Buildings and neighborhoods are a prevalent LEGO builds, often shown in large displays together to create large cities in collaborative exhibits. When showing all the creations together, it’s important to give the buildings variety to make it feel less like carbon copy buildings and have more diversity, like a real city. To help create a more unique city, Brian and Jason Lyles, authors of The LEGO Neighborhood Book, are back with The LEGO Neighborhood Book 2: Build Your Own City!
Like The LEGO Neighborhood Book, The LEGO Neighborhood Book 2: Build Your Own City! is all about building up your LEGO city. While the first book focused heavily on building the buildings of your city, the second book has a couple buildings, but focuses more on the aesthetics of the city.
The LEGO Neighborhood Book 2: Build Your Own City! is broken down into sections focusing on residential neighborhoods, commercial neighborhoods, public places, and the spaces that the buildings exist in. The sections show off the facades of the external of the buildings, but the building instructions focus more on the details, like the furniture, the outdoor accoutrements, and the little things that bring the city to life.
There is a chapter on microbuilding cities. While it is nice to address that there are cities at that scale, it almost deserves to be left to its own book, as it shows off buildings and parks that can be built on microscale, but no discussion of how to build on that scale.
Lest The LEGO Neighborhood Book 2: Build Your Own City! ignores how to build a building, the final section of the book (which takes up almost a third of the page count) is how to build Corner Condominiums. The Corner Condominiums are a combination of two buildings that take up a large baseplate and are furnished for minifigures to move in as soon as your finish building it.
The LEGO Neighborhood Book 2: Build Your Own City! is a great resource for building the parts of the city that go in and around the buildings of your LEGO city, and make a perfect accompaniment to The LEGO Neighborhood Book. For anyone who wants to make their LEGO city look lived in, this book is great resource to build all those details.
