Peter Reid's 'bar with towball' idea

Our brief re-exploration of the LEGO® piece 3.2 Shaft W/5.9 Ball (Design ID 22484) seems to be turning into an unexpected parts festival! I was pleased to hear from Peter Reid with a new creation that uses this part. He calls it The Digital Ombudsman.

Neo-Nexo Ice Planet Knights

It fascinates me that, when planning the LEGO® NEXO KNIGHTS™ theme, the LEGO Group seemingly took inspiration from AFOLs. Specifically, the idea of building new models using the colour schemes of olden-day LEGO themes, such as the Neo-Classic Spacers do. The colour scheme the designers chose for Nexo Knights in 2016 clearly riffs on the LEGO Space theme from 1992 called Ice Planet 2002.

This made me wonder what a modern-day AFOL of super Space-building skills... say, Tim Goddard... might create for Ice Planet using Nexo Knights pieces. Thanks (once again) to the excellent support of the AFOL Relations & Programs team at the LEGO Group and Tim's incredible building skills, the idea has now come to fruition... so let's see how he got on!

I was given an interesting brief for this article: “the Nexo Knights range has a definite flavour of Ice Planet 2002: explore”. There is no denying the colour palettes overlap greatly; you just need a little white to mix with the blue and orange shades and you are almost there, albeit with a medieval twist to the theme. So I have created a few models investigating how the new pieces in the range can be used to add a bit of frostiness to spacey creations, how useful these new moulds are, plus a few other observations along the way.

Nexo-Classic Space: Peter Reid

All week we've had excellent Spacers (Drew Hamilton, Jason Briscoe, Tim Goddard, Jeremy Williams and David Alexander Smith) building gorgeous things with this bunch of new LEGO ® parts. Today it is the turn of Pete Reid; co-author of LEGO Space: Building the Future and the designer of 21109 Exo Suit, with its wee adorable robot turtle. Once again he has employed the masterful skills of Chris Salt to hone the loveliness of the imagery.

Grab a cup of tea first. Strong, British tea. You're going to want to scroll slowly. Over to Pete...

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Asteroids

First up, a homage to a classic arcade game, Asteroids. Only a couple of pieces are actually attached to other pieces. I'm not sure laying out elements like this counts as a proper LEGO model.

Nexo-Classic Space: David Alexander Smith

We're back for another day of Classic Space builds inspired by some of the new LEGO® parts released this year. Following hot on the trail of Drew Hamilton, Jason Briscoe, Tim Goddard and Jeremy Williams we have David Alexander Smith. I first noticed David because he creates all sorts of odd things in a primitive style but most recently he has become known for his charming series of Space Dinos which emulate not only Classic Space but also other toys of the 1980s.

I sent David the same parts as everyone else except for the white 2x2 wedges, and he used all the supplied parts in one creation. Let's hand over to him now to see what he made...

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The little bag of Nexo Knights elements I was sent immediately got my sci-fi juices flowing. As a Classic Space builder the pieces cried out to me to be used in a whole host of ways, although I suspect a space tortoise wouldn’t be the most obvious choice.

Nexo-Classic Space: Jeremy Williams

It's day four of our investigation of seven new 2016 LEGO® elements. So far Drew Hamilton, Jason Briscoe and Tim Goddard have all taken on our super Spacer challenge: today, it's the multitalented Jeremy Williams (Bricking It). Without further ado I will hand over to Jez.

Pilot seat

This uses the Nexo Bot torso element (Design ID: 24078) as a control column, allowing me to attach two levers and a display.

The newer style of 1x1 tile with clip introduced in 2013 which has a C-shaped clip (15712) fits onto the torso nicely, whereas the old, more angular clip (2555) doesn't fit as well, for some strange reason. This warrants further investigation!

I also placed the seat in a mockup cockpit, shown below.

Nexo-Classic Space: Tim Goddard

Today it is the turn of Tim Goddard (Rogue Bantha) to have a play with New Elementary's selection of new 2016 LEGO® parts (hot on the heels of Jason Briscoe yesterday and Drew Hamilton the day before). Regular readers will know that Tim is the co-author of LEGO Space: Building the Future but might not have caught up with the fact that he has launched a project on LEGO Ideas, the subject of which may surprise you!

Meanwhile, back in space, Tim used each of the 'classic Classic Space' coloured parts we sent (namely Bright Blue [TLG]/Blue [BL] and Medium Stone Grey [TLG]/Light Bluish Gray [BL]) to create this sweet microscale ship for us.

Nexo-Classic Space: Jason Briscoe

Welcome to part two of our investigation into some of the new parts the LEGO® Group have released in 2016. In part one, Drew Hamilton created a Utility Bot in a suitably Spacey room. Today it's the turn of Jason Briscoe (Brizzasbricks) to see what Spacey stuff he could make with the selection and he really went for it! Thanks also to the awesome Chris Salt, who did some awesome photoshoppery to make some of Jason's builds even Spacier and awesomier.

Citroën DS-inspired Rover

"This was my favourite build and the one that I spent the most time on. Whilst it does not look much it took a few iterations to get to the final version. It uses four pairs of the white 2x2 wings (Design IDs 24299 and 24307): one pair for the front spoiler, two pairs for the front and rear mudguards and one pair for a pillar screen support. I also managed to squeeze in a couple of the 1x1 plate with vertical tooth (15070) to create some retro rear light clusters. The styling is late Classic Space and takes a few design cues from sets like 6842 Small Space Shuttle Craft from 1985."

Nexo-Classic Space: Drew Hamilton

We have a fun week ahead! In January the LEGO® Group sent a delicious selection of new parts, mostly from the Nexo Knights theme, for New Elementary to play with and we will be publishing the results over the next week. Come back every day to check it out. As you can see below there were a lot of Neo-Classic Space colours in there so I couldn't resist asking a bunch of Spacers to come up with something Spacey!

Our chief minifig is surprise

A brief break from our Elves coverage to look at a Star Wars set: 75082 TIE Advanced Prototype in the hands of Jeremy Williams (Bricking It).

Let’s start with an admission: outside of the six films, my knowledge of the wider Star Wars Expanded Universe is pretty limited. Thus I’m not too familiar with the Rebels series, so I’m going to judge this set on its own merits. And it stands up extremely well. (Except that it doesn’t actually stand up very well at all, owing to those folding wings. But I’m getting ahead of myself).

Six for the proud walkers

Our first Star Wars review for 2015 comes from the multi-talented Jeremy Williams (Bricking It), who examines one of the smallest new sets of the range.

The Star Wars films (including the Clone Wars animated series) continue to provide The LEGO® Group (TLG) with plenty of source material for small ‘battle pack’ sets. These typically include four minifigs (often with at least two duplicates) and some additional hardware. Today I’m reviewing a 2015 set in this series: 75089 Geonosis Troopers.

Let’s start with the minifigs: two pairs of clone troopers (a regular pair and an airborne ‘paratrooper’ pair) all clad in camouflage (or are they just dusty?) dark orange armour.

Play that same song

In case you're one of those people who have never watched Star Wars, let me explain the location which is the subject of this LEGO® summer Star Wars set, 75052 Mos Eisley Cantina: it's a seedy bar crowded with exotic alien creatures from the wrong side of the space-tracks, a "wretched hive of scum and villainy" where booze-fueled tempers continually boil over into senseless violence, usually resulting in death or dismemberment. In other words: the obvious choice for a child's toy.

Fairy Bricks Big Raffle 2014

I'm involved in a charity called Fairy Bricks; the idea of which is to raise money to buy LEGO® sets for children's hospitals and hospices - so far, over £20,000 (US$34,000) worth! It began life as a raffle on Brickset last year and is now a registered charity in the UK, but assists hospitals all over the globe. The Brickset Forum is full of AFOLs who know where to get heavily discounted LEGO, so the funds Fairy Bricks raise is used to get the biggest possible LEGO bang for the buck.

Exo Suit: tease and reveal

Having been starved for the best part of a year, in the last fortnight AFOLs have enjoyed a glut of information about the next LEGO® Ideas set; 21109 Exo Suit, redesigned by LEGO Senior Designer Mark Stafford based on the submission by AFOL Peter Reid. There are already several set reviews online so I'm mixing mine up a bit by interspersing it with a review of the teaser marketing campaign driven by fans.

Benny's Neo Classic Space Ship

Is 2014 just the best year of LEGO® sets ever?? Of course not... that was 1979. But this summer's wave of new sets contains some absolutely thrilling sets. If it weren't for the upcoming LEGO Ideas Exo-Suit, I'd say that my most anticipated set of 2014 was 70816 Benny's Spaceship, Spaceship, SPACESHIP!

Of course, I'm biased because this set represents the ultimate in nostalgia for me, but that also brought a huge weight of expectation to this build. Could a modern set really evoke the kind of love I felt for my Space sets as a kid? I was really worried it wouldn't capture the intangible magic of Classic Space and just leave me feeling like it was any other modern-day Space set but in blue/grey/trans-yellow. I'm happy to report that this was not the case at all.

LEGO® Ideas Exo Suit: the logo

Exciting news today; the LEGO® CUUSOO team have given New Elementary readers this exclusive first look at the official logo to be used on their forthcoming set, the Exo Suit! The set will be released in August 2014. Knowing how special the Exo Suit is to the fan community, the CUUSOO team took the unusual step of deciding to work hand-in-hand with AFOLs to decide how the set should be packaged and marketed. So the designer of the original Exo Suit, British AFOL Peter Reid, assembled a team and I was fortunate enough to be included.

Super Surma Bros.

I've mentioned in the past; one thing which really interests me is when fans push their love of LEGO® into original, unusual territory. I was simply going to post a link to these guys from New Elementary's Twitter account, but I couldn't really compress my love for them into 140 characters so here's a proper post instead.

The Surma Bros. are Marcin and Przemek; two Polish comic illustrators who, as the name suggests, are brothers. For two years they've been posting an illustration of an old LEGO set every Sunday on their blog, Sur m'ale Gobros. I only found them after they posted on Eurobricks recently, although I see they got some love from The Brothers Brick back in 2012. While disappointed I'm so late to the party, it does mean I've been gorging myself for hours on dozens of beautiful images.

Castle meets Space

On reviewing and rebuilding duty today we have James Pegrum, a prolific builder famed for his British history series (his model of WWII code-breaking computer Colossus sits on display in Bletchley Park next to the real thing!) and his realistic Castle builds. At 2013's STEAM exhibit in Swindon, UK, he built the massive castle and grounds for The Land of Tigelfah group display and recently he's entered seven categories in CCC XI (the eleventh annual Colossal Castle Contest). Given these honourable credentials I thought it would be interesting, or perhaps horribly cruel, to send him 70806 Castle Cavalry.

Thrown together

A double-header today, as we have two reviewers that live together. Yvonne Doyle features in Megan Rothrock's new The LEGO Adventure Book Volume 2 and The LEGO Play Book and Peter Reid is co-author of LEGO Space: Building the Future. His Exo Suit model is going to be the next CUUSOO set to be released later this year. I assigned them 70800 Getaway Glider and 70807 MetalBeard's Duel and as things turned out, Yvonne did the official builds and Pete took on my challenge of building alternate models from the sets.

Peter Reid's favourite Classic Space LEGO® elements

Inventive AFOLs have been creating their own LEGO® “themes” for a long time now. For example, Lord of the Rings was a popular MOC choice for many AFOLs long before the Peter Jackson films arrived and became licensed by TLG. But my favourite AFOL-invented theme has to be Neo Classic Space (NCS); models that respectfully bring the “Classic Space” era of LEGO sets (1978-1987) into the 21st Century with new techniques and elements mixed in with the old.

NCS is showcased in the new book LEGO® Space: Building the Future, which (just in case you missed it) I published a cool little teaser trailer for yesterday. Although I’m yet to see an actual copy, I'm expecting a science fact/fiction narrative that builds on the disparate stories suggested by those original Classic Space sets, all richly illustrated with the exquisite models of Peter Reid and Tim Goddard - as you can see from this exclusive preview image of a perfectly-formed little shuttle; the LL-290. Click/tap to enlarge.

LEGO Space: Building the Future - Exclusive Trailer!

It's a book... it's a cool book... it's such a cool book, it has its own teaser trailer. And the guys behind LEGO® Space: Building the Future have been kind enough to give New Elementary readers the first ever look!