The Yoda Chronicles is written by Michael Price (The Simpsons) and produced by Wil Film, and marks the first time entirely new Star Wars characters and vehicles have been created specifically for LEGO Star Wars. for more on LEGO Star Wars: The Yoda Chronicles! This site does not work on your browser. Please upgrade your browser to experience the site.Please support and share my LEGO CUUSOO Star Wars Micro Chess Set project. If the project garners 10,000 supporters it stands a great chance of becoming an official LEGO set! A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, a great battle of good and evil was fought. Now you can relive the struggles of the courageous characters from the Star Wars saga in one of the world's oldest games, brought to life with LEGO Star Wars microfigs. LEGO Star Wars Chess puts you in command of the Rebel Alliance or the evil Galactic Empire! As you craft your strategy at each step, you move your forces to go forth and do battle. Use Chewbacca's skill with the crossbow to take out a sinister Tie Pilot.
Or pit Darth Vader in a deadly lightsaber duel against his arch enemy Luke Skywalker! The LEGO Star Wars Micro Chess Set uses microfigures from the new Battle of Hoth game set. The set includes a 16X16 black & white LEGO Chess baseplate and comes in it's own easy to store and carry box (like the old LEGO tic-tac box). I used 64 black and white studded plates (32 of each color) sourced via Bricklink for the chessboard, but the grey and blue tiles from the Battle of Hoth gameset will do just as well I also used female microfigs from other LEGO gamesets for the Queens on each side (as Princess Leia is conspicuously absent from the Battle of Hoth gameset). The Star Wars microfig chess set is highly compact and portable with all the pieces staying secure even while playing in a bus, train or plane. The LEGO Tic Tac Toe Box is a perfect fit for playing while on the go and for storage. LEGO should seriously consider sending one into Space as a gift to the ISS astronauts!The title of this essay is a riff on Kevin Kelley’s classic essay.
What follows is an account of applying the 1,000 fans model to a specific design challenge.It was a chilly Pennsylvania night. I was trudging home from work to catch a bus back to Philadelphia at the King of Prussia mall.My commute back was always enlivened by the fact that the mall had a LEGO store and I would drop in to browse the current selection while waiting for the bus to show up.That particular night at the LEGO store I was thinking of a gift for my son’s sixth birthday the next week. But I wanted to come up with a meaningful gift, not just buy him a ready-made toy set. What if I hacked LEGO to make my son a Star Wars Chess set?I set about calculating the minimal bricks and figures that would not break my bank account and bought them there and then. That night at home I put together this initial setup for the rebels:The sides were all messed up and the pawns did not match but my son was very happy when he received his birthday present! He started to evince interest in learning the rules of Chess and we played our first games.
He always won them of course:)Around the same time LEGO had launched Ideas, it’s take on crowd-sourced innovation in the manner of Kickstarter. On a lark I submitted my Star Wars Chess project to LEGO Ideas. Nothing much happened at first. But then a few bold souls started to support the project and provided me with feedback in the comments section. I made periodic refinements and came up with a nicer lineup:All was well.My son started playing Star Wars Chess with his friends and gained street cred at school. Meanwhile, the LEGO Ideas project was chugging along, slowly gathering supporters. But it was already not unique. I needed to differentiate the project, and fast. Luckily, the LEGO Battle of Hoth gameset came out just then, containing a bevy of Star Wars microfigures:I calculated that a 16x16 LEGO baseplate would be perfect for creating the chessboard using the studded plates that came with the Battle of Hoth gameset. Looking up the list of sets using the baseplate, I stumbled upon the LEGO Tic-Tac-Toe box.
I knew instantly that this was the perfect pivot for the project! We tested out an initial version:And it all came together into this box:The clincher was finding the Dejarik hologameboard tile as a decorative element referencing the famous Wookiee scene from the original movie. Some box art was also in order:So the project was now stable. I included open-source instructions in the description so anyone could make their own set now if they so wished, regardless of the project achieving final production. The official LEGO comment upon reaching 1,000 supporters was quite encouraging:Now to the hard part. Getting people to support the project.I found that Reddit was great for making images go viral on Imgur.Likewise, Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Tumblr, Instagram, Flickr and Vine all helped raise awareness. And writeups are nice.But the conversion rate to supporters from all these channels was minimal. Internal conversions from LEGO Ideas generated the most support. Only committed people will convert!