Legos

Dear Diary :

Yes, it was only over one month ago that I began to chronicle my nascent love affair with piles of interlocking plastic bricks, but it’s been a wild month. Things just started moving so fast, and before I knew it… well, let me explain.

It all started when I found some boxed Lego sets in my closet during a spring clean. In a moment of much-needed toy therapy, I tore them open, ruined their inherent mint-in-box collectability, and began to assemble. Sometimes, play just outweighs pay.

After that day of building, I never stopped. As soon as my existing sets had been assembled, I found myself needing more, and I needed it fast. A collection of 100 bricks wasn’t even enough to make a small, rainbow-colored shanty out of. It was late, and the stores were closed, so I tore into a small Mega Bloks lobster that I’d also found in the recesses of the closet, but it wasn’t the same. It kept on falling apart, and it bore only a passing resemblance to a lobster. It was like heading out to a club to find a hot chick and then coming home with one that didn’t have all of her own teeth. And didn’t even bother to replace the ones that had escaped.

When you collect to a degree that you forget about half of what you have, your own residence is a constant wonderful surprise, if it doesn’t kill you first.

I was so dissatisfied with the non-Lego lobster that I decided to create my own. When I see a creative problem, I will inevitably throw all sensibility away and throw my whole life into engineering a near-perfect solution, while I still remain indifferent about balancing my bank account. In this case, a new and improved lobster cost me a few hours of sleep, as I learned my way around the free Lego Digital Designer (which works on both Mac and Windows, and can be downloaded from free from the Lego website). By the time I was finished, I had created a wonderful Lego lobster that was all mine – and best of all, it didn’t take up any physical space! Within the LDD, you have the ability to click on a ‘how much will this cost me?’ button, and the program will calculate your total price based on which bricks you’ve used. While my Mega Blocks lobster was about 7 inches long and $2, my Lego lobster was a far more intricate, detailed, and large $35. My creation, however, was articulated with a curling tail, pinching claws, and 8 moveable legs. Such points of movement are important to an action figure geek like myself. Ol’ Blok lobster didn’t even have any legs.

I contented myself by going out into the real world and picking up a variety of under-$20 Lego sets from the store. I’d put the ‘correct’ items together, look at them for a moment, and break them apart to make them other things. I went on eBay about bought mysterious lots of thousands of mixed, used Legos. I didn’t know where they’d been, but at this point, I didn’t even care. Our love affair was getting dark and kinky, but we both knew what it was.

I lost three days’ worth of free time after I saw a picture of Iron Monger from the new Iron Man movie. With a toy magazine propped up next to my monitor, I dove into the LDD again and built a semi-accurate effigy of the Iron Monger robot, complete with moving parts (including moveable fingers), and space on the inside for an AA battery and a small light, so that he might emit a glow. I estimate that he’s about a foot tall, and has over 500 pieces. The price, after three days of intense e-labor that overtook all of my thoughts and gave me a fun project to look forward to? $95.

It was like giving intellectual birth, and it turned out really nicely. When it was done, I felt empty and directionless. Sure, I had more Lego ideas, but I was still no Nathan Sawaya. Still, visions of being employed by Legoland filled my head, as I skimmed the application process and job openings for possibilities. Unless I wanted to move to Sweden, the options were pretty limited – and the Legoland Master Builder interview process required that the applicant build a both a spontaneous model and a rollable ball of Legos on the spot, under the watchful eyes of Lego Masters. This was a situation that I felt very unprepared for, after my recent three day excursion into Legoblivion. I could traverse the Legobstacle course, but it was at my own speed.

The emptiness persisted, and my local toy store shelves were empty or only filled high-end sets and Bionicles, which are largely incompatible with your standard Lego brick. On a trip to Marshalls with my mother, I wandered over to the toy section while she browsed the pottery and spices, banking on a tip that I heard over in the Lego Facebook group. It was there that I came across my Lego holy grail, and marked at 50% off. I’d always wanted the Lego Ultimate Collectors’ Edition Batmobile, both because it was Lego and it was a batmobile, but the original $60 price tag was too steep. There were three on sale, and I bought them all. I remained awake until 2 AM, being accosted by the horribleness of the Transformers Movie, and assembling the Batmobile.

As the pieces came together, I got a sinking feeling. See, once I’d put together a handful of base plates to serve as the undercarriage of the car, I thought that would be the size of things – but no, the two thick instructional manuals that came with the Batmobile kept on adding more and more baseplates, until the size of the thing completely overtook my who designated assembly table. Bags upon bags of bricks were gently cut open at their corners, to avoid spillage onto the floor. Gears were added, sleek and curvy black bricks were stacked in ziggurat patterns, and 5 hours later (including 2 hours past my bedtime), I had a massive, solid, awesome Batmobile – and no plans on how to safely keep anything this huge. It’s too large for a Lego-sized figure or a 3 3/4 scale figure, and too small for your average 6” figure. Not only is is a masterpiece of smart construction and a testament to the power of Brick, but a handful of Lego Technic pieces cause fiery blasts and visible turbines to spin while the car’s wheels roll, and a turn of the steering wheel causes a bat-symbol on the front of the car to pop up. I’d be happy if it just sat there looking pretty. I don’t require fancy action features for my Legos.

I guess that brings us up to date, Diary. That was Sunday, and I don’t know what’s going to happen next, but I think we’ve decided to spend a little time apart so that I can get other parts of my life back in order. You know, eating and sleeping, some painting. The Digital Designer keeps on beckoning to me, though – promising me other buildable sea creatures and cthulhus, and making a mini-model of my dream house. Do I really have $100 to buy a Lego-bot of my own devising? Looks like I’m gonna hafta pull an extra shift at work. Lego, you’re worth it, and I can always rationalize it as a ‘creative expense’, which I set no spending limit on. I know, once you start making excuses for Legos, you know you’re in trouble. But it’s awesome trouble.

So, a pirate walks into a bar with the ship’s steering wheel sticking out of his pants. The bartender asks, “Hey, why’s there a steering wheel in your pants?”

The pirate answers, “Arrrr, it’s drivin’ me nuts!”

I’ll wait while you regain your composure, since you just heard the best joke to ever grace the English language.

It seems that everyone’s into pirates these days, since by my estimation, the golden age of the ninja is entering its twilight years, katanas being traded for cutlasses and quiet dignity fading away being replaced by drunken shanties. The pop-cultural appeal of robots and squid, for those of you who were wondering, are eternal. This pirate preoccupation probably finds its origins in 2003’s ‘Pirates of the Caribbean‘ film, wherein Johnny Depp manages to make pirates sexy and eclectic and dangerous, a fair mix of personality traits to please all genders. This newfound attraction to all things swashbuckley permeated items from Legos to Playmobil sets, Halloween parties, and anything else influenced by the common consciousness. When it began to intersect with collectible card games in 2004, pirates and I began speaking the same language – which was pretty much like English, but with the word ‘matey’ thrown on the end of every sentence and with bigger beards.

In 2004, WizKids Games released Pirates of the Spanish Main. Marketed at a ‘constructible card game’, each pack of cards contained everything that two people would need to play a small game of Pirates, including ships, crew, rules, treasure and tiny little dice. Of course, buying more packs of Pirates would increase the possibilities and dimensions of the game, but it wasn’t necessary. The real stroke of genius behind this game is that the cards are all made of thick plastic, have pop-out pieces, and are used to make three-dimensional ships. No longer were card games constrained to the realm of the conceptual and closely guarded fans of cards held closely to the chests of the players – this was real, live pirate ship action, movin’ around the table, canons a-blazin! Tabletop gaming in a card-based format, and not using large boxes of plastic and metal miniatures, was a pretty impressive and original feat.

I hadn’t thought about these in quite some time, so they remained sealed away in a collectible tin… and then Wizards of the Coast (a completely different gaming company from WizKids, confusingly enough) decided to sue WizKids for copyright infringement on their ‘constructible card game’ idea. Subsequently, I found out that WizKids made a set where ships could fight giant cursed squid instead of just other ships, and I was all over them again. The WizKids / Wizards litigation aside, it had reawoken my interest in pirate gaming, and if WizKids was going to be forced to stop making constructible card games, I wanted to get in on it before the ship sank… so to speak.

After the first set of cards, which included Spanish, English and Pirate ships, WizKids continually added to the variety of ships within the game with each expansion. Eventually, everyone was joining the battle at sea – the Americans, Vikings, Asian ships, Mercenary ships and ghost ships, the Spanish, and even a few unusual submarines and epic sea monsters. These ships, equipped with cannons and crew based on a points system, traverse any available flat surface that you can set up on, navigate around islands, collect treasure, and try to blow off each others’ masts, all at the same time. As the ships fall apart, their destroyed pieces could be popped right back into the cards that they came from. While these parts are tiny and occasionally difficult to work with, any gamer familiar with painting tiny miniatures should have no problem with these.

WizKids has created nine different sets of Pirates cards, each with new ships and crew and treasures, and their website catalogues these in checklists, as well as presents players with scenarios to set the game in. As with most miniature collectible games, WizKids has also released a are number of ‘exclusive’ pirates items, either from mail-aways, conventions, or scheduled gaming events. For being little more than plastic cards, many of these items fetch some high prices on eBay, since there are few things more exciting than forming your own perfect armada of marauding ships.

It’s all the pirate fun that you can have without disemboweling someone. And for only about five bucks.