We Built Retro Sets at the Bricks&Figs Museum!
At the LEGO® minifigure museum in Kraków, on July 22, there was an event and contest about building as many bricks as possible. I signed up, and voila! I got an SMS saying I had been selected and they were waiting for me on Saturday at 10:00.
Once I arrived, it turned out that only 10 people had been chosen, and if I remember correctly, 8 showed up. All adults, so my fear that I was too old for this event disappeared 😮💨 I met the face of the museum -> Dżodżo, and Mateusz Kustra! The only certified professional LEGO® builder in Poland 😱
The rules were very simple. We drew a table inside the museum, then drew the set we would build. After finishing it, we received another one, and so on until 20:00 or until supplies ran out. The winner would be the person who built the largest number of bricks in that time.
The prizes for the top 3 places looked excellent:
- LEGO® 92176 Ideas - NASA Apollo Saturn V
- LEGO® 80045 Monkie Kid - Monkey King Ultra Mech
- LEGO® 71369 Super Mario - Bowser’s Castle Boss Battle
The sets we got at the beginning were new and released relatively recently. There was even LEGO® 40580 - Blacktron Cruiser. At the very start I drew the largest one, specifically LEGO® 43225 Disney - The Little Mermaid Royal Clamshell, with 1808 pieces. True, LEGO® 43222 Disney - Disney Castle was still available to draw, and it had as many as 4837 bricks! The organizers hid it from us, though, afraid we would not manage to build it in time. Pff.
The contest started at 10:30, with everyone already sitting at their table with the set they had drawn. I finished the Little Mermaid before 13:00. Then a new Ninjago mech landed in my hands and took me about an hour. Before the planned break at 14:30, I also managed to build a bit of the Astronomy Tower. I had never built Harry Potter before, so it was a pleasant experience.
They took us to a pizzeria for lunch. Margherita gave me the energy needed for building. It also turned out that we had finished practically all the sets that were supposed to last us until 20:00 😎 So the organizers started adding more to the pool, and they turned out to be no ordinary sets! It was the SpongeBob series released between 2006 and 2012.
After finishing the tower, one of those sets landed in my hands: LEGO® 3833 SpongeBob - Krusty Krab Adventures from 2009. The average BrickLink price is 836.70 PLN for MISB, which is what I got. The instruction booklet was rough, the colors did not match, and the famous reddish brown felt like bricks in that color wanted to crumble in my hands. And that was only the beginning of the set’s advantages 😛 Overall, a very nice experience.
When I finished the Krusty Krab, there were 3 new sets left to draw, and I got LEGO® 76423 Harry Potter - Hogwarts Express & Hogsmeade Station. The train turned out to be very pleasant to build. Unfortunately, the set had 1074 bricks. Why unfortunately?
The moment the last boxes left the shelves, the organizers started bringing out real gems…
Space, Blacktron, Western 🤠. Classic sets most of us only stared at in catalogs as kids. My bad luck was that this Hogwarts Express took me until 18:25, and bricks were handed out only until 18:10 😭
See for yourself what other participants were building:
If I had finished building about 10 minutes earlier, I would have had a chance to grab one of the 3 added retro sets:
Farewell, Native American minifigures and space people. I was not meant to know you better 😢
Grande finale
When time ran out, the bricks were counted and the results were announced. I do not remember the exact numbers, but it looked roughly like this:
- 3rd place - 4400 bricks
- 2nd place - 4600 bricks
- 1st place - 4800 bricks
Maybe I did not get the chance to build the Native American village, but I did take first place 😄🎉 Seven hours of building at a pace of 690 bricks/hour gave me the win. As my prize I chose the Saturn rocket. I was missing it in my collection, so I am very happy. Participants outside the podium could grab a cap or a mug.
To sum up, if you see an announcement for the next edition of Bricks&Figs Masters, sign up without hesitation and make sure to reserve a full day. Even if you do not climb onto the podium, you get a full day of building in a friendly atmosphere and free pizza 🍕 And who knows, maybe there will still be some MISBs in the mysterious warehouse 🕵️♂️
Talk soon!