Back in August, we shared Wayne Tyler’s first and second-day experience attending the LEGO Inside Tour. (We highly recommend you read those first). Today we bring you the third and final chapter in that installment ahead of sign-ups for the 2023 tours opening up later this month. The guided tour is a “once-in-a-lifetime experience” for the biggest LEGO fans that includes a factory tour, chats with designers, special access through normally restricted areas, and lots of amazing swag.

We’ve arrived at the last day of the tour (which is actually just a half day) and it was spent entirely inside LEGO House.

Mike Ganderton, LEGO House Head of Experience Development, photo courtesy of Alex Kulvelis

A lot of the information presented during our tour of the House can be found in the book, Building a Dream, among others. What made this part of the LEGO Inside Tour (LIT) special was that we not only got to learn about LEGO House, we got to experience it. And like the kids who were there with parents for the day, we explored, played, learned, and shared the various aspects and experiences that is LEGO House with our LIT family. Having bonded over two intense days of behind-the-scenes tours, this was our chance to just enjoy ourselves with our newfound friends and kindred spirits.

After the usual gathering in the LEGO Forum room to start, we were divided into two groups for our personalized tour. One group was led by Mike Ganderton, Head of Experience Development at the House and our group was headed up by Stuart Harris, Master Builder for LEGO House.

And headed up is literally what we did! We started at the bottom of the staircase in the middle of the House and went directly to the top to the Masterpiece Gallery, then worked our way back down through the various experience zones. Unlike other portions of the tour, there were no restrictions on taking pictures—so collectively I think our LIT group probably took close to 5,000 photos while on the House tour.

Tree of Creativity at the center of LEGO House, photo courtesy of Arlett Michael & Michael Kühlberger

We started by clustering around Stuart Harris at the bottom step of the staircase as he talked about the Tree of Creativity, what went in to designing and building it and some of the easter eggs that can be found. As we ascended, he talked about process of assembling it and the sets and themes that can be found on the branches.

Stuart Harris talking about the Tree of Creativity, photo courtesy of Wouter van Rij and Jan van Kampenhont

An interesting note here shared from the Mike Ganderton group, some of the sets seen on the branches were bought on BrickLink (the monorail & Barracuda), which made me laugh. Even LEGO House had problems getting monorail parts! (Apparently, LEGO archives don’t have too many extra old sets laying around that can be opened and displayed… who knows, maybe you sold a classic set that is in LEGO House!)

Section of monorail on the Tree of Creativity

The Masterpiece Gallery

The Masterpiece Gallery is truly an art gallery, but all the displayed art is made of LEGO. Each LEGO build is given the space it needs to be considered on its own with little distraction from surrounding pieces. That was incredibly refreshing because our only other experience with large numbers of MOCs has been at LEGO events where builds are pressed together because of limited display space and where the exquisite and unique are side-by-side with something else… I built.

This gallery has since been refreshed with all new displays, usually happening around Skaerbaek Fan Weekend in September. I wanted to spend more time in the Gallery, but there was a schedule to keep, and we were off to the first of the four experience zones.

Before diving into what we did, I must point out that there is SO much in LEGO House that many experiences, displays, and opportunities were missed because we only had a half day. One could easily spend several days in the House and still not take in everything.

The Green Zone

Our group headed to the Green Zone, the Social Zone. I got stuck in the World Explorer area where there are huge minifig-sized displays: mountain, island, and city. I ended up taking well over 100 photos and videos to use for reference and ideas for my own MOCs.

07 - Green Zone, World Explorer (RS).jpg

There were other areas in the Green Zone, but I couldn't tell you what they were. I had to be dragged away to our next zone, the Yellow Zone.

The Yellow Zone

In the Yellow Zone, the Emotional Zone, we were first shown the Critter Creator area. Very prominent were two tall giraffes based on the work of Dagny Holm who was the LEGO Group's first Master Builder and chief model designer. This year's LEGO House exclusive set is based around her and some of the models she created.

Most of our group spent time in the Mood Mixer area with its digital dance stage. You would build a simple LEGO representation of yourself, digitize it into the Mood Mixer and then watch the virtual version express different emotions through dance.

11A - Yellow Zone, Mood Mixer - Digital Dance Floor (AM).jpg

11B - Yellow Zone, Mood Mixer Dance Selection.jpg

11D - Yellow Zone, Mood Mixer Station (RS).jpg

I wound up in the Fish Designer area and its virtual aquarium where you create a simple fish with LEGO, digitize it, and then watch how it reacts to the various situations it encounters in the aquarium.

An aside here: Interestingly, for me, I worked on a prototype for something similar in the late 1980s when Apple Computer partnered with Evans & Sutherland (a pioneering computer graphics company) trying to tie a Cray II supercomputer (the world's fastest at the time) with one of E&S's real-time simulators. Nothing ever came of it except a short video because the Cray, even with all its computing horsepower, couldn't keep up with the E&S simulator. It was fascinating for me to see an idea from 35 years ago come to fruition at LEGO House.

The Red Zone

From there it was off to the Red Zone, the Creative Zone. This had huge bins, larger than your average backyard swimming pool, filled with hundreds of thousands of LEGO pieces (if not more). Though not sorted, it was like being on the LEGO Masters set. This is what every LEGO fan dreams of... a seemingly limitless supply of LEGO bricks to build whatever you might imagine. This, alone, would be reason enough to come to LEGO House day after day after day after day.

I, however, avoided digging through the bins. Even with the extraordinary precautions taken by LEGO House to prevent the spread of COVID, I still didn't feel comfortable running my hands through the pools of LEGO pieces. One of the significant precautions taken by the amazing LEGO House play agents was to empty the LEGO containers of ALL the pieces every night and quarantine them for 72 hours before letting them back in the House. That means there were four collections of the hundreds of thousands (or more) of LEGO bricks being rotated in and out of the House. That’s mind-blowing when you consider what you might build with that many pieces.

The Blue Zone

The last experience zone, the Blue Zone, is the Cognitive Zone. The first area for us was Test Drive. You would build a vehicle and then see how well it did in a variety of challenges... launch it off a ramp trying to get it through a bullseye or challenge a friend to a race to see who was fastest.

I didn't build a car but watched most members in our tour devolve into their childhood as they built and tested their creations. I could easily see how our group might spend many hours here, ignoring the rest of LEGO House, gleefully watching their cars careen through the air.

I moved on to the City Architect and RoboLab areas and was soon joined by the others. This is where you can remote control vehicles that interact with projections to achieve different goals. My time spent in the RoboLab was devoted to taking pictures because most of the control stations were already being used by kids visiting the House. I, however, was fascinated by the seamless combination of LEGO builds and projected imagery to create a wholly immersive experience.

A portion of the RoboLab in the Blue Zone. The consoles (upper right) control the robots (left)

And then it was the City Architect, which is a combination of the Hamurabi video game and the game of Go but using projected imagery and small LEGO-built pieces. Yeah... it is a little tough to imagine, but it was INCREDIBLY fun to interact with. With my love of all things microscale, we spent far too much time there working to unlock the football (soccer) stadium reward animation.

City Architect in the Blue Zone, photo courtesy of Rob Starkman

The Molding Machine

After leaving the Blue Zone, there was one last stop before the guided tour portion was finished: the LEGO House molding machine. There are seven facilities I know of that produce LEGO pieces and/or assemble LEGO sets. Each facility has a unique alphabetic identifier assigned to them that is used in a code on LEGO set boxes which indicates when and where a set was produced. One of those letter codes is LH and it refers to the lone molding machine in LEGO House. Yes, the smallest LEGO factory is, in fact, in the House and it produces one product: a package of six red 2 x 4 bricks.

The calculated total number of unique combinations of those six bricks is 915,103,765. What does that have to do with anything? Well, you can be assigned the number of one of those combinations and it is unique to you—no one else in the world will ever get it. Why? Because even if LEGO House had a million visitors a year, it would still take over 915 years for each one of the unique combinations to be assigned to someone. It's been estimated, based on the current yearly visitor counts, that it will actually take around 3,000 years.

So, the very last part of the LEGO House tour was to pick up our six-piece polybag and be assigned a unique combination number. I was assigned #622,473,470 and it's mine, Mine, ALL MINE!

My six bricks and unique brick combination

Closing Ceremonies

Wrapping up the guided tour, we all headed back to the Forum room for the closing ceremonies. Black drapes had been pulled out to cover the walls and windows, so walking back into the room felt like entering a movie theater with slightly dimmed lighting and no sunshine sneaking in. After everyone got to their seats, short talks were given by Astrid Müller (who ran the Inside Tour for many years), Steen Sig Andersen (long-time LEGO designer and collaborator with Stuart Harris on the exclusive Inside Tour sets), John Hansen (Senior Vice President Engineering & Corporate Quality at The LEGO Group) and Stuart Harris, himself.

Bags with the 2022 Inside Tour exclusive model, photo courtesy of Rob Starkman

Our LEGO Inside Tour started with Stuart Harris enthusiastically greeting us as we first gathered on Day One and ended with him sharing his thoughts of the tour. It was the perfect bookend to an amazing time! But wait, there was one more thing that needed to happen—the exclusive Inside Tour sets needed to be handed out. We were reminded that we could not reveal what the exclusive set was until a certain date because a couple of weeks after our LIT, the second Inside Tour of 2022 was to take place and LEGO wanted those folks to be just as surprised and pleased as we were when receiving the exclusive set.

The first step was to pick a random numbered tile out of a LIT bag. The numbers went from 1 to 35, one for each member of the tour. Then as each number was called out, that person would receive an exclusive set. Why all this pomp and circumstance? Well, the exclusive sets were also numbered, 1/80, 2/80, 3/80, etc. so rather than have everyone do a mad dash to grab the first of the 80, luck was given the task of determining who got which set. I got set #25/80… but I was SO close. The person next to me got #1/80!

The set was a model of the AGV (Automated Guided Vehicles) that retrieve bins full of LEGO parts from the molding machines and replace them with empty bins in all the LEGO factories. (You can read about our tour through the factory where this #17 AGV attempted to run us over!)

After all the sets were handed out and the Inside Tour was sadly officially declared over, most of the participants stayed around to chat with the LEGO folks and to have their sets signed, making each set that much more special.

Steen Sig Andersen signing a set box, photo courtesy Arlett Michael & Michael Kühlberger

Baby Come Back

Another bonus aside! A couple of weeks after the Tour ended when the embargo on information about the exclusive set was lifted, Jay’s Brick Blog posted the first article about this year’s LIT set. In that article, I found out that there had been a second, one-of-a-kind exclusive set (a mini version of the AGV set we received) built by Stuart Harris specifically for the 3-month-old baby that was on our tour!

I caught up with Stuart Harris at this year’s BrickCon in Seattle and he told me the story. When he heard that there was going to be a baby as part of the Inside Tour, he thought having something special for her would be a great way to celebrate, so he immediately started working on a mini “baby-scale” version of the AGV. Before the closing ceremony began, he had placed a bag holding the mini-AGV behind the tables at the front of the room. His plan was to would pull the mini-AGV out of the bag after all the exclusive sets had been handed out during the closing ceremony and present it to the baby and her parents.

However, when he went to check that everything was ready to go, he found that someone had accidentally placed a heavy object (I think he said it was a book) in that same bag on top of the mini-AGV! It was in pieces at the bottom of the bag.

When working on exclusive sets for the Inside Tour and LEGO House, Stuart said he really doesn’t document a build. Why should he? The build itself is the document. Notably, he also doesn’t build a backup version (and has even had some of his one-of-a-kind designs unknowingly abducted by LEGO owner Kjeld Kristiansen to put on his desk). So it became a race for him to try to reassemble the mini-AGV before the parents and baby left LEGO House. He didn’t quite finish before the closing ceremonies had ended and the room had cleared. Luckily, someone found the family still in the House, and Stuart was able to present them with this amazing gift.

For me, having a unique gift built by the Master Builder of LEGO House and having him present it privately and one-on-one, rather than in front of 34 ogling AFOLs, would make that the high point of an incredible Inside Tour and the treasure of a lifetime! (I talked about this with another BrickNerd who has been on an Inside Tour and their comment back was, “Another example of how they really go all out with the LIT experience.” So true.)

A Little Bit of History

After the LIT officially ended, there were a couple more things we wanted to do while we were still there. First, we visited the basement of LEGO House to see the history collection. Though the museum with the LEGO vault in Idea House has some of the rare and unique items curated from LEGO’s history, the History Collection at LEGO House has so much more and really gives you the sense of breadth and depth of LEGO products over the years. This was yet another space where we spent too little time and could have easily stayed for hours taking everything in.

One of the many, many displays in the LEGO Museum at LEGO House

Exclusive Merchandise

Then we went up to the lobby to visit the LEGO House store… and to pick up some of the exclusive sets. Though the store limits you to getting only two sets each, between the two of us, we could have gotten a total of four of a set. However, our limitation was how to get everything back home! That was unfortunate because there were several sets I would have liked to have had more than one copy of. If you ever go on the Inside Tour, make sure you bring extra luggage!

The exclusive sets at the LEGO House store, photo courtesy of Alex Kulvelis

We then hauled everything back to our LEGOLAND hotel room, dropped it in the middle of the floor, and went off to explore LEGOLAND. During the course of the tour, we hadn’t managed to sneak in some time at the park, so Friday afternoon was all we had left to take it in. Looking back, we should have stayed an additional day in Billund just to spend time in the park. Others in our LIT group did add one more day and seeing the pictures they took made us realize how much we didn’t get to see.

When the park closed, we made our way back to our room and began a long night of packing and repacking to make everything fit in our luggage because early the next day we were going to be on an airplane headed home.

One last look at LEGO House before heading home, photo courtesy Andreas Bamberger

In Conclusion

There is so much more to an Inside Tour than I’ve been able to put into these three articles totaling almost 10,000 words. Though the exclusivity of the tour makes it unique and special, I wish every LEGO fan could experience an Inside Tour. Every day brought new insights and experiences beyond anything we dreamed of or could even imagine. The world of LEGO behind-the-scenes is filled with wonder and awe and inspiration and incredible people willing to share their knowledge and love of the brick with you… just an ordinary AFOL.

It may take only one application to be accepted for a slot on the Inside Tour (like it did for us) or it may take 12 years of applying (as someone told me) to get a slot, but keep at it! It will come your way eventually—registration for next year’s tour begins soon so you can try your luck. (They also offer a one-day Fan Tour including access to the vault and the factory if you can’t get into a full Inside Tour, thankfully.)

I offer many, MANY thanks to my fellow participants on our Inside Tour for providing pictures and information to fill in what I missed, to the folks throughout the LEGO Group who gave their all behind the scenes to make sure everything was in place and ran smoothly throughout our tour, and ESPECIALLY to Stuart Harris, Marie-Laure Carnet, and the LIT staff for being with us every step of the way and making sure we had the BEST experience possible.

Lastly, a BIG and humble thank you to Dave Schefcik, editor of BrickNerd, for allowing me to write three articles on the same topic, guiding me through the process of putting together a coherent story, and then cleaning up what I wrote to make me look like a better writer than I really am.

What do you think of the LEGO Inside Tour? Have you been on one yourself? Leave your thoughts in the comments below.

Do you want to help BrickNerd continue publishing articles like this one? Become a top patron like Charlie Stephens, Marc & Liz Puleo, Paige Mueller, Rob Klingberg from Brickstuff, John & Joshua Hanlon from Beyond the Brick, Megan Lum, Andy Price, and John A. to show your support, get early access, exclusive swag and more.