over the internet, the Super Robo Rally by Steve Hassenplug is not a problem. I am definitely not an expert with this game, but basically he has a game board with robots on it and users have to program brick built robots through a series of turns to win the game against competitors. Beyond that I won’t try to explain it because I would probably get it wrong. Definitely a fun opportunity if this is something you are into. Just be sure to sign up for one of the slots ahead of time.
Bravo if you’ve made it this far… I realize the virtual experience doesn’t compare to meeting in person, but given the situation, I applaud the Brickworld team for executing the idea and moving out with it. They had a tech support room you could join with questions and many of the rooms had moderators or the exhibitor spoke up every now and then to explain how they wanted to run things.
Did you attend Brickworld Virtual in April or May 2020? What were your thoughts?
In the meantime, happy building!