No Starch Press are back with another of the popular LEGO titles, Tiny LEGO Wonders takes a closer look at the miniscale world of LEGO and includes instructions to construct nearly 40 mini LEGO builds. Across the books 10 chapters you’ll be able to treated to a wide range of vehicles to try out for yourself all expertly put together by the books author Mattia Zamboni, who has previous contributed to No Starch Press’ Built-It Book series. Read on for our thought on Tiny LEGO Wonders.
Official Synopsis
Build a lot with a little with this collection of miniscale models! In this inspiring, step-by-step guide, you’ll learn how to make the most out of your bricks by building miniature models of vehicles, spacecraft, airplanes, racecars, ships, and more. Fun, compact designs will inspire you to get creative with as few as 75 bricks. LEGO fans of all ages will get hours of entertainment out of building miniscale models that fit in the palm of their hands. In Tiny LEGO Wonders, you’ll create miniscale models of real vehicles like: a space shuttle Boeing 747, Concorde plane, and helicopters Flatbed trucks and cement mixers France’s high-speed TGV train BMW and F1 racecars Muscle cars Cargo, cruise, wooden ships, and more! Let your creativity run wild with these pint-sized miniscale models of real vehicles. All you need is a few bricks and a little imagination.
Review
I used to be quite set in my ways when it came to build scales, I was quite firmly in the ‘minifigure-scale’ camp. But the longer I’ve be around the LEGO, I’ve found myself appreciating different build scales far more, one of which is the microscale size most commonly used in the Architecture theme. So I was very intrigued to find No Starch Press have created a book which focuses soley on mini-scale builds.
As with most of No Starch Press ‘ LEGO titles, the book itself has a high quality feel to it, with a sturdy hardback bound cover, which is nice and minimalistic. It’s a mainly white cover with an microscale Excavator as the main image and a number of other builds dotted about both the front and back cover. Offering a sneak peek as some of the funky little things you’ll be treated to inside. These images all have a nice glossy finish to them compared to the matt finish of the cover, adding to that quality feel.
But as the say, you can’t judge a book by it’s cover and it’s the inside which is of most interest. The book is brimming with build instructions for 40 different mini-scale vehicle builds, all of which are themed around one of the book’s 10 chapters. These feature vehicles from land, sea, air and beyond. Unlike other LEGO titles which have inspirational models within them, Tiny LEGO Wonders actually provides a visual parts list and a step by step build guide. This makes it much easier to gather together the correct elements and get building. The instructions are inspired by the visual style of the official LEGO ones but aren’t quite as in-depth, yet they are still simple enough to follow. Each model is also tagged for it’s difficulty level. They may be smaller builds but some can be quite involved which is what I love about discovering different ways to build with LEGO.
Although Mattia is listed as the main author of the book, a team of 10 contributors from around the world have also lent their building expertise to the book, which provides it with a nice varied array of models to tackle. Tiny LEGO Wonders is just that another wonderful LEGO title from No Starch Press, who continue to publish, unique and inspirational titles, which focus on often overlooked aspects of the LEGO world.
Tiny LEGO Wonders is published by No Starch Press and will be available next month from all good book retailers including WHSmith and Amazon.