Lego fandom: Kid’s play, or nerd territory?
- Greg Richards
- Oct 3
- 6 min read
You thought Lego was just for kids? Think again.
Lego has been co-creating with adult makers for years, developing a worldwide network of “Adult Fans of LEGO“, or AFOLs for short. There are currently over 350 such groups globally, and these Lego fans come together regularly to “meet, have fun, share, inspire, build and connect with likeminded AFOLs and LEGO® Group employees”, according to Lego. These groups organize multi-day events with many participants, “focusing on networking, social activities and knowledge/skill sharing around the LEGO® hobby.” These groups are linked at global level in the LEGO Ambassador Network.
“The LEGO Ambassador Network (LAN) is a community network to provide valuable dialogue and collaboration activities for the mutual benefit of Recognized LEGO User Groups (RLUG), Recognized LEGO Online Communities, Recognized LEGO Fan Media (RLFM) and the LEGO Group (TLG).”
The Lego Group recognizes the AFOL community as an important part of its customer base and maintains a number of outreach programs connecting it to the fan community. In some cases, entire official Lego sets can be seen as intended not for children but for adult fans. These often refer to themselves as ‘geeks‘ or ’nerds‘, and as in any community these days, they delight in acronyms.
So much so, that there are many guides available to Lego fan terminology:
AFOL:
Stands for “Adult Fan of LEGO.” It refers to adults who are passionate about LEGO and engage in building and collecting LEGO sets.
MOC:
Stands for “My Own Creation.” It refers to original LEGO creations designed and built by fans rather than official LEGO sets.
SNOT:
Stands for “Studs Not On Top.” It refers to a building technique where LEGO bricks are placed sideways or at angles to create a smooth surface without exposed studs.
LUG:
Stands for “LEGO Users Group.” It is a community organization or club formed by LEGO enthusiasts in a specific geographical area to share their passion for LEGO.
UCS:
Stands for “Ultimate Collector Series.” It is a LEGO product line that consists of highly detailed and large-scale models, often targeting adult LEGO fans.
Studless:
Refers to building techniques that minimize or eliminate the visible studs on the surface of a LEGO creation, resulting in a sleek and smooth appearance.
AFOLCON:
Short for “Adult Fan of LEGO Convention.” It refers to gatherings or conventions where adult LEGO fans come together to showcase their creations, participate in workshops, and socialize.
Dark Ages:
A period of time when LEGO fans temporarily lose interest in LEGO building, often occurring during adolescence or adulthood, before rediscovering their passion later on.
The Lego fan story begins twenty years ago in 2005 when an ambitious LEGO employee , Jan Beyer, had the opportunity to organise a LEGO event in the small town of Skaerbaek in Denmark. He took the opportunity and helped create the “LEGO Fan Weekend.” There are now 12 AFOL Networking Events in 2025, including North America, Europe and Asia.
Brickvention | January 18 - 19 | Melbourne, Australia | |
Bricktastic | February 22 - 23 | Manchester, UK | |
Bricks Cascade | May 17 - 18 | Portland, Oregon, USA | |
Paredes de Coura Fan Weekend | June 7 - 8 | Paredes de Coura, Portugal | |
Brickworld Chicago | June 14 - 15 | Chicago, Illinois, USA | |
Japan Brickfest | July 5 - 6 | Kobe, Japan | |
Brickrodeo | July 3 - 6 | Austin, Texas, USA | |
BrickFair Virginia | August 2 - 3 | Dulles, Virginia, USA | |
China AFOL Festival | August 2 - 3 | Fuzhou, China | |
Brickslopes Utah | August 21 - 24 | Utah, USA | |
BrickCon | September 4 - 7 | Seattle, WA, USA | |
Skærbæk Fan Weekend | September 27-28 | Skærbæk, Denmark |
These events attract large numbers of visitors. For example Bricktastic had over 12,000 visitors and Brickcon Seattle attracted 10,000. Skærbæk in Denmark had 1,000 public visitors. There are also dozens of LEGO Conventions and Events in addition to these ‘official’ events.
Here is a report on the 2025 edition of the Skaerbaek Fan Weekend in Denmark, which is notable for its location close to the Lego home base of Billund.
The Skaerbaek Fan Weekend is organized by amateur enthusiasts, who are apparently happy to break even and show little sign of professional for-profit management. The organization rents the Skaerbaekcentret for the event, and, as far as we know, they get no public funding. Why hold the event in a village of 3,000 people in rural Jutland? Skærbækcentret has two big exhibition halls and 100 cosy cottages.
The event Business Model is pretty simple: the Fan Weekend is designed for AFOLs (Adult Fans of Lego) and LUGs (Lego User Groups), of which there are a large number (for example, the US alone has 53 such groups ). AFOLs can submit their Lego MOC (My Own Creation), and if it is accepted by the organizers, they are invited to exhibit it there and participate in all the activities for free (apart from travel, accommodation and catering, which you have to organize yourself). The resulting MOC exhibition, therefore, is a self-generating visitor attraction for the paying public. There are around 400 official participants to present their MOCs, including their families, and most of them stay at least from Thursday to Monday. There were constantly long queues of paying visitors on Saturday and Sunday, although not many stay overnight. The entrance fee is a moderate 60DKK (€8) for adults and 30DKK for kids from 2 to 12. There is no sponsorship, but a lot of volunteering is involved. And there is an auction, which is specifically advertised as an additional source of income for the organizers.The venue, Skaerbaekcentret, is a vast sports and leisure center, with swimming pool, football fields and two adjacent exhibition halls. It is organized around a non-profit foundation (Fonden Skærbækcentret) and a local association (Foreningen skærbækcentret). The foundation runs the commercial side (kitchen, café, holiday-home rentals, etc.), while the association serves the community/club activities. The adjacent Skærbæk Ferieby holiday homes group (something like 100 cottages on the grounds that house 4-6 people each) are owned by a private investor. During the event, the Skaerbaekcentret has considerable income from rent, accommodation and catering, but is otherwise not involved in the organization.The event, consequently, has two different target groups, the more recently evolved adults target group and the traditional kids target group (which effectively includes parents and relatives). The MOCs are built and exhibited by AFOLs and LUGs. The resulting exhibition itself is then mainly visited by families with kids, the exhibition effectively acting as a temporary Legoland, close to the original theme park. So what is the atmosphere like? For the participants, you can probably best compare it to a bikers meeting without the heavy drinking and the occasional violence (both not advisable around delicate Lego creations). Participants wear their LUG uniforms just like bikers wear their club gear. It is an intimate, if somewhat cult-like community, and they caress their MOCs just like bikers caress their Harley Davidsons. The event does have quite some potential for professionalization. The big USP it has in comparison to all the other AFOL Networking Events around the world is proximity to Billund, which also means Lego itself is involved. There are workshops with actual Lego designers and Lego recruiters, and Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen himself (the grandson of Lego founder Ole Kirk Christiansen) pays a visit and talks to the participants. Currently the event is a curious mix of a lot of amateur DIY compassion and a little bit of corporate Lego power. It's miles away from, say, a Comic Con as far as corporate organization is concerned, and yet it attracts lots of visitors. Lego itself could possibly take it over, just as they have done with Bricklink and, indirectly, the theme parks.
The success of the Skaerbaek event is underlined by the fact that future editions are already planned up to 2029, so plenty of time to book a slot for your MOC to rub shoulders with other AFOLs, comparing MOCs and inventing acronyms.
It seems that some adults have always been interested in building with Lego, but before websites, blogs and social media, they were more isolated and insecure about sharing their passion for something that is supposedly for kids. Then, with the benefit of the relative anonymity of web-based communication, they started to share their passion confidently and build online communities, and these became visible by exhibiting their creations on the web and at self-organized events. So Lego decided, cleverly, to start catering to this adult target group. Now there are whole sections in the Lego sets portfolio that are aimed at the adult market, and those sections grow steadily. The sets sell in smaller numbers but with larger profit margins than those targeted at kids. It might happen that, like with model railways for example, the kids target group will eventually disappear. But, this is not likely to occur while Lego continues to invest heavily in keeping kids interested in the product. The advent of Lego stores in major city centres is one sign of this. Many parents will for the foreseeable future prefer for their kids to do something creative and "real" with their hands instead of just staring at a screen. But even if you want to stare at a screen, Lego and its communities give you plenty of opportunities to do so with the Lego online universe of video games and social media for kids – which many parents still prefer to TikTok. Perhaps most importantly for the long-term Lego strategy is the fact that the kids who play with Lego today are the adults who buy the expensive sets tomorrow, and fill an empty event space with their MOCS.
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