We’ve compiled all the weeks articles into this weekly roundup to keep you up-to-date and help digest the goings-on within the LEGO World. From the launch of this year’s #BuildToGive campaign and the chance to help children in need of play, to four new LEGO Botanicals sets unveiled. We also saw a brand new LEGO Art set revealed in the form of Robert Indiana’s LOVE piece. The long awaited LEGO Horizon Adventures game also dropped during the week along with our first look at a set inspired by it.

A lot more happened during the past week so why not take a look at our recap below.

LEGO Build To Give Is Back – Build A Heart For Children In Need Of Play!

LEGO Art LOVE (31214) Officially Revealed!

LEGO Horizon Adventures – Behind The Bricks & Potential Set Leaks!

LEGO DREAMZzz World Builder Book Revealed By DK Books!

LEGO Insiders Legend Of Zelda Rewards Available To Redeem!

Four New LEGO Botanicals Sets Revealed!

Win A Brickmas Christmas Party At The LEGO Store!

Early Black Friday Deals From FunWhole!

New LEGO Clothing Available – Pyjamas, Jumpers And More!

LEGO Horizon Adventures Now Available On PlayStation, Switch And PC!

LEGO Ideas To Announce New Set Soon!

LEGO Space TicTacToe (5008897) GWP Revealed!

LEGO Horizon Adventures Aloy & Varl vs. Shell-Walker & Sawtooth (77037) Revealed!

LEGO #BuildToGive – How it Makes A Difference!

LEGO Ideas Feature: House Makeover By MaMiMo

FunWhole Cyberpunk Apartment (F9042) Review

Which Flower Or Plant Would You Like To See Next From LEGO?

The new book will take you on a visual journey through LEGO history and revisit some of the most iconic and influential sets, themes and moments from the company’s ten-decade history. LEGO Timelines originally had a publication window of September but has been pushed back a month and will now became available 24th October in the UK and Europe. There is a short wait for North American fans, but only by a few days.

Sadly no physical LEGO elements are included but don’t let that stop you, the book looks like a fantastic read and full of LEGO information for even the most die-hard LEGO fans.

Below are a handful of preview pages. Will you be picking up this book? Share your thoughts in the comment section.

The LEGO Timelines book is by publisher DK Books and available now from all good book retailers and digitally as an e-book.

• Amazon (UK)
• Waterstones (UK)
• Forbidden Planet (UK)
• DK Books (US)

Official details:

LEGO® Timelines takes you on an epic tour through ten decades of history – from before the iconic LEGO brick to today’s amazing sets and beyond!

Pore over pages packed with fascinating facts, stunning images, and amazing details, and discover a treasure trove of iconic LEGO sets, minifigures, accessories, and more.

More than 70 illustrated timelines bring LEGO history to life like never before! From the early days of LEGO Town, LEGO Castle, and LEGO Space to LEGO Pirates, LEGO Star Wars, and LEGO NINJAGO, the timelines provide a fun visual overview of much-loved LEGO themes. Fascinating timelines include the history of LEGO minifigures, the biggest LEGO sets ever, and how a LEGO set is made, and much more. “Sets in focus” showcase iconic LEGO sets through history, too.

Celebrate more than 90 years of LEGO play!

This new publication follows on from the LEGO Minecraft Ideas release earlier this year, although this one focuses on Games. It will feature 50 fun games inspired by Minecraft that you can build and play with from your LEGO collection. The book will come with 50 LEGO elements to help you get started, most of the builds inside the book look simple yet fun.

LEGO Minecraft Games will be hitting stores and online in Summer 2025. Cover is subject to change.

Official details:

Build in some time for bite-size fun with the whole family!

With 50 ideas for LEGO® Minecraft-themed games, puzzles, and challenges, there is something to keep everyone entertained.

Grab this book and your LEGO collection and get ready to level up the fun with your friends and family! Challenge friends to a Nether minecart race. Find the odd crafting block out. Design your own Minecraft-themed fairground and much more!

Comes with 61 Minecraft-themed LEGO elements to add to your collection and help you play games in the book!

Back in 2020 LEGO Ideas and publisher Unbound partnered to fund a specialist LEGO book. Fans then cast their votes and a unique version of the book was produced and put on a very limited run to those that pledged. The book is now available once again on a wider release and features the same content as before but with a slightly different design and size.

The Secret Life of LEGO Bricks: The Inside Story of a Design Icon book is available at selected stockists including Amazon, which currently has around 30% off retail.

LEGO Minecraft Ideas is the first ever book to feature LEGO Minecraft and features over 50 builds inspired by the hugely popular LEGO Minecraft theme. Each page includes inspirational ideas to expand your brick-built Minecraft world and complement the LEGO Minecraft sets you already have. It also includes a small but exclusive LEGO Minecraft build that comes complete with a Diver Minifigure and a pair of Pufferfish.

The LEGO Minecraft Ideas book is available now in the UK and Europe, followed by other regions from 18th June.

Official details:

Level up your LEGO® Minecraft® models with more than 50 building ideas!

Use your LEGO collection to bring your Minecraft builds to life. Inspire budding builders to design a diamond sword, build a busy biome, make a micro mob, create a creeper house, and much more. Challenge family and friends to exciting games that combine the best bits of Minecraft and LEGO building.

Comes with a diver minifigure and all the bricks needed to build an exclusive LEGO Minecraft mini model of an aquatic scene. Get ready to play!

The book, The Secret Life of LEGO Bricks, was originally released in November 2022. with a very unique version that was rather pricey, but don’t fret if you missed out, the book will be available again later this year for around £30. Although the book will feature the exact same content as the crowdfunded one from 2020, it will vary in design and size.

Did you miss out first time around? Will you be picking this up? Let us know via the comments section below.

Official details:

Building the ordinary into the extraordinary brick by brick.

This first official book for Adult Fans of LEGO takes the reader on a visually stunning journey from the very earliest hollow bricks to the complex shapes and building techniques of today.

LEGO bricks are design icons and marvels of engineering. Virtually unchanged for over fifty years, the brick is still at the very centre of LEGO’s ethos: each brick connects to every other brick, allowing the construction of almost anything you can imagine. LEGO minifigures may be the friendly faces of the LEGO world, but bricks in all their different shapes and forms are its very foundation.

The Secret Life of LEGO Bricks explores the brick’s rich history in full colour and unparalleled detail. Granted unprecedented access by the LEGO Group, Daniel Konstantski has interviewed design masters, element testers and the so-called ‘rock stars’, the set designers, to reveal for the first time how and why new LEGO bricks are made.

This is the book the fans have always wanted: a truly behind-the-scenes look at the story of the beloved LEGO brick and the company which makes it, with a wealth of exclusive visual material from the LEGO Archive in Billund.

The book comprises of over 50 different LEGO Halloween themed games, puzzles, challenges, and activities, perfect for family and friends to get involved with. All the models shown in the book were designed a former LEGOLAND California Master Model Builder, Mariann Asanuma.

You can pre-order it today from Amazon for £15.99/$19.99 (price correct at time of posting), it will be published 6th August.

Official details:

Build in some time for frightful fun with the whole family!

With more than 50 all-new Halloween themed games, puzzles, challenges, and activities, there is something to keep everyone entertained this autumn. Grab this book and your LEGOⓇ bricks and get ready for scarily good time with your friends and family! Challenge friends to complete the scary escape room puzzles. Mix up a brick-built potion. Design an escape room. Make it through the monster trap board game and much more!

Comes with 40 Halloween-themed bricks and pieces as well as a skeleton minifigure to help you play the games in the book

The four new LEGO titles will be available in the UK throughout the year. Each book comes complete with a unique and exclusive LEGO Minibuild. Covering a variety of themes, including LEGO Build Your Own Story: Space Adventure, LEGO Temple Quest, LEGO Junior Detective Agency: Who Done It? and LEGO Cute Squad: Corgis Never Quit.

Take a look below and see which one takes your fancy. Keep an eye on all good book retailers, in the UK, for when these books and others hot the shelves.

To judge a book by it’s cover, this one looks fancy from the outside. Presented in hardcover format with a black cover with hand drawn illustrations by Nina Pace. Also included (and carefully stored in an enveloppe on the inside of the back cover) is a collectible botanical print.

The illustrations are quite stunning. Each page dedicated to a flower shows the full (brick built) flower, some more detailed drawings and also some drawings for individual LEGO parts. The combination of these are really appealing. In this review you’ll find some pictures that give an impression of the way the book is illustrated. Other than these illustrations you’ll find full color pictures from sets and alternate builds for the bonsai tree.

In the almanac, 27 flowers/plants trees get these detailed double pages. The way this is done really reminds of a scientific field guide with several details on each bloom, like naming, height, flowering time etc. After this there is a nice blend describing both real life bloom and LEGO version. There are facts about part usages, the history of specific parts. So if you’re more interested in the LEGO side of things, there’s plenty to discover as well!

There are also various other topics discussed in the almanac. This ranges from the plants from plants initiative to tips on arranging your own bouquets or adjusting certain blooms to fit in your arrangements.

There are interviews with several designers included in the book, especially the one with Nicolaas Vás about the history of his Bonsai trees is very interesting. And of course the frogs get their moment in the spotlight as well. Other designers that were interviewed are Astrid Sundorf Christensen, Michael Psiaki, Milan Madge and Anderson Ward Grubb.

Despite the almanac being a mixed bouquet of topics, it’s still very coherent. The interviews are blended in over the course of the 112 pages. This way it’s interesting all the way through. And it certainly welcomes to keep coming back to the book to pick up on a few new facts every time.

When looking at the sets mentioned in the book, there are a couple missing. With the production time for a book like this and the relentless release schedule by LEGO it’s virtually impossible to stay up to date. And we can only assume that LEGO wasn’t willing to share details for upcoming sets with the publisher while the book was in production. It could have been nice to expand upon the existing plants and flowers with some extra designs not included in sets. Deviating from the set collection a bit more would have made the missing sets less obvious. However, it’s not a major issue and will always occur when publishing physical books.

The book has a very fair price at £14.99/$19.99. Prices may vary at different retailers however, since I’ve seen it advertised at Dutch retailer Bol for €13.97. This gives it a similar price to the smaller botanical sets. 

In conclusion, we think this field guide is a perfect gift for any fan of both flowers and LEGO, especially combination of both in the Botanical Collection. And of course treating yourself to this almanac is also part of that. The illustrations are beautiful to look at and the book is informative about both flowers and the LEGO botanical products.

The book is available from March 19th 2024. If you’re planning on buying it, be sure to support your local independent book store.

Disclaimer:

The Brick Post was provided with an advance review copy by publisher Chronicle Books. We thank them for sending us a copy. All views expressed however are our own. Receiving a free copy has not influenced the contents of this review. 

The LEGO Botanical Almanac will be published by next month by Chronicle Books and feature gorgeous illustrations of brick-built flowers, information about them and more, you’ll even find interviews with some of the LEGO Design Team who created them. Theres also an exclusive illustrated print inside, which would no doubt look amazing framed and hung on the wall.

The LEGO Botanical Almanac: A Field Guide to Brick-built Blooms will hit all good book stores 28th March in the UK and Europe. North American fans  can pre-order it from 18th March, be sure to use the code BOTANICAL during checkout to get 25% off (US only).

Check out the preview pages below, don’t forget to let us know what you think of the book via the comments section.