Brick Fest Live! lets Lego fans build own fun
A Lego brick isn’t a mere children’s toy. With a pile of Legos, anyone can be a builder, creating cities, vehicles, animals and anything else their imagination can fathom.
The Brick Fest Live! Lego Fan Experience will challenge, educate, inspire and spark ideas in those builders when they visit WestWorld of Scottsdale on July 22 and 23.
During the event, visitors can build and race their own derby cars down 35-foot-long tracks, contribute creations to a glow-in-the-dark zone, take pictures next to models inspired by Lego movie figures, follow a template or create their own unique pieces to add to a large mosaic, develop their own buildings to put inside a Lego city or let their imaginations guide them inside a brick pit or at a build wall.
Trivia, video and mini golf games with a Lego twist add to the interactive fan experience.
For those who feel inspired to build at home, vendors will have vintage, collectible and newer Lego sets, plus custom creations available for purchase.
Brick Fest Live! founder Chad Collins said the show offers families a chance to spend quality time together in an immersive and engaging space.
“You are experiencing Lego as a family unit. You are sitting alongside your child building with them, and your child is listening to you as their parent or guardian, and there’s nothing they want more in their life than for you to play with them,” Collins said.
Collins said playing with Lego bricks within an attraction such as Brick Fest Derby encourages both children and adults to think critically and problem solve.
“The parents get involved, and they’re giving instructions on how to make the car more aerodynamic, so it goes faster. That family unit is getting tighter, but they’re all playing and having fun at the same time,” Collins said.
The Scottsdale event is broken down each day into two four-hour chunks from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. and 2 to 6 p.m.
With VIP tickets, attendees receive early entry, all-day admission and swag.
Collins said the fan experience allows amateur to more experienced builders to have access to new and diverse Lego pieces and encourages them to collaborate with each other.
“Everyone that comes to the show has their buckets or their bins of Lego at home. There’s a limited selection with the Lego you have at home, and you’re typically not playing with hundreds or thousands of other people at the same time,” Collins said. “What we’re providing at Brick Fest Live! is a unique hands-on experience where you are only seeing these elements at the event, and you are only able to experience it together with others that are just as enthusiastic as you are.”
At previous events, attendees have shown their ingenuity with Alamo, video game character and Brick Bot inspired creations. Collins said Lego fans continually surprise him with their builds.
“Every artist has their own different style, and everybody that builds with Lego has a different style,” Collins said.
Often during the fan experiences, members of cosplay groups and fans of the Lego movies come dressed as Star Wars characters or superheroes.
Collins came up with the idea for Brick Fest Live! after doing a Lego YouTube channel with his daughter. They produced over 500 videos over an 18-month span.
Collins, who has an engineering background, never anticipated when he brought home a Lego set years ago that his daughter would come to share his enthusiasm for the plastic bricks.
“I was a Lego kid growing up…I was happy that she loved it because that brought me back to my childhood, and it also created a bond between her and I that’s something special that we’ll now have forever,” he said.