Other

Message Board

A clever idea for a family night that fights you every step of the build.

Brick Rated Score

3.1/5

Set 41839 · 2024

Pieces1,743

Minifigsn/a

Year2024

Set number41839

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The verdict

This one is all concept and it leans hard on whether you love the concept.

You spell out a word up to 30 characters long, one letter tile at a time, and hand sheets around so everyone builds a letter at once. As a shared project it can be genuinely lovely. As a solo build it turns into a dark tan jigsaw puzzle, and the finished sign wobbles if you look at it wrong. Go in for the group experience, not the model.

Best for: Families who want a build everyone can work on at the same table

The full review

What it is

Message Board is one of the more unusual LEGO® sets of 2024, and I have a real soft spot for what it is trying to do. It launched alongside Travel Moments as part of a little pair called Build Together, sets designed from the ground up so more than one person can build at the same time. The idea here is simple and sweet. You pick a word or phrase up to 30 characters long, a family name, a birthday message, a motto you actually live by, and you build it letter by letter as a chunky sign you can stand up at home. The instructions come on separate sheets specifically so you can hand them around the table and everyone claims a letter. There are even 10 emoji stickers for round tiles if you want to add a bit of personality on the end.

The catch

Now the caveats, and there are a few big ones. The letters are built almost entirely in dark tan and white, so when you tip all the unnumbered bags into bowls you are staring at a sea of pieces that vary in shape but barely in color. Several reviewers described it as feeling less like LEGO and more like hunting through a jigsaw, and I get it. It is fiddly and slow, and the parts are so similar at a glance that even sorted bowls do not help much. The finished sign is also on the delicate side. It leans on Technic pins to hold together and it can topple if it gets bumped, which is a bit ironic for a set whose whole pitch is rearranging your message. Prying those pins apart to swap a word is more work than it should be. And at 99 dollars for 1,743 mostly small flat elements, you are paying for the concept more than the pile of bricks.

Who it's for

So who is this actually for. If you want a project a couple of kids and a parent can all dig into at the same table on a rainy afternoon, and the point is the shared hour rather than a showpiece, this earns its keep and then some. If you are a solo builder chasing a satisfying build or a display model with wow factor, I would be straight with you and say skip it, because the monotony of the sorting and the plainness of the palette will wear on you fast. It is a genuinely nice thought executed in the most tedious color LEGO could have picked. Buy it for the people you will build it with, not for the sign on the shelf.

The parts story

What the build is actually like, and the pieces worth knowing about.

The build is unlike almost anything else LEGO makes, and that is both the charm and the problem. Each letter sits on a 6x8 plate, and you add two layers of dark tan and white plates and tiles on top to shape the character, using a mix of curved, angled and straight elements to get clean strokes. There is no numbered sequence at all. The bags are unnumbered on purpose, so you have to open everything and lay it all out before you start, then work letter by letter off whichever instruction sheet you grabbed. It is repetitive by design, the same plate-and-tile routine 30 times over, which is exactly why it works better split between several people than ground through alone. The letters then join into a standing sign held together with Technic pins.

On pieces, do not come here for exotic new molds or rare recolors, because this set is a study in restraint. The star of the show is really the font engineering itself, the way negative space and curved slopes are used so that hard letters like Q and S still read cleanly. For parts value it is a huge tub of common small plates, tiles and jumpers, overwhelmingly in dark tan and white, which is genuinely useful if you are a builder who hoards neutral basics, but underwhelming if you want variety. The designer actually ran scripts to work out optimal counts of every element so a normal phrase will not leave you short, though spell something with twenty of the same letter and you might. There are no minifigures, just 10 emoji stickers for round tiles.

Fun facts

01Message Board was part of LEGO's short-lived Build Together line, a two-set experiment (alongside 41838 Travel Moments) engineered so a whole group could build the same set at the same time.
02The set can spell any message up to 30 characters using the full Latin alphabet, with the designer running scripts to calculate part counts so a typical phrase does not run out of letters.
03Every letter is a brick-built glyph in a single custom font, using clever negative space so even awkward characters like Q and S stay legible.
04It carries a middling community reputation, sitting around 3.1 out of 5 on Brickset, with Brick Fanatics naming it one of the worst building experiences of 2024.