There aren’t many LEGO sets designed to played with once they’re built. A lot of them are envisioned as show-pieces, and yes, you can do imaginary play with them like you would holding a LEGO Millennium Falcon and whooshing around the house, but this MOC from HH Bricks captures a kind of LEGO playability that’s absolutely rare. Inspired by his daughters’ love for building and playing with LEGO, HH Bricks designed this playable version of one of the world’s most popular tabletop games.
For those uninitiated, Connect 4 is a simple game where you drop tokens down a vertical slot-board, trying to build a set of 4 tokens in a straight line. Your job is to simply build a straight line without being stopped, while also consistently breaking your opponent’s ability to build a solid 4 streak on their own. The game just celebrated 50 years since it was first invented in 1974 (and commercially sold in ’75), and this set recreates the game’s strategic magic, just using LEGO bricks.
Designer: HH Bricks
Although HH Bricks doesn’t specify how many pieces come together to build this set, one could venture it’s easily in the higher end of the spectrum, just because of how many tiny single or double-stud bricks were used to build the set’s flat panels and the 42 tokens that come along with the board. Flat surfaces are fairly complex in LEGO, not because of any visual complexity, but just the fact that they require a lot of bricks to build out.
The rules are ridiculously simple. Each player chooses a color and gets to work, dropping tokens into any slot they want. Beat your opponent by building a connection of 4 tokens in the same color in a straight line (horizontal, vertical, or diagonal). Some people even play a double-streak round, trying to hit two connections to eventually win the game. Once the game is over, simply pull out the bottom tray and all the tokens come crashing out, reseting the game for the next session.
If you’re here you’ve probably heard of LEGO Ideas – the online forum where LEGO fans and enthusiasts build, share, and vote for MOCs (or fan-made My Own Creations). This LEGO Connect 4 set is a part of the Ideas forum too, having racked up more than 2,800 votes as of writing this. The ultimate goal is to hit the 10k vote mark (which this MOC has 478 more days to reach), following which LEGO’s internal team reviews the build and turns it into a retail box set if everything goes well. The first step, however, is to hit that 10,000 vote mark, which you can help HH Bricks reach by voting for their MOC on the LEGO Ideas website here!
The post DIY LEGO ‘Connect 4’ Brickset lets you actually play the game after building it! first appeared on Yanko Design.