BrickNerd today features a guest article from the talented writer Alicia Costello. She recently attended the LEGO convention Brick Rodeo 2021 in Texas (formerly known as Brick Fiesta). She has graciously shared her convention experience and a walkthrough of the exhibition floor.

Brick Rodeo is the Texas LEGO fan convention. It travels around the Lone Star State, and this year, it landed in Houston, TX. Conference events began Thursday and Friday, July 22nd and 23rd. The public exhibition covered Saturday and Sunday, July 24th and 25th. This year contained extra excitement because after the virtual 2020 convention, we were back to in-person!

Me

First, we have to address the elephant in the room. As a native Houstonian, I am intimately familiar with rodeos. I am not, however, familiar with Brick Rodeos. I politely joke that I am LEGO-adjacent – LEGOs are an item I step on more than play with. My husband, Brian, has always been a fan of the brick. He has passed that love to our two boys, who are 7 and 5. My kids often ask me to build with them, and occasionally, I comply. This makes my time with LEGOs not necessarily about the brick itself, but about the connections I make with my family as I build.

At Brick Rodeo, this idea of LEGOs being about connection was put into overdrive. Not only was I using LEGO to connect with my little family of three brickheads, but now I was meeting lots of strangers, all assembled around our mutual admiration of the brick.

The People

As I walked into Opening Ceremonies, I was a little shocked at how many people had opted to attend the 4-day event. I mean, I knew my family had a brick addiction; I wasn’t aware I was in such good company. The showroom was huge – 12,000 feet, displaying 317 MOCs and several vendors. Several LUGs were represented, including: Houston Brick Club, Texas Brick Railroad, TexLUG, TexLUG-SA, DFWLUG, DEN-LUG, TNVLC, ArkLUG, BayLUG, PortLUG, UtahLUG, Women’s Brick Initiative, TrickyLUG, RebelLUG.

Seven of the LEGO Masters from Season 2 joined the fun as well: Moto, Jen, Dawn, Mark & Steve, and Zach & Wayne. The LEGO Masters joined conference attendees for games and fun. They also displayed some of their work. Here’s a few:

The Event

At check-in, they hand you the swag bag. This bright red bag contained a lanyard that gained access to the event, a cute card of each of the LEGO Masters who would be at the event, and, as a nod to the suburb of Sugar Land where the event was held, some Sugar Land pens and microfiber cloths. And LEGOs. So many LEGOs. We had a “party pack” which was basically a big bag of random pieces, a “minifig habitat,” a “space explorer” pack, a “longhorn” pack, and, for an extra fee, the commemorative themed BrickHeadz MOC. We also paid extra for the t-shirt.

Now, what to do? Looking at the schedule was, for me, an education. I wasn’t – and still am not – entirely sure what a LEGO draft or swap meet is or why you’d do it. But there were a lot of them. Dirty Brickster, which I heard is most people’s favorite event, was a white elephant game featuring only LEGOs. The hottest item was the LEGO 1966 Batmobile. My favorite part of the event was the kid who, having picked the Harry Potter Advent calendar, decided he’d rather have something else and proceeded to sales-pitch the item to about the next thirty contestants. Someone give that kid a scholarship to a degree in Marketing.

The LEGO-based games were the best part of the schedule, as there were plenty to pick from: left/right builds (one player builds using their right hand, the other uses their left; at some point, you switch); standing builds where contestants had to hold their pieces on their person until the pieces were used; telephone builds where one teammate could only look at the directions and communicate steps while the other could only look at the build; progressive builds where the teams used the same pieces in the same order, but each final result came out differently. It sounds like a lot of fun, and it was.

In one build, teams worked to build a giant circle. Our table was actually being shared between us and another team (which featured LEGO Master Jen,) so, short on space, we had to get creative. Brian got set to work on the structure; I started to work on the flair. I imagined our circle was the border of a town, and what does every town need? A mini art-park, of course! I think it came out rather well! Then I looked over at the other side of the table, and LEGO Master Jen and her teammate had created something truly cool. Their build was not only beautiful but WAY more structurally sound than ours. I spent the ride home dreaming about how we can replicate the games to play with our kids.

Events also included educational sessions on how to light your MOC, how to work with trees, how to connect to other AFOLs through the power of social media, how to store and transport your MOCs, and how to build mosaics. As my husband, Brian, has been talking about adding lights to his downtown Houston MOC, the lighting class really helped. Some sessions were hosted by locals, and some sessions were hosted by featured guests, including Daniel Konstanski, whose book The Secret Life of LEGO Bricks, will be published soon, and The LEGO Group’s Matthew Ashton and Jamie Berard joined us virtually for sessions of their own.

The MOCs

Let me take you around the showroom and introduce you some of the coolest things I saw. For a few of them, the builder will illuminate how they came to be.

As you enter the main doors, you actually see the two builds that are very special to me – my husband’s own “midi”-scale downtown Houston, which has been his solo project for two years, and the micro-scale downtown Houston that is the Houston Brick Club’s collaborative build. Since my house already featured a LEGO Houston, the HBC asked if we could house their micro-scale Houston, too. It lives in my guest room in boxes, and this was the first time I had ever seen it together!

Then, your eye is caught by a flash of red and an eerie blue glow. It’s LEGO Master Season 2 contestant Mark Erickson’s “Ragnarok Begins.” This was one of my favorite builds because its creative use of light packs a big punch. You already saw it by day, above, but check it out by night:

Next to it was a sweet little build that helped me realize one of my own LEGO preferences – small, creative, visually interesting builds. Because how cute and creative is this forest scene? And this little guy with a massive cowboy hat was a few tables over. I love him.

I quickly realized another thing I appreciated most in a build was a good texture. No offense, but in my limited experience, LEGOs can be… kinda flat. However, creative use of pieces and angles can bring a build a feeling of movement and richness.

This is a shot of a tiny piece of the *massive* Alamo build on display. True Texans will know the Alamo isn’t just this famous visage, but an entire complex of buildings, and they were all here.

You just have to appreciate the creativity in the building’s texture making it look aged and dare I say organic?

Then, something catches the corner of your eye. Is that MOC…spinning? Well of course it is! What else do tornados do? This tornado had a four-armed structure at the top that facilitated the spin. As you can see, bits of the town are along for the ride, as was a shark for obvious reasons!

As I walked around being marveled at people’s creativity and skill, I just had to ask a few the story behind their builds.

Hudson’s family bought him a TIE-fighter set when he was 5 years old, and Hudson played with it until his dad tried (unsuccessfully) to superglue it together. At a visit to a previous BrickFiesta, 11-year old Hudson’s eyes opened up to the world of MOCs. He went home and started building.

Now, he’s a Texas Tech student. When COVID-19 hit, he found himself at home, looking for something to do, and he returned to the brick. This weekend, Hudson was showing what he created since COVID: a two-story Star Wars-inspired build.

Near the Alamo, another wild-west themed build put me right back to those days watching Gunsmoke reruns on the couch with my grandparents. Look at all the action present in this one little section.

I also spoke with Alexander, who had several displays of spaceships. His minimalist color scheme intrigued me, and I had to ask him about it. Apparently, Alexander’s mom found a tub of LEGOs at a garage sale one day and brought it home for her son to play with. When Alexander opened it, he discovered the LEGOs were solely in black and florescent yellow – the first iteration of Blacktron. As he didn’t have too many colors to work with, he had to make what he built structurally and narratively interesting.

To pay homage to his early builds, this year he showed a display of Blacktron builds. What struck me about his builds was that the rich narrative. The main structures are a mysterious result of a lost civilization; the minifigs are explorer researchers. Each minifig’s position was an individual story. He knew where they had come from, and where they were going.

This build fully fed my need for interesting texture. Not only was it massive, but the trees, the water, and the landscaping were truly awe-inspiring.

Eloise and Robert were both showing their first-ever MOCs. Robert went big or went home with a 1:100 scale San Jacinto monument. The San Jacinto monument is a Houston landmark that celebrates Texas’ independence from Mexico. And it’s tall. Robert’s 1:100 scale stands 5 foot 7 inches, so sitting up on the display table, it was closer to 9 feet. Yes, you heard that right, this is his first-ever MOC and it towers – pun intended – over the room.

Eloise has always tolerated Robert’s building habits (we have that in common) but about two months ago, Robert gave her a base plate and encouraged her to start building. A chemical engineer by day, Eloise quickly found that building her own MOC ignited a long-dormant love for story that had almost been her major in college: Literature. Her first build was on display, an intricate story of a Japanese shrine caretaker living in a beautiful forest called “Temples with Koi.”

Eloise also incorporated a bit of a game into her build – she encouraged onlookers to find a number of animals hidden within the scene. I have to confess, the game had me twisting and turning in all directions as I sought to put my eyes on every inch of the build, but in the end, she had to point out the last few birds and frogs to me. I confess, I was so engrossed in the game that I didn’t actually get a picture of “Temples with Koi,” but to compensate, here’s that towering MOC.

Next came the mosaic row. The most eye-catching mosaics were these huge portraits of some very famous robots done by Dr. Greg Jonasson, who we had breakfast with during the event. His mosaics, especially C-3PO, were some of my favorite builds.

Really look at that C-3PO. There is NO BROWN in that mosaic. He used only six colors: black, white, green, red, yellow, and blue. It’s made up of 12,228 dots. The entire piece stands 30”x40” and has 16x16 Technic bricks behind it. Check out the close up:

Brian, my husband, also had two mosaics on display. The story behind these two is that I won’t allow him to have LEGOs on display downstairs. “I don’t want to become that LEGO house,” I’ve always told him. Finally, I said, “If you build pictures of our family as a mosaic, we can add them to our portrait wall next to the stairs.” He eagerly set out to work. To get better resolution, he decided to build them studs-up. We had the only studs-up mosaics on display.

This husky mosaic also was amazing, as Edward, the builder, utilized the base plate colors and different types of studs in a very creative way to add extra depth of color. AND THOSE EYES!

The Big Stuff

For those builders who believe that bigger is better, several jaw-dropping builds were on display. The Texas Brick Railroad group came out with a train display that took up an entire section of the hall. During an event called “MOCs at Night,” in which the room lights were turned down and we got to enjoy the lighting elements in their full glory, I was able to snag a couple pictures of the train build.

Corry Lankford from Houston Brick Club wanted to build something Star Wars related, and saw a picture one day of a space station shaped like a snowflake. Corry works in the grocery industry, so when COVID hit, his work went into overdrive. To relax after work, he started making his snowflake space station dream a reality. End to end, the build measures twelve feet.

He started with the main tunnels, then attached the ends, then built the middle hub and engine room. Custom fighter and bomber aircraft complement the build and fill out the world. The entire MOC is lit, and Corry guesses there are eighteen or nineteen USB cords connecting all the lights. In the engine, he ran the old-school UFO fiber-optic lights from the 90s. He estimates a little over a thousand hours went into his build. His favorite section is where he was able to use the parts from the old NBA basketball arena set. (This close-up photo is one of my favorite pics of the whole event.)

The Pop Culture section featured some of my favorite builds, including a running Batman, and my worst Wii nightmare, built in LEGO. Even that Wiimote is LEGO.

Easily the most jaw-dropping MOC in the room was Jhaelon Edwards’ Starkiller Base. His project was two years and six months in the making. The build stood at six feet wide and twenty feet long, and all of the interior sections are lit with, by Jhaelon’s estimate, “a few hundred LEDs.” As he and a whole team assembled the build over three days, it was great for an un-initiated person like myself to see what really is underneath the curtain of a build like this.

To make the build, Jhaelon mapped it out on a grid, making sure to include a short-list of must-haves. He was able to use creative license to translate how the different parts within Starkiller base related to each other, and what made the most sense in LEGO form. As it was built in sections, this was the first time Jhaelon had seen the build together. Jhaelon is a YouTuber that many of you may already know, so if you’d like to see more of this build, and to keep up with future projects, visit his YouTube page and subscribe.

Giving Back

Brick Rodeo didn’t forget children in need this year, and they were able to partner with two worthwhile charities to give back.

Houston Brick Club has a long-standing relationship with Texas Children’s Hospital, holding monthly “build & play” sessions with children in the hospital as well as putting on displays at the hospital a couple of times a year (pre-covid). Those activities have been on hold since 2020. Because of this relationship, TCH was chosen as the beneficiary of the charity auction this year. The auction raised just over $4000 for TCH. Three huge donation bins worth of new LEGO sets were also collected through a toy drive.

Through Houston Brick Club, Fairy Bricks, an international LEGO charity, has made a number of very generous donations of cases of new LEGO sets for three of the Houston Texas Children’s Hospital campuses. Brick Rodeo decided to partner with them to run a fundraiser benefiting their non-profit organization. They created a huge mosaic for the event as a public activity and we ran a fundraiser game during public hours to benefit their charity. The fundraiser raised $3200 for Fairy Bricks. The mosaic was truly awesome, as it was made up of 144 base plates. Attendees could come up, get a base plate, instructions, and start building. I don’t want to brag, but base plate #46 looked mighty good.

This is the final piece of the mosaic being placed:

Final Thoughts

Overall, I had a lot of fun and met a lot of great people. I even picked up a brick every now and then. While I’m stopping short of planning my first MOC, I appreciate the time, skill, creativity, and engineering that goes into both the biggest and smallest builds.

True to my nature, the greatest thing I walk away with this year is not the commemorative Brickheadz (although he’s super cute,) it’s the people I have met and the friendships I have formed. From meeting Brian’s Houston Brick Club friends, to MOC builders in all stages of their relationship with LEGO, to the wonderful out-of-town LUGs that came, supported, and cheered (special shout out to you, Austin LUG!) the brick has truly continued to help me make connections. From 7 to 70, we all bonded over the brick. Next year, Brick Rodeo will be in Austin, so I hope to connect with you there!

Did you attend this year’s Brick Rodeo? Let us know your experiences and favorite parts in the comments below.

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