The weekend Lego went to war in Minneapolis

Maybe you didn’t want your kid to play with toy guns or toy soldiers, so you gave him some wholesome, creative Lego bricks.

Which works until he uses the interlocking plastic pieces to make a tank.

And that explains why World War Brick exists.

World War Brick was a three-day convention held June 6-8 in Minneapolis devoted to military-themed Lego creations. It was put on by a Minneapolis company called Brickmania, which is sort of an arms dealer for the Lego world.

The company, started about 25 years ago by Twin Cities Lego enthusiast and designer Dan Siskind, sells custom-designed, military-themed Lego kits and gear depicting everything from the Roman Empire to modern armies.

Brickmania sells Lego bricks and instructions to build tanks, jeeps, submarines, helicopters, artillery pieces and torpedo boats that can cost hundreds, even thousands of dollars.

It also offers a vast line of aftermarket wartime accessories to outfit minifigures — the plastic Lego people — with assault rifles, grenades, helmets, body armor, gas masks and uniforms spanning the Revolutionary War to the conflict in Ukraine.

“It’s basically like toy soldiers, but with Lego,” said the 54-year-old Siskind. “I’m making stuff out of Lego that I wish Lego made when I was a kid.”

While Lego makes popular “Star Wars”-themed kits, the Danish company, whose name derives from a Danish phrase meaning “play well,” generally refrains from making Lego products depicting actual wars.

“They don’t support us in any way,” Siskind said. “We’re like one little niche in the giant Lego universe.”

But it’s a niche large enough to amount to $7 million to $8 million in sales a year online and in five Brickmania retail locations around the country.

And about once a year starting in 2012, Brickmania hosts World War Brick. That’s where Lego designers from around the country come to the Brickmania warehouse in northeast Minneapolis and show off one-of-a-kind military history creations depicting everything from a battleship the size of a small canoe to the D-Day invasion.

Siskind said this year’s convention featured about 165 exhibitors and attracted about 1,500 attendees over three days.

Robert Rodriguez, a 59-year-old Lego builder, drove 17 hours from his home in Temple, Texas, to display his 7.5-by-5-foot model of a Roman fortress, depicting an actual structure located in Cairo, Egypt, in 100 A.D.

The fortress required 50,000-some Lego pieces worth about $15,000 to build.

Rodriguez said he’s also made Lego creations inspired by World War I, World War II and the Vietnam War. But he said: “I’m a big fan of Roman history.”

He said at regular Lego conventions, “military history is kind of a stepchild.”

“Lego’s theme is play well with others and not war,” he said.

But at World War Brick, Lego military history enthusiasts feel like “This is our mecca because we get to freely display our stuff and not be shunned,” Rodriguez said.

“Military builds are definitely controversial,” said Mason Helmel, a Lego tank designer from Minneapolis.

“I’m antiwar,” he said. “But at the same time, these machines are incredibly interesting to me.”

“So, this is the Second Battle of El-Alamein near the Kidney Ridge area in North Africa,” said 10-year-old Phineas Versteeg of his 10,000-piece World War II diorama display showing British tanks and troops battling the German Afrika Korps panzers on a desert landscape.

Overhead, a Lego Spitfire chased an Italian fighter plane.

“I’ve been wanting to do North Africa for a couple of years,” said Versteeg, a North Mankato resident. He has also depicted D-Day and the Battle of Guadalcanal in plastic bricks.

“It combines my two favorite things, World War II history and Legos,” Versteeg said.

“It’s been a great learning tool,” said Versteeg’s father, Matthew Versteeg. “He knows more about this history than I do.”

Dale Schieman of Mount Pleasant, Wis., flies corporate jets for a living. He displayed a Lego airfield with a control tower, ground crew and 10 massive U.S. Air Force planes, including a B-24 Liberator and a B-50D Superfortress.

Those were bombers flown by Schieman’s father during his service in World War II and the Cold War.

Schieman, 57, said Legos were “my favorite toy as a kid.”

He created his Lego airfield “as a tribute to my dad and to the Strategic Air Command.”

“I like to hear the guys who come by and say, ‘I was a crew chief on a B-52,’ or ‘I saw these planes fly over my house when I was a kid,’” Schieman said.

Schieman couldn’t say how many Lego pieces went into his creation.

“I never count pieces, time or money,” he said. “If you do that, you’re in trouble.”

Paul Rank, a firefighter from Inver Grove Heights, brought a 3-by-5-foot diorama of the Battle of Lone Pine, fought between the Australia and New Zealand Army Corps and soldiers from the Ottoman Empire during the Gallipoli campaign of World War I.

His creation featured trench systems, tunnels, shell holes, barbed wire, artillery pieces and 300 minifigures attacking each other with rifles, machine guns and bayonets.

A previous display he built depicted the 1879 Battle of Rorke’s Drift, which was the subject of the 1964 Michael Caine film “Zulu.”

“I love to tell a story about it,” Rank said of his creations. He won’t say how much the displays cost to build.

“More than I want to put in the paper in case my wife reads it,” Rank said. Then he laughed for about 30 seconds.

Like other Lego builders, Rank enjoys finding creative solutions using Lego bricks as a medium to build something that’s never been seen before, that doesn’t come with a set of instructions but looks as true to life as possible.

For example, Rank took reddish pieces that Lego originally made to depict a plant stem and repurposed them as blood spurting from wounded soldiers.

“I have a field kitchen I’m really proud of,” he added.

Jason Kameya created a Japanese-held island under attack from American troops at the end of World War II.

He stuffed four suitcases with Legos so he could fly from his home in San Diego to display his 7.5-foot-long diorama for the first time in Minneapolis.

“We don’t have a table big enough at home,” he said.

“Every one of these fighter planes I built by hand,” said Kameya, a project manager for an aerospace company. “I find it insanely therapeutic sitting with a big pile of bricks.”

The design, which took more than two years to perfect, features an unusual Easter egg: gigantic, three-toed footprints formed in the Lego brick beach. They’re the tracks of Godzilla, as depicted in the recent movie, “Godzilla Minus One.”

“Anybody can build from a kit,” Kameya said. “But if you can master build-it-yourself, that’s the true sense of Lego.”