Build-A-Minifigure (BAM)
What's up LEGO Maniacs??!!??!? I know you love going to the LEGO store to root around in those big bins of plastic bricks. Well, TOO BAD, most of the minifigures on this page are impossible to find at the LEGO store! They're a distant memory, consigned to the past, jumbled up in children's LEGO tubs—as indeed they should be.
Okay, let me explain. If you go to your physical brick-and-mortar LEGO store, you'll be able to build exclusive LEGO minifigures, stylistically similar to the blind-boxed Collectible Minifigures. A single minifigure bought this way consists of 5 parts: head, body, legs, and five accessories, one of which is usually a hat/hairpiece. In the UK, a single minifigure costs £2.99, but you can get a box of three for £6.99. Technically, what I've heard from store staff is that you're only supposed to buy a "complete minifigure", rather than just taking any five random parts. In practise you can probably load up your box with 15 rats and if the sales assistant likes your moxie they might let you get away with it. Become the rat king.
When are new BAM parts released?
New pieces are dumped into the tubs at several points around the year. At the start of the year, a batch of pieces for seven new minifigures will be added, including one themed for the Lunar New Year. Two or three more batches of seven are added later in the year, sometimes with a common theme. There's typically also a few themed batches of three minifigures, for parties, Valentine's Day/Easter/Spring, Halloween, and Christmas. If you want to build a minifigure of yourself or a pal, you're probably out of luck, as most of the parts are too wacky, idiosyncratic, or specialised to make normal-looking people.
While the parts from the latest drop should be pretty much guaranteed to all be there, the further back you go, the harder it'll be to reliably find all the pieces. In fact, there are definitely certain points in the year where the bins are entirely emptied and restocked. For example: during May 2025, I visited my local store, and found mostly pieces from the April drop, slightly fewer from the January drop. I also found lots of pieces from 2024, and even a fair few from 2023! The oldest piece I found was a light blue brick suit torso from 2022. However, I tried to build 2024's Halloween and Christmas minifigures, as well as 2025's Party minifigures, and could only find a few nondescript parts in very small quanitites; I couldn't build a single one. The June parts were then added at the start of the month; however, midway through, the bins were seemingly completely restocked, and I suddenly found many pieces that had been difficult to come by, including 2025's Party figures. The continued presence of parts from as far back as 2022 suggests to me that stores do not return pieces once they've got them, but might for example empty the bins after Halloween and after Christmas, keeping the parts from those periods separate until the following year. I'll be sure to verify this later this year, if older seasonal parts return!
How do we know about these minifigures?
As I keep hinting, the intended play-pattern here is very much for you to make your own minifigure, using your own imagination and creativity, to suit your own uniquely personalised tastes. But if you're reading this, it's because you're a dork like me who wants to "know the answers". Comparing photographs from various LEGO stores worldwide—and confirmed by the existence of high-quality PNGs of the minifigures—there are certain combinations that are communicated at the store level. Back when the minifigures were sold in transparent-plastic blister packs, stores usually had a display of pre-built ones that used a mixture of these combinations and whatever the bored sales assistants could come up with; this is why the seasonal batches break down into sets of three. Unfortunately, whatever materials are used to disseminate the intended combinations are confidential, so we've got to work it out for ourselves.
The most high-profile resource for Build-A-Minifigure exclusives is Jay's Brick Blog, which reviews the new minifigures as they come out. Unfortunately Jay does not always know the official configurations in advance, which leads to a lot of guesswork on his part, and there's a few waves which he never covered. This webpage instead uses the listings from AG LEGO Certified Stores, a retail partner for LEGO in Australia and New Zealand. They have had a listing to buy these minifigures online since at least 2022; as old minifigures go out of stock, they're removed from the listing, but the individual minifigures still appear in the product catalogue, so the images are still on their CDN. Thanks to these listings and the Wayback Machine, I've been able to reconstruct the most complete archive of these minifigures on the internet!
Each minifigure has its own name, and a unique number in the 1500-1699 range, mostly assigned sequentially; the image filenames themselves sometimes use random other numbers, which you can see on this webpage by hovering over the numbers with your mouse. I'm sceptical that either of these bits of information are actually "official" data in any meaningful sense; it's possible a middleman invented the names, and that the ID numbers are just assigned in the order the figures are added to the website. A small handful of listings were entirely missing, so I wasn't able to retrieve a couple of the names, unfortunately. One curiosity is that many minifigures with dresses have the dress piece backwards, perhaps to show off the printing, or maybe to help the employees with picking the right pieces. Click the images to view full resolution.
Here's something neat! This German store in Oberhausen has actually given names to some of their minifigures.
BAM tips & etiquette
When it comes to collectors, you're always going to find people with bad shopping habits. Some people know full well that their behaviour is detrimental to other people, and they just don't care—nothing to be done about that. But for most of us, it's just very easy to be thoughtless or inconsiderate without meaning to; I've definitely been guilty of it myself. So here are a few things to keep in mind while hunting for minifigures!
- Leave some for others. LEGO stores are usually situated in big cities, and you won't be the only fan hoping to find specific pieces. Scalping and bulk-buying create huge amounts of disappointment for other people, some of whom might have travelled a long way to visit the store.
- Go when it's quiet. Avoid weekends, public holidays, and school holidays. Try to go early in the morning or afternoon.
- Leave it better than you found it. Even if it's already a mess! Put pieces back in the right bins, don't leave anything on the floor. One strategy for keeping things neat is to make up a few cardboard boxes and stack them open in a tower, so you can separate out pieces without leaving them lying around. Just remember to put them back once you're done!
- Let the kids go first. If you're an adult, you're probably going to be much bigger than them, which can be intimidating. If lots of kids are making minifigures, maybe come back in five minutes.
- Stick to five pieces per figure. Yes, staff often let kids get away with giving their figures two accessories and a hat. That's because children have joy in their hearts and nobody wants to make them experience the sorrow of deciding between two things they want. For you, there's no excuse, don't push it!
- Keep people out of your photographs. Norms and expectations regarding public photography are much weaker nowadays, but still!
- Put on deodorant. Shops can get pretty stuffy when it's busy. Sorry, it's gotta be said.
- Remember that every store is different. You might hear stories from people who say things like "Oh, at my local store, the staff helped me get such-and-such!" LEGO store employees place customer service as a very high priority, and are usually happy to make time for you or go out of their way to help. If they say they can't help you with something, then there's probably a good reason for that, even if you can't guess what it might be.
This webpage is a work in progress. If you have any information you can share regarding missing figures—especially if you have high-resolution images saved—please get in touch. I also would benefit from information regarding the exact timing of these releases. Planned content for this page includes greater detail on the provenance of various parts, whether recoloured or repurposed from in-production sets.
I am not affiliated with the LEGO Group in any capacity. All information on this page is collated from publicly-available sources. All images are externally hosted and belong to their respective domains; if anything goes down, please let me know.
2019
Summer
This was the first year that pieces designed exclusively for BAM showed up at LEGO stores. It was intended to incentivise fans into going to the stores in person, to get the special pieces! Unfortunately, as it turned out, 2020 was a very normal year where nothing happened and this was a very normal thing to do.
This knight and mermaid are two examples of early exclusive figures.
Halloween
Here are some of the first Halloween figures, featuring exclusive parts.
2020
Winter
Jay's Brick Blog
New Elementary
This is the first year we have pictures of the figures, as COVID-19 meant stores resorted to selling the exclusive parts online, instead. Lucky for us? The Valentine's Day-themed "Love Elephant" was included as part of this initial batch, but is one of the only minifigures on this page for which there isn't an individual online store listing. Weird! As number #1523 is the only gap in this early run of minifigures, I am guessing that it belonged to this figure. I've seen a few examples of "Love Elephant", "The Ice Man" and "The Penguin Boy" being packed together in Winter-themed three-packs, and their sequential set of numbers supports this idea. Later years would drop the idea of Winter-themed sets of three, so far as I can tell.
New Year
Nearly all of these minifigures have parts visible in the New Elementary and Jay's Brick Blog articles from the start of the year. Their ID numbers are sequential; "The College Student" is the only one I couldn't see any evidence of in these articles, but as her ID number matches, I'm pretty sure this was when she was released. Maybe in this year, they were doing multiples of three to fit in the blister packs?
Spring
Unknown
The minifigures pictured below do not appear to have been included in the initial batch for 2020, otherwise New Elementary would have covered them in their article. With their ID numbers being sequential, I'm guessing that they were released across one or two batches later in 2020.
Halloween
Christmas
2021
New Year
Unknown
Like the similar scenario for 2020, I couldn't find much documentation on these minifigures, but they appear to have been released a little ways into the year.
Q3
2022
January? - Party
I'm not sure when exactly in January these were meant to be released. "Party" figures like these were often sold packed premade into the blister packs.
January
This year's first batch includes three figures themed for the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics.
![The Ice Skaker [sic]](https://lego.bricksmegastore.com/cdn/shop/products/NEW7B.png)
February - Spring
May - 90 Years of Play
This batch of minifigures pays homage to classic Castle, Pirates, and Western, in celebration of LEGO's 90th anniversary.
September
September - Halloween
November - Christmas
2023
January - Party
13 new figures were released all together in one big batch at the start of the year, but they break down into more-or-less the usual categories. The Spring releases aren't as strongly-themed as usual; I'm guessing it's "Tweety Fleur", "Egg Splat" and "Bunny Walker"...? Uniquely, this year saw three Lunar New Year minifigures, enough to fill a box on their own.
January - Lunar New Year
January
April
June - Ninjago
To tie in with the release of a rebooted Ninjago animated series released on June 1st, a wave consisting entirely of ninjas was released, with three returning ninjas, the two new ninjas, and two generic martial artists.
September - Halloween
October
November - Christmas
2024
January
February - Party
February - Spring
![Easter Bird with Bunny [sic]](https://lego.bricksmegastore.com/cdn/shop/files/6b_2.png)
May - City Space
2024 saw a line-wide celebration of LEGO Space, which notably included a range of sci-fi models in the LEGO City line. Three of the new astronauts were included in this batch!
July
This batch is loosely themed around the Paris 2024 Olympics, with two athletic characters, and two stereotypically French characters.
September - Halloween
September - DREAMZzz
A year on from the launch of LEGO DREAMZzz, a wave was released consisting entirely of the series' main characters in their "Waking World" forms. This is a rare example of an obvious error in the pseudo-official images: Zoey's and Cooper's accessories are swapped!
November - Christmas
2025
January
![Velantine [sic]](https://lego.bricksmegastore.com/cdn/shop/files/1672_5af40a54-a112-4e22-85ce-80bca3788f76.png)
![Cute Vikin [sic]](https://lego.bricksmegastore.com/cdn/shop/files/1673_6072a3bf-c4d0-4e33-bc07-efb00e5fbe98.png)
Party
April
A good example of how parts get swapped around depending on the source: in the images shared by Jay, the heads for the "Busy Bee with Wings" and "Martial Arts Minifigure" have clearly been swapped from their official intended configurations, pictured below. In this wave, the bee, the rabbit, and the farmer appear to be another spring-themed trio; meanwhile the "Boy with Leg Cast" and doctor are an obvious themed pair.
June - DREAMZzz
The DREAMZzz minifigures from this wave come from cancelled sets; for instance, the sought-after light blue Classic Space torso was intended for inclusion with 71501 Game Island Tower. You might be forgiven for thinking the pirate character is an unrelated odd-one-out, but he actually has the trademark hourglass on the back of his torso!
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