The LEGO Play Book: Ideas to Bring Your Bricks to Life Review

A few weeks ago, DK was kind enough to send us a copy of The LEGO Play Book: Ideas to Bring Your Bricks to Life by Daniel Lipkowitz, the LEGO Group’s Senior Writer and story developer. The book consists of 200 pages and retails for $24.99. It is available on Amazon and other retailers like Barnes & Noble.

The LEGO Play Book continues on the highly successful and New York Times bestseller The LEGO Ideas Book. The book shows over 500 builds that are created by LEGO fan builders including Stephen Berry, Yvonne Doyle, Tim Goddard, Tim Johnson, Rob Gillies, Barney Main, Peter Reid, and Andrew Walker.

There are five chapters in The LEGO Play Book: Once Upon a Time, A Small World, Go Wild!, Things That Go Bump in the Night, and Wish You Were Here. In each chapter, there are also five special features that gives you some cool information, advice, and hints to help you create your own builds including Builder Talk, Cool Brick, Quick Build, Challenge, and Handful of Bricks.

Like with many other DK books, the quality of photography is top-notch as they have been known for. There are hundreds of pictures that you can see to give you ideas for your future builds. The amount of effort put in to creating the builds then to take high-quality images involves a lot of effort so it makes you appreciate the book even more.

The beginning of the book is a flowchart that is a good source of information for beginners. The flowchart asks you some questions then gives you a couple of solutions depending on your situation. The next couple of pages show a variety of elements and also gives you the names of them so you can familiarize yourself with the various parts.

Each chapter has their own unique theme in which the fan builders create a number of builds to match the theme. The “Once Upon a Time” chapter focuses on fairy tale builds. “A Small World” concentrates on micro-scale creations. In the third chapter, “Go Wild!,” shows off builds of animals in the wild. “Things That Go Bump in the Night” is a chapter that spotlights ghosts, goblins, and other spooky creatures. Finally, “Wish You Were Here” is a chapter related to things that people do or see during a vacation.

As mentioned before, each chapter also has special features. “Builder Talk” is a section where the fan builders give tips and building advice. “Cool Brick” shows you an element and tells you why it is useful. “Quick Build” is a section for simple and quick builds using a small number of pieces. “Challenges” are fun activities that you can do with other people using LEGO bricks. Finally, “Handful of Bricks” are neat little creations that the fan builders built using just a handful of bricks.

Overall, The LEGO Play Book is a fantastic read and a great spin-off of The LEGO Ideas Book. It is highly recommended and you’ll have a lot of fun reading through it as well as seeing all the colorful images of the builds by the contributers. I’ve spent many hours just reading through all the information the book has to offer. It may even give you some ideas on your builds in the future. Again, I would like to thank DK for sending us this fine book to review. It is available on Amazon and other retailers.