Review: Build Your Own City Book

Subtitled as "The Big Unofficial Lego Builder's Book", this is a third party book about building Lego City creations.  It's full of instructions, parts lists, and pictures.  The breakdown is as follows: pages 1-19 = Intro, SNOT, Tips & Techniques; pages 20-239 = Midi-Scale; and pages 240-400 = Minifig Scale.  So, about 57% of this book is aimed at a usable scale for MFZ.

What the authors call Midi-Scale looks to be about 5P Scale in MFZ terms as the representations of people are five plates tall.  This is one of the lesser used scales but I think that the items these instructions build will still help to flesh out a gaming table.  There are 24 vehicle instructions, 4 of which are construction vehicles, 1 is a plane, 1 is a helicopter, and 3 are trains.  There are instructions for two different types of trees.  Instructions for a house with two different types of roof and two different types of floor design.  And there's instructions for a Department Store that covers 32 x 16 studs and is 23 bricks, 1 plate tall.  Each set of instructions has a little introduction blurb that also gives a tip  or trick concerning building.  There are also plenty of pictures between the instructions that show alternate builds and things that haven't been included in the instructions.

There are only five sets of instructions in the Minifig Scale section, all of which are vehicles.  There may be some techniques that can be adapted to other scales but all I've done so far is glance through this section.

Price is about $24.99 depending on the source.  With only -- roughly -- 33 sets of instructions and not all of them relevant to MFZ I can't really recommend this book.  A lot of the instructions in the Midi-Scale section are just variations on the base car design.  I've seen similar complaints about this book elsewhere.  Maybe if they put in some different instructions and reduced the size of the instructions themselves they could have fit a little more variety in the book.