Here a LEGO, There a LEGO, Everywhere a LE-GO!

My boys love LEGOS, lots and lots of LEGOS!  There is not a room in our house that doesn’t have at least a little pile of LEGOS in it, and of course, the boys’ rooms are filled with LEGO creations.  Even so, we are always on the look-out for a new LEGO adventure!

It’s a real treat to find building instructions on-line that allow us to use the many, many LEGOS we have amassed in our collection.  We have found several fun seasonal LEGO builds here.  The Chinese Dragon has been a favorite to date, but the May flowers have caught my eye and so we’ll likely be building those one day very soon!  There are also some fun LEGO builds here.

Even better than using the LEGOS we already have… is finding an opportunity to get new LEGOS FREE!  The first Tuesday of each month, we head to the LEGO Store between 5 and 7 pm for the LEGO Mini Model Builds, hosted at LEGO Stores world-wide.  This week, the boys built red tulips in honor of  Mother’s Day.

Here’s another fun way to use LEGOS:  play a game!  Ryan received the LEGO Creationary from the newly released line of LEGO games for his birthday.  The boys couldn’t wait to sit down and play the game as a family!

Creationary is similar to Pictionary, but with LEGOS.  Players  roll a LEGO die to select one of four building categories: vehicles, buildings, nature or things.   They then choose a card from one of three levels of difficulty and build the object pictured.  The enclosed directions provide several ways to play from this point.  We chose to have the other three players attempt to guess what the builder had created.

In the store, we thought this game sounded like a ton of fun!  In reality, the play moved slowly and proved frustrating for all but the best builder in our family:  Ryan!   Connor was quickly frustrated in his building efforts and resorted to repeatedly picking a new card before building the one in hand:  “This one is too hard, Mommy!”  I was stumped by several of the “easiest” cards.  Coffee pot put me at a total loss; wheel chair I could conceptualize, but could not build with the pieces provided. In the end, we suggested the boys work together to build some of the items pictured on the cards, not as part of the game, but just to get a feel for how to build so others can guess.  This turned out to be a lot of fun, and not quite as frustrating as playing by the rules had been.  

Overall, I would recommend LEGO’s new Creationary game to LEGO-Loving families like our own, with one caution:  it’s a lot harder than it looks… and your nine-year-old son will probably out-build and out-play any adult who accepts the challenge of ” just one game.”