LEGO Stronghold

FIRST General Forum
#1

Everyone here on Chief Delphi knows that FIRST changes lives. Designed by an alumni, volunteer, and mentor and a current student from my team, this LEGO Idea is a scale model of half of the field for FIRST STRONGHOLD.

The project can be found at: https://ideas.lego.com/projects/132444.

The picture of the set is below.

This set includes: all 9 possible defenses, 1 mock robot of the Blue Alliance— based on the game reveal video, 2 opposing Red Alliance robots, 9 Boulders, and… Dean Kamen! A similar stand-alone set, FIRST STRONGHOLD: Red Alliance, along with its awesome minifigure, has been submitted for the other half of the field and is awaiting approval.

LEGO Ideas accounts are FREE. We need your help, as the set builds up to 10,000 supporters. If you support the project, please comment your first name and any associated FRC team number!

Example. “Brian from 810! Im a Supporter!”

For those of you that support this idea (thank you in advance!) and have an association with an FRC team, we’ll propose to LEGO Ideas that the top 3 teams who support this project (in total, 6 different teams between this set and the coming Red Alliance Set) will have their teams’ Standards added, in the form of stickers for the 3 alliance Standards.

If you like what you see, please share with your teammates!

Are you ready to defend your LEGO Stronghold?

Stay tuned for the Red Alliance!

IMG_6942.png


IMG_6942.png

#2

This is really cool

#3

Okay, this is pretty awesome! Can’t wait to see how far this goes :smiley:

Maybe after the worlds competitions, you can add some “Robot Booster Packs” of robots that were on Einstein :stuck_out_tongue:

#4

Hopefully we will see our goal of having the stronghold set made. It would be really cool if we can do this yearly, and even get older games made. This is not only good for strategy, but it’s also nice to have to remember a year in robotics.

#5

Just a quick update on our progress:
In just under three days of its debut, we’ve gathered more than 120 supporters from across the country! We’d like to thank everyone for their support.

We kindly ask that you please log onto LEGO Ideas and support this project, if you have not already done so. The official goal set by LEGO is 10,000 supporters, so we still have a ways to go.

Also, please remember to share our project on social media with #LEGOStronghold!

#6

I’m Bryce from team 2471, and I’m a proud supporter.

#7

(NOTE: This is coming from an avid AFOL perspective)

Looks good! But, some questions…*
How do you plan to market to the greater LEGO community? Why would a non-FIRST customer want this kit? Will a 6-10 year old kid want this?

Please, don’t take this as harsh. I certainly don’t intend it that way. Just throwing some questions out. The review panel will want to select kits that will be wanted by many.

*(I’ve been watching LEGO Ideas since it started and was known as LEGO Cuusoo, so I’ve seen the whole range of ideas… :] )

#8

Thanks for your question, Calvin. No offense is taken, and we appreciate that you care enough about the idea to ask. I knew this was definitely something that’s been hard thought over on the end of the designers, Matt and Emily. I reached out to Matt, and he had this to say:

#9

As of 6/3/16, the stronghold Lego set has 1464 votes on it! Keep on voting guys!!!

#10

First of all, in the interest of disclosure, I am not in the LEGO community. I’d never seen the two words in conjunction until today.

If the marketing on this product is limited to the existing LEGO community, it is almost certainly doomed to fail. The key question here is whether there are enough FIRST people who would buy it. This is a chance to **expand **the LEGO community, not **exploit **the existing one.

A key point to getting anything close to an accurate read would be to include intended price points. If a half field were $20 or less, I’d likely buy both sides. If it were in the $20-40 range, probably one side. If more than $50, not interested. I may or may not be typical.

For previous years, I’d recommend going back one year each year - six months out of cycle with the “current” offers. Eventually, the “back year” interest would fade below viability, or not.

#11

Lego products generally cost 0.10 USD per piece* (i.e. a $30.00 lego product would contain between ~250 and 350 pieces). If a part count were provided, one could use that to get a rough idea of what the cost would be, but I was unable to find that metric listed.

*licensing fees tend to increase this by a non-trivial amount (~$5.00 for a typical product)

#12

Ideas kits have historically fallen within this rule of thumb. From a brief look, the lowest price per piece was 0.073 USD with the highest being $0.135. Looks like the kits average to the normal 10 cents, though.

#13

Here is something else to think about with this project. This is purely an analysis of the timeline for a project like this. My opinions about this project are irrelevant to this post.

The latest LEGO ideas kit is this awesome marble maze.

Here is the project timeline:

The project met the 10000 voters needed by the January 2015 deadline. Project deadlines occur about 3 times a year. This way the projects that cross the threshold are grouped together for evaluation.

The project was approved in May 2015. Many good projects were rejected, including a Goonies set celebrating the movie’s 30th anniversary, and a reasonably scaled Minis Tirith from Lord of the Rings. Both of these projects have a large following from outside the “LEGO community”, but neither advanced beyond the review stage. This could be because of licensing terms, or a market evaluation to determine interest. LEGO does not release the details on why a project is rejected.

Official product images of the Marble Maze were released in March 2016 with the official launch in April 2016.

This means from the project reaching 10000 votes to the project becoming an official event took 16 months. Following this timeline, LEGO FIRST Stronghold would be released in January 2018.

Just some food for thought. How can this be marketed in such a way to make it relevant a season and a half from now?

#14