Build-A-Minifigure (BAM)
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What's up LEGO Maniacs??!!??!? If you've ever visited a LEGO store, you've probably seen several bins full of LEGO minifigure pieces. What many people don't realise, however, is that these bins often have exclusive pieces, not available in any other set—basically, to encourage you to visit the store!
Each minifigure consists of 5 parts: headgear, head, torso, legs, and accessory. If you don't need headgear for your minifigure, usually you can have two accessories. You can buy a cardboard box of three minifigures for $9.99 USD / £6.99 GBP / £19.99 AUD (or an individual minifigure for £2.99 GBP, which works out slightly more expensive, but still cheaper than a regular Collectible Minifigure). If you don't have a LEGO store nearby, you'll have to rely on inflated aftermarket prices—but keep in mind that ultimately you're saving time if someone else has built the minifigures for you!
Every year typically has four quarterly waves of seven minifigures, plus celebratory waves of three minifigures—usually themed for birthdays, Easter, Halloween, and Christmas—adding up to around forty minifigures total. Elements and prints are often based on those designed for the Collectible Minifigures series. There are usually one or two figures designed for the Lunar New Year, Valentine's Day, and Día de los Muertos. Other recurring themes include army-builder characters, and "Brick Suit" minifigures in a range of colors. While there's no centralised official guide to the official combinations, they're usually publicised via store displays, social media, and online listings—this guide aims to be as accurate as possible to the designers' intent, documenting any ambiguities.
At the end of the day, don't sweat it—really, the idea is to build a minifigure of your own design! Just don't get too excited about seeing yourself in LEGO, though—these days, most of the pieces are too wacky, idiosyncratic, or specialised to make normal-looking people.
For a month or so after the new pieces are dumped into the bins, they'll be readily available, but appealing elements will often sell out; you might be able to ask a staff member to check in the back for you. The more time goes on, the rarer the parts become. Seasonal waves are sometimes pre-built and sold separately at the counter, so you might be able to save yourself time digging around.
Tips
- Go when it's quiet. Avoid weekends, public holidays, and school holidays. Try to go early in the morning or afternoon.
- Stay tidy. I recommend making up a few cardboard boxes and stacking them open in a tower, so you can organise pieces temporarily.
- Leave some for others. Bulk-buying can create disappointment for other people.
- Let kids go first. You can always have a look around and come back in five minutes!
Sources
I can't disclose where I obtained some of this information, but I have been able to source the official product numbers and inventories for BAM waves from 2017-2019 and some waves from 2024 and 2025.
Most of the photographs and all of the names on this site come from AG LEGO Certified Stores, a retail partner for LEGO in Australia and New Zealand, which began selling the minifigures online in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Their listing dates back to 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. I must stress that these do not appear to be primary sources from LEGO; I think the configurations, names, and serial numbers (in the 1500-1799 range) for the figures come from a middleman, because there are occasionally discrepancies with what the designers appear to have intended.
Other useful sources are Jay's Brick Blog (for many years the only person documenting this stuff, which required a lot of guesswork on his part!), @lego_bam on Instagram, the community-sourced PABfinder gallery, and this Eurobricks thread.
Inventories are organised by category, not by individual figure: all the hats, all the heads, and so on. They come in quantities of 300, and I've heard from store employees that each store receives a box with individual bags for each piece. For example, 2025 saw the release of 40 unique minifigures, so in a year, they're expected to sell at least 12,000 minifigures, or 33 a day. In practise, this number strikes me as perhaps being a little low, so maybe stores receive multiple boxes for 600 or more depending on sales figures.
Minifigures used to be sold in plastic blister-packs (852766), and sometimes stores would sell packs of pre-made minifigures; some of the standardised seasonal releases are documented by the likes of BrickLink. Since a shift to cardboard boxes (2856753), stores can't sell pre-made minifigures in quite the same way.
How to help
This webpage is a work-in-progress, and I've been working on it entirely by myself in my spare time. If you think you can help with any of the following, please get in touch:
- Do you know any of the product numbers I'm missing?
- Can you identify the BrickLink listings for any of the pieces I haven't got pictures for?
- Do you own any figures I haven't pictured below, and can you take high-quality photos of them?
- Can you share evidence to show which month older waves were released in stores?
- Do you work on the design team for these minifigures, or at a LEGO store, and have any special insight you'd like to share?
If you'd like to send me a donation to make it easier for me to devote time to the maintenance of this site, you can do so on Patreon or by subscribing to my Substack, where I write fiction and essays. Anything you can spare would be a huge help.
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.
2017-2019
Click here to view the raw inventories for the quarterly waves from 2017-2019.
2018
853746: 2018 Halloween
Some online listings show a spider coming with this wave of minifigures, but this appears to be an error.
853745: 2018 Christmas
Some online listings show a wand and cookie coming with this wave, but this appears to be an error.
2020
853971-853975: 2020 Q1
Jay's Brick Blog
New Elementary
This is the first year we have quasi-official pictures of the figures, as COVID-19 meant stores resorted to selling the exclusive pieces online, instead. Lucky for us? Nearly all of these minifigures have pieces 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. One minifigure was not sold on the online store, so the remaining pieces are listed below.
853976: 2020 Q1 - Valentines and Winter
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.
853982: 2020 Q2 - Easter and Spring
853977-853981: 2020 Q2
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. One figure was missing from the AG LEGO Certified Stores site: his parts are listed below. It's obvious that the dual-molded legs seen on "The Dog Lover" were intended to go with this missing figure's formal wear, but that leaves some confusion about his accessory... why would he be carrying a sword? The rest of the accessories look like an exact match. My only theory is that maybe this sword was actually intended to go with the army-builder knight figures seen in other waves.
854051-854055: 2020 Q3
This wave was never available online; I only found out about it from this post from the LEGOLAND Discovery Centre Melbourne Facebook page. Online inventories confirm these are the correct elements.
854062: 2020 Halloween
854057-854061: 2020 Q4
I had assumed this was the 2021 Q1 wave, but official documentation suggests it was for 2020 Q4.
854063: 2020 Q4 - Christmas
2021
854096-854100: 2021 Q2
2021 had very limited BAM releases, presumably as a knock-on effect of COVID-19; I haven't seen any seasonal packs for this year. I couldn't find much documentation on these minifigures, and the AG LEGO Certified Stores configurations are probably wrong, because the turban and snake were almost certainly intended for the same figure. This post from the LEGOLAND Discovery Centre Melbourne page suggests they were released in May. Although only four minifigures are pictured below, the wave actually consisted of the usual seven. The remaining parts are listed below.
854147-854151: 2021 Q3/Q4
2022
2022 Birthday (January)
I'm not sure when exactly in January these were meant to be released. "Birthday" figures like these were often sold packed premade into the blister packs.
2022 Q1 (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)
2022 Spring (February)
This post from the LEGOLAND Discovery Centre Melbourne Facebook page suggests that another wave was released in February, including Black Falcons torsos. I haven't found any other evidence of this. Weird!
2022 90 Years of Play (May)
This batch of minifigures pays homage to classic Castle, Pirates, and Western, in celebration of LEGO's 90th anniversary. I suspect that AG LEGO Certified Stores has made a mistake and swapped the body and legs between The First Mate and The Bandit; other stores sometimes displayed them with those pieces swapped. It's further possible that The Wizard is actually meant to have the bearded head given to The Sherriff here.
2022 Q4 (September)
2022 Halloween (September)
2022 Holiday (November)
2023
2023 Birthday (January)
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.
2023 Lunar New Year (January)
2023 Q1 (January)
2023 Q2 (April)
2023 Ninjago (June)
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.
2023 Halloween (September)
2023 Q4 (October)
2023 Holiday (November)
2024
2024 Q1 (January)
2024 Birthday (February)
2024 Spring (February)
![Easter Bird with Bunny [sic]](https://lego.bricksmegastore.com/cdn/shop/files/6b_2.png)
2024 Q2 (May)
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!
40731-40735: 2024 Q3 (July)
From this point onwards, I have the exact Product Numbers for all the waves, confirming the name of each wave and the included elements, if not always the exact configurations or identities of the individual minifigures. This batch is loosely themed around the Paris 2024 Olympics, with two athletic characters, and two stereotypically French characters.
40736: 2024 Halloween (September)
40737-40741: 2024 DREAMZzz (September)
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!
40742: 2024 Holiday (November)
At some point between 2020 and now, the yearly Christmas wave has been renamed "Holiday".
2025
40826-40830: 2025 Q1 (January)
![Velantine [sic]](https://lego.bricksmegastore.com/cdn/shop/files/1672.png)
![Cute Vikin [sic]](https://lego.bricksmegastore.com/cdn/shop/files/1673.png)
40831: 2025 Birthday (February)
40832-40836: 2025 Q2 (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.
40837-40841: 2025 DREAMZzz (June)
The DREAMZzz minifigures from this Q3 wave come from cancelled sets; for instance, the sought-after light blue Classic Space torso was intended for inclusion with 71501 Game Island Tower. Matching hands for this torso aren't available in the BAM towers, unfortunately, but the Miles Morales minifigure from the Spider-Verse Collectible Minifigures series has them, along with a few other scant releases in previous years. You might be forgiven for thinking the pirate character in this wave is an unrelated odd-one-out, but he actually has the trademark hourglass on the back of his torso!
40845: 2025 Summer (July)
These three summery minifigures were made available midway through July. Strangely, they weren't added to the online store, so I don't have official names or numbers for any of these figures; clearly, their intended range is 1695-1697. Lots of online sources skipped over them, and curiously, their Product Number goes after the subsequent Halloween wave. Maybe they were a last-minute addition?
40844: 2025 Halloween (September)
I noticed a lot of mid-height legs dual-molded in orange and black in the parts bins, which aren't used in any of the other figures on this page, but so far as I can tell, these are the official configurations for the figures, so presumably those legs were just extra? Sadly, I don't have official inventory data for this wave to check.
40846-40850: 2025 Q4 (October)
This batch of seven figures includes a couple of themed pairs: La Calaca and La Catrina for Dia de los Muertos, and the Arctic Explorer and Pink Snowboarder.
40851: 2025 Holiday (November)
2026
40927-40931: 2026 Ninjago 15th Anniversary (January)
A widely-circulated promotional photo of the minifigures makes a couple of errors with Arin: he is pictured without his pie accessory, and with mid-length legs instead of the correct short ones, which are accurate to his appearance in the cartoon and were what was delivered to stores. The mid-length legs pictured probably got mixed up from 2025 Q4's Nature Scout, so be careful to get the right ones when you visit the store!
40932: 2026 Birthday (February)
Some stores got these a little early, towards the end of January. This leak which got widely shared appears to have a couple of errors with the exact heads used for the jester and brick girl; the ones pictured below are correct. The blowing head (obscured in the picture below, but see here if you're unsure) seems like it should be correct for the elephant, seeing as he's playing the saxophone, but strangely the official product render for this wave shows the jester with the blowing head, and the elephant with the serious face. It's your preference I suppose!
40956: 2026 Easter/Spring (March)
I hope you found this page useful! If you'd like to contribute to this resource in any way, don't hesitate to get in touch. To support my work, you can follow me on Bluesky for future updates, or on Substack for my original fiction and essays.