Review: 30545 Fish Free Builds
Posted by Huw,
The LEGOLAND Discovery Centre in Birmingham currently has a veritable smorgasbord of polybags for sale, including a number of 2019 releases. I had the opportunity to visit at the weekend so I availed myself of the opportunity to acquire them.
Among them was 30545 Fish Free Builds - Make It Yours, which costs £2.50 for 39 parts. It might not seem like terrific value but it provides a lot of fun.
The idea of the set, as you can probably tell from the name, is to build fish. Instructions are not provided but a sheet with inspiration is. It's not hard to build the examples, thanks to the colour coding of the parts, should you wish to.
Instead of building them verbatim I built a few of my own:
I even managed to fashion something resembling a duck and a bird:
OK, so they are not going to be troubling the editors over at Brothers Brick any time soon but it was fun to fiddle about and create models that passed for fish with just a handful of rather nice colourful pieces.
£2.50 well spent, I think, and a great little impluse buy for kids to play with in the car on the way home from the Discovery Centre. Until they drop the parts down the back of the seat, that is...
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Those last three builds don’t exactly look like fish, Huw... ;)
What’s the mystery fish? Drumroll please.
The name of the set is somewhat misleading. Free builds? Now how can someone charge for a free build?? ;)
Random polybags can be fun. I impulse bought a couple of friendship flowers recently just to play around with only using those included pieces and made some abstract sculptural thingys while watching TV.
Your bird looks great btw =)
Something I realized lately is that Medium Lavender has been extremely scarce in LEGO Classic sets, as well as sets like this and Go Brick Me. I'm not sure why. I hope they add more of it now that LEGO Elves has been discontinued.
I might pick up this polybag if I find it at a decent deal, it looks fun and I love the colors that are included. Polybags are generally pretty poor value where I live.
@Your future president: If I had to guess... "Yours"?
I would get multiples of these just for the parts
I have 2 of those small boxed 10401 Rainbow Fun sets (2018).
While it has instructions, the "Building Bigger Thinking" line did promote self-made builds.
The advantage of those small part sets/polybags is you'd end up with extra parts too :)
So this looks like a fun little set to me.
That's a very nice selection of useful parts in fun colors.
This seems like a great way to get usefull newer pieces in some uncommon colors
I love close enough to Birmingham so next time i mindlessly wonder Birmingham’s city centre while my mom is in Harvey Nichols i’ll walk down there and pick this and a few other polys up.
@Your future president:
Ha ha, it does totally sound like it should be free! LOL!
Totally looks like a Classic set with the wide range of colors, and printed eye pieces - which I really like!
By the way, do any of you guys know if this polybag is supposed to be LEGOLAND exclusive, or anything like that? If not, hopefully I would be able to buy one or even several of them at one of my local Walmart.
By the way, @Huw, great review and fish builds!
Might grab two packets just for parts i probably won't even build the fishes,
But love all the colours it's nice to see lego in teal again aswell..
$2.00 US at the Grapevine Mills Discovery Center got a few
This reminds me of the fish building area at Lego House. My kids had so much fun building and then transferring them to the virtual tanks!!
Cute little set!!
Cute set. Dumb name.
Found this polybag for $2 and bought one. Love the part & color selection. Even built a few fish using the round printed eyelash tiles as gills. Went back & bought 4 more to have even more choices.
@daVisionary:
Cool! Where did you find them? (Not trying to be nosy, I’m just simply wondering)
I want a couple of this just for the parts, such a vibrant collection! Especially that teal blue.
A shame you don't seem able to build to many of them at once, but those eye pieces are always handy!
If you can build fishes out of it, it is definitely not fish free! It is spaceship free, or gas station free, but surely not fish free.
Maybe it's "free" as in the sense of unrestricted, i.e. nothing you're meant to be doing other than making fish.
Definitely a stupid name for a set, but what a wonderful little "bag-o-parts".
Nice colours, your duck looks so sad it’s almost heartbreaking.
I'll take that as a complement!
Great review and builds.
I should think that the phrase Fish free builds should have a comma after Fish and that free build means without instructions and using your imagination.
Ah but you did trouble your friends at The Brothers Brick. :)
Huw has hit the big time now, blogged by The Brothers Brick ;-) https://www.brothers-brick.com/2019/02/21/take-a-dive-into-the-ocean-of-creativity-with-this-colorful-birdy-intructions/
Yes I'm not the only one that noticed that!!!
"Smorgasbord"
I giggled.