Living La Vida Lego

When you build a house or castle out of Lego, you can’t help but think how cool it would be to live in a life-size building like that. Well, as our fan Merrick J. has shared, the California Legoland has done it with their Lego Hotel. The building itself isn’t totally made out of Legos, but as we see here, it’s very Lego-y. There are about 3,400 different sculptures in the hotel, using 3 million Lego pieces in total. Each of the 250 guest rooms has at least 8 of these sculptures with either a Pirate, Kingdom or Adventure theme. Then of course, there’s the whole Legoland park to check out. But the nice thing about your regular home is no one can take it apart while you eat dinner.

Wee ones: If there are Pirate, Kingdom, and Adventure rooms, and you’ve stayed in a Pirate room and an Adventure room, how many room types do you have left to try?

Little kids: If your room’s statue has 6 pieces for its nose and you stick on 2 more pieces, how many nose pieces are there now?  Bonus: The whole wall behind the front desk has a Where’s Waldo minifigure. If you’re staring at 20 minifigures and one of them is Waldo, how many of them aren’t Waldo?

Big kids: If you’ve stayed in 6 rooms at Legoland and each had 8 statues, how many statues have you gotten to see?  Bonus: How do you “spell” 3 million in numbers?

The sky’s the limit: If the hotel gives you 2,000 Lego pieces, and you get to build statues that use either 90 pieces or 600 pieces, what combination(s) of sizes will use up the most pieces?

Answers:
Wee ones: 1 more room type – the Kingdom style room.

Little kids: 8 nose pieces.  Bonus: 19 minifigures.

Big kids: 48 statues.  Bonus: 3,000,000.

The sky’s the limit: Both sizes are multiples of 3, which 2,000 isn’t, so you will always have leftover pieces. The best you can do is to have 20 pieces left over:
– If you build the maximum number of big statues, you’ll use 6 x 300 pieces, or 1,800, leaving 200. Two 90-piecers will use 180, leaving just 20.
– If you build 2 600-piecers (1,200 total), leaving 800, the best you can do is to build 8 90-piecers (for 720), leaving a whole 80 behind.
– If you build just 1 600-piecer, leaving 1,400 more, the closest you can get is 15 90-piecers to use 1350, still leaving 50.
– If you build all 90-piecers, you can build 22 statues and use 1,980 pieces, so again you’re left with 20 pieces. So you have 2 ways to use a full 1,980 pieces.