Usually, I try to follow the monthly LEGO challenges that our community provides and build something. But when it comes to FebRovery, it’s a bit different—I’m not good at building things with wheels. So at the end of January, I had this idea to build a space bandit that would steal all the rovers in the upcoming FebRovery for 2022. And it hit me—why not make it a contest!? I know that there are a lot of people who would like to get better at creating characters, myself included, and hence the contest was born. (Oh, and I called it FebRobbery, because it sounds good… and stolen! :D )

The Plan and Scheme

As a fan of small LEGO builds, I wanted people to also build small things and have fun with them without the need of spending too much time on it. The idea was to “build a character out of LEGO bricks (not minifigures) that is going to be your space bandit and will try to steal some rovers. It can be any alien species or human, no robots. It can have mechanical elements, but it should be some sort of living thing. You can build in any scale, but I would recommend keeping it relatively small, or at least not huge.” And that’s it—no special backgrounds, scenes or vignettes. Just cool characters and lots of fun.

I invited two builders to join me judge the entries. First: Mr Frost, a builder known for his love of rovers and beautifully detailed vehicles. In FebRovery he typically publishes a build EVERY DAY of the month, which is pretty insane and a true show to watch. Second: Djokson, an absolute master of brick-built characters. Each of his creatures tells a story of it’s own, most of the times with a small number of parts. So with these two rover and character specialists on my side, we were ready to go. Aah—and a few prizes too! I prepared three small trophies, my gang of robbers, and we went out on a hunt.

The Gang of Robbers

The contest generated 21 unique creatures, and they were all so full of character and super fun to look at (and some of the backstories were hilarious!). Most of the robbers were of alien origin and fun fact, we had no human robbers, which is a good thing—apparently we humans are not that good at stealing rovers… yet. Here is a gallery of the crew. (You can see each builder and look at their other work by clicking through to this Flickr group for FebRobbery.)

The Nefarious Winners

And finally the winners! The results of the top 5 to 6 entries were very close, but unfortunately, we had only three prizes this time. Here are your FebRobbey top winners! The ones that got away with it all!

1st Place - Stinger by Scott Wilhelm

2nd Place - Fish & Chips by Toddbrick

3rd Place - Alien Creature by filbrick

4th Place - Crime boss “The Armadillo“ - by Snick Bombay

5th Place - Miko by gGh0st

FebRovery has successfully been robbed! A big thank you goes to everybody that decided to build a character and to our judges of course! That sums up the contest for 2022. I would love to do it again next year, and people have already started to ask about coming on board, ready to contribute. I hope that we will have even more space robbers next round.

So be sure to equip your rovers with some sort of alarm system next year, because we are coming for them!

Are you into building characters? Leave your thoughts in the comments below.

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