Review: 72041 Party at Toad's House
Posted by SetToBuild,
With the frequency at which LEGO releases sets based around parties, you could be forgiven for thinking “Oh dear, another party that I’ll have to make an excuse not to attend…”. Don't worry—this is a shindig you won't want to miss! This humble gathering has a soundtrack which makes my heart sing with nostalgia, and we're all invited.
Summary
72041 Party at Toad's House, 276 pieces.
£24.99 / $29.99 / €29.99 | 9.1p/10.9c/10.9c per piece.
Buy at LEGO.com »
An unassuming mushroom house holds a marvellous musical secret
- 15 music tracks to play
- Rearrangeable furniture
- Best mushroom house yet
- None!
The set was provided for review by LEGO. All opinions expressed are those of the author.
Box
The box’s background depicts a sunny day in the Mushroom Kingdom, and shows off the interior and ‘action tag’ barcodes’ functions. Inside are three paper bags.
Characters
Blue Toad is unchanged from his earlier appearance in 71419 Peach's Garden Balloon Ride, so there’s nothing much to report about this cheeky chappie.
Previously, we’ve seen a Green Toad in series six of the Super Mario Character Packs. That one has a unique face, as does this one. Is something yummy, or is he trying to lick his own eye?
Completed Model
This is by far the best roof I’ve seen on these mushroom houses. There is more care taken in shaping the back and providing some additional texture on the roof. For the first time ever, the door and frame are being used outside of the Animal Crossing sets. This is still within a Nintendo theme, so it’s unclear if we’ll see this handy combination elsewhere. The 6x6 white round tile, first seen in 72037 Mario Kart - Mario & Standard Kart, is here and now notably undecorated.
A Shulker box element, now used in a wide variety of ways, makes for a nice stove here. There is also an inverted 2x2 tile beautifully printed with a painting of Peach’s Castle.
The attic has just enough space for a Toad to lie comfortably on the bed. From this rear view, you can see in greater detail what I meant by rounding out details on the house, like the chimney sticking out of the roof, for example. By the way—what are the Toads planning to do with that green chaos emerald?! (Realistically, this is probably just a gem that has been gathered from a recent treasure hunt.)
Expanding on a feature seen in the Animal Crossing sets, the furniture can be somewhat rearranged by shuffling which plinth each piece sits on. Back in my day, you used to have to prise parts off to reconfigure, but these handy jumper plates encourage this further.
The set only officially comes with one waffle, but luckily there’s a spare, so both the host and the guest can enjoy them—phew! There’s also a spare gem and a variety of handy connector parts. Quite the haul for a small set!
Play
Scanning the barcode on the house‘s doormat rings the doorbell, and gives some coins and a heart.
Before electronic Mario’s latest update, scanning the barcode on the gramophone played some music. You’d think it would have played the Toad’s House theme from Super Mario Bros. 3, but instead it was the Hammer Bros. Battle theme from the same game.
After the update, we can now scan the barcode to choose between 15 songs, from various Mario games, composed by Koji Kondo. It was fun to test my knowledge by guessing each track, so skip this tracklisting if you want a challenge! I’ve compiled these into a custom YouTube playlist to check your answers.
Track 1: Main Theme/Bob-Omb Battlefield - Super Mario 64
Track 2: Hammer Bros. Battle Theme - Super Mario Bros. 3
Track 3: Overworld Theme - Super Mario World
Track 4: Slider/Race Theme - Super Mario 64
Track 5: Underwater Theme - Super Mario Bros.
Track 6: World Map 5 - Super Mario Bros. 3
Track 7: World Map 3 - Super Mario Bros. 3
Track 8: Inside the Castle Walls - Super Mario 64
Track 9: World Map 2 - Super Mario Bros. 3
Track 10: Overworld Theme - Super Mario Bros.
Track 11: World Map 8 - Super Mario Bros. 3
Track 12: The Evil King Koopa - Super Mario World
Track 13: Airship Theme - Super Mario Bros. 3
Track 14: Castle Theme - Super Mario Bros.
Track 15: Koopa Kid Battle Theme - Super Mario Bros. 3
You can quickly cycle through the tracks by quickly tapping the barcode with your hero figure. After landing on the song you want, let it play for a moment, then tap the barcode again to stop the playback. You can hear footsteps on a wooden floor and some coins being collected when tapping your hero on a surface while a song plays. Each track plays for about four minutes.
After scanning the start pipe to begin playing a level, scanning the gramophone will change the standard backing music to your course. Unfortunately, if you then scan any other barcodes in the course, the music will be interrupted and return to the standard tune.
Conclusion
When I received this wave of sets, the LEGO Super Mario app wasn’t updated with the latest barcode features. This resulted in a nice enough model, but a fairly lacklustre play experience; however, upon updating the app and revisiting the set, I was blown away by the gramophone’s 15-track offering of nostalgic goodness.
The music feature and the added detail of the mushroom house make the £25 price point acceptable. Sure, you could just listen to the playlist, but the set is way more fun!
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12 comments on this article
I do like that these sets work more as standalone models away from the electronic figures. Now, if we can just get versions of the main characters entirely brick-built…
I get the feeling that the whole "Pick a box, its contents will help you on your way" was just a desperate attempt to get thieving plumbers to leave with just ONE item from each Toad House.
What I'm saying is, the Toads have it rough, man. Show them some love.
This set is cute but also felt like kind of an easy pass for me since there's been Toad Houses like this one in other sets before now. This one is definitely the most homey/well-furnished one yet, though, with much more of an interior compared to the early ones (a trend we've been seeing more and more in this theme's set design). And the sheer variety of the music feature is surprising—one of my complaints about some recent sets has been that some of the context-dependent music tracks have gotten a little stale, so an option to customize the music to your liking is very appealing!
Also, after enjoying the Castle Bowser set based on Super Mario Bros. Wonder, I wonder if we'll ever get one of the more flower bud-shaped Poplin Houses from that game.
I just realized that like all app-based sets the app will one day no longer be supported. And this being Nintendo, they'll probably actually prevent anyone from sharing ways to make it work again. Now I'm a bit sad.
But not too much because I'm not a Nintendo fan and don't have any of the sets. And at least the theme has outlasted pretty muh every other app-based line from lego because Nintendo's license is keeping it afloat.
Fun house btw, but for the price I'd rather save up a bit more to get Isabella's house from Animal Crossing.
i haven't gotten any Super Mario sets aside from the larger Mario Kart set, but I might grab this to use with the Bricklink mushroom house sets
@Binnekamp said:
"I just realized that like all app-based sets the app will one day no longer be supported. And this being Nintendo, they'll probably actually prevent anyone from sharing ways to make it work again. Now I'm a bit sad.
But not too much because I'm not a Nintendo fan and don't have any of the sets. And at least the theme has outlasted pretty muh every other app-based line from lego because Nintendo's license is keeping it afloat.
Fun house btw, but for the price I'd rather save up a bit more to get Isabella's house from Animal Crossing."
The figures do come with a version of the software programmed into them, so if/when the app gets taken down and updating the figures becomes impossible, future compatibility will likely depend on the age of the digi-figs you're using (with the earliest ones only having the basic software for the first wave of sets, but newer ones coming with more recent software that is compatible with the sets up to the time of their release).
@Binnekamp said:
"I just realized that like all app-based sets the app will one day no longer be supported. And this being Nintendo, they'll probably actually prevent anyone from sharing ways to make it work again. Now I'm a bit sad.
But not too much because I'm not a Nintendo fan and don't have any of the sets. And at least the theme has outlasted pretty muh every other app-based line from lego because Nintendo's license is keeping it afloat.
Fun house btw, but for the price I'd rather save up a bit more to get Isabella's house from Animal Crossing."
While entropy (and gravity) can get you down, look on the bright side - it also means that everyone who has ever wronged you will one day be dead.
While I'm annoyed that this is $30 and not $25 (yes, $5 is a significant difference for me and my $0 budget), I'll still get this around Black Friday, alongside 72040. Finally, a cheap set with more than one Toad in it! I can boost my Toad collection infinitely! (2/0 = infinity)
The music bits are a nice addition, but since I don't have the app I won't be able to have them play. That said, I'm still a bit displeased that there's no Super Mario 2 tracks in that list - the Overworld theme is a great party song (or so I assume it is; I don't go to parties).
I think it's quite odd that LEGO made the 35763 balloon piece, but they keep avoiding using it when they have balloons in sets.
@crazylegoman said:
"I think it's quite odd that LEGO made the 35763 balloon piece, but they keep avoiding using it when they have balloons in sets."
The master mold was likely immediately scrapped / retired as with most CMF unique elements. If it doesn't appear outside the series that introduced them within a year... chances are they're already gone. We've seen many, many useful pieces be introduced and never get used this way...
My pet peeve with balloons is that they stopped using 24947 which was *also* designed to function as a balloon element (this time a modular bottom half).
I love that gramophone! I'm gonna need to build one of those!
After seeing this set I am thinking Smurf set are coming next.