LEGO User Groups (And Why You Should Join One)

Well, here it is, October 16^th, and I’m starting to think that my now thrice postponed blog entry on the subject of Reddit is simply never going to get written and posted.  When I put today’s topic on the schedule I didn’t even bother to slot the Reddit post into a later date.  It’s now sitting in the ‘Eventually’ folder.  Will it ever get posted?  Will it ever even get written?  Your guess is as good as mine. 

Anyway…

This is one of those posts that wasn’t on the regular schedule, but was intended to be posted ‘once LUGBulk season started’.  I wasn’t expecting that to happen until November or December.  But: Surprise!  It’s happening now.  So, today’s post is about LUGs (LEGO User Groups). 

My Discovery of the LEGO Fan Community

Most AFOLs [Adult Fans of LEGO] have what they call a ‘dark age’, which is the period between when they stopped playing with LEGO (usually as a teenager) and started up again as an adult.  I don’t have a dark age.  What I have is a bunch of dim ages.  Periods of time when I wasn’t really playing with LEGO, but would still walk through the toy section and check stuff out whenever I was at a place likely to carry it.  I’d buy one of those new sets (or more) every couple of years.  As far as dark ages go, it was kind of like catnapping instead of getting a solid night’s sleep. 

When the pendulum swung from not-LEGO back to LEGO in about 2011, I had a thought.  “I wonder if there are any LEGO websites?”  And that’s basically the origin of my discovery of the LEGO fan community.  I looked it up online, and there it was. 

I discovered the existence of online build contests.  And almost immediately thereafter discovered the existence of Bricklink, which is often described as being “eBay, but for LEGO pieces”.  I then ordered a sizable number of tan 2x4 bricks and trans-clear 1x2x2 panels, and proceeded to build Gotham Central for a Batman contest.  (Which I didn’t win.) 

I started seeing references to an upcoming event called BrickCon.  Which was in Seattle—theoretically close enough to drive to if I could find and convince someone to take me there.  Fortunately my friend Mallz was in his “I want to experience different subcultures” period, and thought that a LEGO convention might be interesting. 

Attending my first LEGO convention is a weird little story that I’ll save for another post.  But at some point during the con, somebody asked me, “Are you with a LUG?”  Which made me wonder… what the Hell was a LUG? 

LEGO User Groups

I suspect that part of the reason why LEGO User Groups [LUG] are called that is because the term ‘fan club’ seems incredibly hokey in this day and age.  Nevertheless, LUGs are clubs where Adult Fans of LEGO gather. 

When AFOLs talk about LUGs, they are usually referring specifically to RLUGs, or Recognized LEGO User Groups.  These are the LUGs that the LEGO Group has given its general nod of approval to.  I’m not using words like sanctioned or official here, because it is my understanding that this isn’t exactly the case.  LUGs are definitely an AFOL undertaking that certainly interacts with the LEGO Group, but there isn’t really an official tie between them. 

[In addition to RLUGs, there are also RLFMs, and RLOCs.  Recognized LEGO Fan Media and Recognized LEGO Online Community.  I won’t be covering those today because there’s only so much digital ink in this bottle and I don’t want my blogging pen to run dry.] 

When you decide that you want to join a LUG, you typically seek out your local LUG and join that.  Unless, of course, there is no local LUG.  Then you have a couple of options.  There are a few online LUGs.  And while they don’t offer all of the same benefits or allow you to all gather in the same room (not that there’s been a lot of that going on since the pandemic anyway), it’s still better than nothing. 

The other option is to start your own LUG.  (Now, you can’t start out with an RLUG.  You have to start and build up your LUG before LEGO will recognize you.)  Starting is fairly simple.  Find a place to have a monthly meeting.  Even if it’s just your living room in the beginning (when you’ll have fewer members and won’t need as much space).  Start a Facebook page (or group), or start a webpage for your fledgling LUG.  (Just be sure you don’t use the letter combination L-E-G-O in your URL.  LEGO won’t like that.  I’ve been told that my LEGO name “Battlegorilla” wouldn’t work in a URL because it has LEGO in the middle of it.)  And then find some like-minded LEGO-oriented individuals to join. 

After you’ve attained a minimum membership of 20 people and have been in existence for a year or more, you can contact the LEGO Ambassador Network (lan.lego.com) for recognition.  The transition from LUG to RLUG includes selecting a LEGO Ambassador who will be authorized to contact LEGO directly on the LUG’s behalf. 

And, of course, once you’re an RLUG you’ll have access to some of the various perks that LEGO offers to the LUGs that they recognize. 

PortLUG

Fortunately for me, that day at BrickCon when I first heard the term LUG I also learned of the existence of PortLUG, the Portland area LEGO User Group, so I didn’t need to mess around with trying to create my own LUG.  (Although I do sometimes think it would be nice to have a LUG here in Salem…) 

PortLUG meets the second Saturday of every month, and so I made plans to attend their November meeting.  Getting to Portland at that time meant taking busses.  Silverton to Salem, Salem to Wilsonville, Wilsonville to Portland, and then wherever else I needed to go on Tri-Met. 

Unfortunately, not all of those busses operated on weekends back then.  So, I made arrangements to come up on Friday, spend the weekend with my friends Dennis and Leanne, and then head back home Monday morning.  And on that Saturday, I attended my first ever LUG meeting. 

That month, PortLUG was meeting in the back room of a game shop, within which the attendees just barely fit.  I was only one of several new members that day.  Everyone in the group introduced themselves and explained what they tended to build.  Some members of the group had brought along small MOCs for show and tell.  And there was talk about an upcoming LEGO convention in Portland called Bricks Cascade, the mere existence of which excited me very much. 

I attended quite a few PortLUG meetings thanks to the generosity of Dennis and Leanne lending me a chair to sleep in for a weekend every month or so.  And I met a wide assortment of AFOLs in those meetings.  With a wide variety of building styles. 

I actually first met my friend Kyle at Bricks Cascade, but it was a conversation we had at the PortLUG annual picnic that led us to split gas and a hotel room for the next BrickCon in Seattle. 

And of course I would be remiss in singing the glories of PortLUG if I didn’t name-drop Boone Langston and Mark Cruickshank, who would go on to make it all the way to the final round in the first season of the US version of LEGO Masters.  (Boone has since been hired as a senior designer at LEGO and moved to Denmark.) 

I stopped attending the meetings after the remaining cartilage had fled my right knee and walking became a thing to avoid.  Then the pandemic happened, and the meetings switched from physical to virtual.  I attended some of those Zoom meetings, but quickly discovered that if I wasn’t planning my whole weekend around attending the monthly PortLUG meeting, I didn’t remember to log in at start time. 

The Parts Draft

One fun activity you can find going on at a lot of LUG meetings is the parts draft.  (Parts drafts are also very popular at LEGO conventions.) 

If you’ve never participated in a parts draft, here’s what you need to know.  First, the group decides what the set is going to be.  (This is done ahead of time.  For LUGs, usually at the previous month’s meeting.)  Then everybody who wants in buys a new copy of that set and brings it to the meeting unopened. 

When it’s time for the draft, everybody opens their copy of the set and starts parting it out.  Suppose that the set you picked has several black 2x4 bricks in it.  Everybody would then put all of the 2x4 bricks from their set into the same container on the table. 

And it’s the same with every other unique element in the set.  All of the white 1x6 plates go into the same container on the table.  And so on.  Until all of the parts from each set have been organized into containers by color and part type. 

Then everybody draws a number to determine what order they go in.  Whoever has #1 goes first, and chooses a container of parts to keep.  Then #2 picks their container, and so on.  Once everybody has taken a container of parts, you start over with #1, who then selects another container of parts to take.  This continues until the very last person grudgingly takes the final container, which is full of technic pins.  (At least that’s how it usually works.  Nobody seems to want that container of technic pins.) 

It's a great way to accumulate a good number of parts that you like from a particular set.  And it’s a fun activity!  Maybe a little nerve wracking when you know what your next pick will be, but someone else snags it just before your turn. 

Sometimes people will bring two or three copies of the set, and then draw two or three numbers from the hat (or bag or whatever), enabling them to pick two or three containers of parts over the course of a full turn. 

If the set has minifigures, then there is a decision to be made before the sorting even begins.  Do you assemble them and have containers of complete minifigs?  Do you put each part in its own container and let people pick just that part?  Or does everybody just keep the minifigs from the set that they brought, and not draft them at all? 

I’ve been in drafts that have done it each of those three ways.  (Which is why I have a bunch of Yoda heads in my collection of LEGO parts.)  And there was a Marvel set chosen for the draft one month that I took a huge gamble on.  I needed an ‘army’ of Hydra soldiers (the comic accurate ones, not the MCU version), and that set had one.  I brought two sets to the draft.  The first number I drew was way down in the line.  But that second number was #2.  And the guy who had #1 picked the container of Red Skull minifigs, so when it was my turn, I claimed my little army!  The gamble paid off for me. 

Cons/Shows/Etc.

PortLUG participates in several events each year.  And will also occasionally do their own small events. 

Bricks Cascade is the big one.  Obviously PortLUG is going to have a presence at Portland’s annual LEGO convention. 

PortLUG usually has a presence at the Rose City Comicon, but this year opted instead to set up a number of displays a week later at CouveCon in Vancouver. 

There’s also the Providence Festival of Trees, where the group builds and displays some primarily winter-themed MOCs. 

And then are the non-annual, oddball, here-and-there events.  Setting up a display at a library for a weekend.  That sort of thing.  We once provided an exhibit of MOCs at a museum.  (Fancy!) 

CASA

Every Christmas season PortLUG collects and donates a bunch of LEGO sets to CASA (Court Appointed Special Advocates) for children in foster care. 

Last year PortLUG’s contribution to the organization totaled over $4000 worth of gifts.  A number we’re hoping to surpass this year. 

LUGBulk

It used to be that the first rule of LUGBulk was: “You do not talk about LUGBulk.”  And the second rule of LUGBulk was: “You do not talk about LUGBulk.” 

However, times have changed, and now the rules of secrecy have been softened to: “You do not discuss the actual prices you pay for LUGBulk” and “You do not use the existence of LUGBulk as a recruitment tool for your LUG.” 

Which means that now I can talk about LUGBulk!  And so talk about LUGBulk I shall! 

LUGBulk is a once a year opportunity for the members of a LUG to buy certain LEGO elements in bulk amounts at an incredible discount.  The whole LUGBulk process happens in a number of stages.  The 2023 LUGBulk, for example, officially began this past week with the beginning of registration.  I’ve already sent my pertinent information off to the person in charge of organizing PortLUG’s LUGBulk (our LEGO ambassador, Grant).  Sometime soon he’ll email me back a confirmation that he’s received my info and that I’m on the list of participants. 

Now, even though I’m an official participant in the 2023 LUGBulk, I’m not actually obligated to buy anything once that phase rolls around.  If I were to go nuts and spend all my money on food delivery leaving nothing with which to buy LEGO, I can simply not place an order.  (But that’s not a likely scenario.)  So it’s better to register not knowing for certain if you will want to participate than to discover that you do want to participate after your opportunity to register has passed you by. 

The deadline for the registration phase this year is November 11^th.  If you haven’t registered by then, no LUGBulk 2023 for you!  Once November 11^th has come and gone, the wishlist phase begins. 

The wishlist phase is simple. You make a list of the five LEGO elements (in order of importance) that you’d like to buy in bulk quantities.  Everybody who is registered can turn in their five item wishlist in the hopes that one (or more) of their items ends up on the final list. 

There are some rules for what parts you can select.  Nothing licensed.  So no bricks with Batman’s Bat-Symbol printed on them, for example.  (Actually, it’s possible that you can’t choose parts that only exist in a licensed set, too.  Like if LEGO makes a brand new part but it has only appeared in a Harry Potter set, then it’s also off limits until it shows up in a non-licensed set as well.)  The parts you choose also have to have been in production within the past few years.  (This is information you can find out easily on Bricklink.) 

Once the deadline for submitting those lists is over, whoever is in charge of your LUG’s LUGBulk goes through those lists, and picks the 85 items that will appear on the finalized list that you will end up making your order from.  Starting with the elements that appear on multiple wishlists, and going from there.  Then each of the 85 elements is checked to makes sure that it isn’t available in high quantity from Bricklink at a lower price.  If it is, it gets removed from the list so as not to ‘waste’ that slot and one of the runner-up pieces moves into its place.  (This happened for me last year.  A piece I didn’t care about at all got removed, and was replaced by one of the five selections on my wishlist.  Score!)

That list of 85 elements is sent out to all of the LUGBulk participants, who then carefully select what they’re ordering.  Each person is limited to a maximum order of (this year) 235 euros. (Yeah, all the prices on the official spreadsheet/order form are in euros.  There are US conversions so that you know what you’re actually paying for things, but the actual purchasing calculations are done in the euro.) 

Each individual element is purchasable in increments of 25.  (Except for baseplates and incredibly high priced pieces, which are purchasable in increments of 1.) 

Once you hit the deadline to turn in your completed order forms, the next deadline is to pay for the stuff.  And then it’s just waiting for the order to arrive at the home of the poor unfortunate soul whose job it now is to break everything down and sort it into the individual member orders.  (It doesn’t come presorted.  Just giant bags of individual elements that have to be counted out – or weighed – into smaller bags to fill all the orders.) 

Once it’s all sorted, an announcement goes out that it’s available for pickup.  Sometimes from a LUG meeting, other times directly at the home of the person holding all the orders.  And then, shortly thereafter (or sometime overlapping the event), the process starts all over again for the next year. 

LUGBulk Strategies

PortLUG typically has over 100 people submitting their want lists for LUGBulk.  From which only 85 slots get filled.  So not everybody is guaranteed that even one of their five choices gets picked.  So far, I have not ‘campaigned’ for a specific piece amongst the other participants, but I’ve always wondered… if someone is having difficulty picking a full five pieces, what harm could there be in hinting that they should add your number one pick as their number four or five pick, to increase the likelihood of your main pick being chosen? 

Anyway, the first time I participated in LUGBulk, I was overwhelmed when I saw the order form.  “Look at all those pieces!” I probably exclaimed.  Then I proceeded to go down that list. 

“I’ll get 50 of these, and 50 of those, and 50 of that thing over there, and 50…”  Tiny little quantities of a great many different elements.  Some of which I still haven’t used nearly a decade later. 

Then I wised up, and started looking at the long game.  First, I started adding pieces for ‘the Big MOC’ to my want list each year.  Between LUGBulk and Bricklink, I’ve been gathering pieces for the Big MOC for nine years now.  And if everything goes well, I could possibly get it built for display by 2024!  [No, I’m not going to tell you more about the Big MOC yet.] 

There were several years where my order was about half parts for specific MOCs I had coming up, and the other half was smorgasbord style ordering.  A little of this, a little of that. 

But nowadays, I tend toward just ordering the bulk lots of stuff I know I’ll need a bunch of for specific MOCs.  Last year my order consisted of only three elements.  (A two-by-four brick, and two different colors of 1x2 plate.) 

And this year?

LUGBulk 2022

This year my order was a whopping five elements.  Two stacks of different colored baseplates (one standard, one half-sized), 2000 dark red 2x4 bricks, and then (for the Big MOC) nearly 2000 1x2x2 reddish brown window frames, and the same amount of 1x2x2 pearl gold lattice window panes. 

When I submitted my order all those months ago, Grant included a question when he sent me my order confirmation:  “OK, I gotta ask what are you building with soooo many windows?” 

Hee-hee!  I love that my order made him curious enough to ask.  I didn’t actually answer his question (because I’m not ready to reveal the nature of the Big MOC yet), but I did give him an answer.  I told him that I wasn’t using the windows as windows, but instead as flooring.  “Picture a large wooden floor with inset brass grates.” 

Mumbling About LUGs, But Trailing Off…

Is there more to know about LEGO User Groups?  Sure.  Am I going to discuss those other things here?  Sadly, no. 

My plan was to have this post finished by Thursday so that I’d have several days to work on other stuff.  But, as usual, here I am feverishly pounding on the keys less than an hour before my 3:00 pm posting target on Sunday.  (Sigh.)  Blogging is a never ending battle.