BrickSlopes Colorado LEGO Event Debuts in Denver

LEGOs have been around since 1932;  the name comes from the Danish “leg godt,” meaning “play well.” And now superfans can play well right here in Denver, at BrickSlopes Colorado, one of only eleven officially recognized Adult Fans of LEGO events by the LEGO Group.

The BrickSlopes Colorado celebration of all things LEGO will be held at the Stockyard Event Center for four days, April 24-27. Thursday and Friday are designed specifically for those involved in AFOL (or who want to be!) and will include team builds, speed builds, a parts swap, a whole Dungeons & Dragons/LEGO crossover and much more.

But Brickslopes isn't excluding families and kids. On Saturday and Sunday, everyone is welcome, and organizer Nikki Malone Daniels promises there will be something for all levels of LEGO love. "It's a family-fun event," she says. "We'll still have presentations and panels for the AFOLs, but we'll also have games for the kids, a big 3-ton brick pit for them to play in, a race track, and lots more."

Daniels adds that Saturday's big event for youth is a build-mosaic event, and on Sunday, there will be a "Make and Take" with the new LEGO cars that were just released. "There'll be vendors for those little mini-figs and other accessories and hard to find sets and a lot more for the fans," she says. "Plenty of things to keep everybody busy and happy."

Daniels herself wasn't a kid who was into LEGO. "As a kid, it was just too expensive, but once I got older and had a little money of my own, I decided to go crazy," she laughs. "I joined a LEGO Users Group after meeting some ladies from the local LUG at BrickFest Live, and she said not only were there perks to joining, but they really wanted to include more women in the group. So I signed up. Actually, both my mother and I signed up. She's a LEGO fan now, too."

That was back in 2019; Daniels got involved right away with a Harry Potter group build that she says she loved so much that she got deeper into the organization. By the time the COVID-19 pandemic hit, she was the coordination director for the LUG, and it was her responsibility to keep the group together during a time when no one could physically get together. In that, she succeeded, and once the world opened up again, began to travel to other conventions with the fellow fans she'd come to know. They went first to Brickworld Chicago, and then to BrickSlopes Utah. "It was just called BrickSlopes then," Daniels says. "We really loved the intimacy of the smaller space at BrickSlopes. Brickworld was amazing, but it was just so big. That was when we really started thinking that hmmm...maybe we should do a convention in Colorado too."

The result of that long LEGO road is the inaugural event of BrickSlopes Colorado. "We're obviously excited to bring in all the local AFOLs," says Daniels, "but we're also really looking forward to hosting the kids just getting into the hobby and those adults who are more casual fans, too. Just the sheer spectacle of the MOCs [My Own Creations]. We're going to have 17,000 square feet of displays that aren't sets — they're just creations directly from the imaginations of builders. It's amazing. Awe-inspiring. Out of this world."
One of the MOCs that Daniels effuses about is one she saw in Brickworld Chicago. "There's this group called Eurobricks that always displays there," she recalls. "They make these huge collaborative builds. The one I saw was this Day of the Dead ship full of color and light and sounds. Just crazy cool."

For many fans of LEGO, it's the licensed sets that draw them in. The first licensed set as we know it today was, as fans might guess, Star Wars, and those started in 1999. Before that, sets were more generalized — knights, space, etc. — and before that, there weren't really sets at all, just boxes of blocks meant to come to life out of sheer creative energy. Licensed sets are now one of the major revenue sources for all things LEGO — and the aftermarket for some of the hard-to-find sets can be pricey. Even new sets — the larger ones, naturally — can command serious money. The Ultimate Collectors Set of the Millennium Falcon is nearly a yard long, and two feet across — and retails for $850. 

"We're hoping that we'll be able to do this on an annual basis," says Daniels. "We hope the event will spark more interest in the hobby and just being more creative in general. But really, we just want people to come and have fun. Nerd out!"

BrickSlopes Colorado, Saturday, April 26, andSunday, April 27, the Stockyards Event Center, 5004 National Western Drive. For tickets and more information, see the BrickSlopes website.