Random set of the day: Royal Knight's Castle
Posted by Huwbot,
Today's random set is 6090 Royal Knight's Castle, released in 1995. It's one of 7 Castle sets produced that year. It contains 764 pieces and 11 minifigs, and its retail price was US$95.
It's owned by 2769 Brickset members. If you want to add it to your collection you might find it for sale at BrickLink or eBay.
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33 comments on this article
Wow. I could have said that we already had this one...
Of course maybe it was one of the 13 billion other castle sets Lego has made over the years.
It’s great how the King’s cape is blowing one way yet the flags (or banners) are blowing in the opposite direction.
But it's not the 5th of April :(
I loved the addition of the stone gargoyles on the towers overlooking the castle grounds. I thought they were cool.
In this subtheme, Lego had too much fun with using the new skeleton minifigure to scare away the intruders.
Favorite set of all time!
Man, oh man, the memories! I got this one for my birthday. I was so excited to open that box and put it all together. I loved the design of the castle, the big doors, the ghost, the King, everything about it! I miss sets with those raised base plates. Such terrific memories of this one. I still have it, albeit in pieces all mixed in with all my old childhood sets. One day I will get organized and rebuild this sucker!
11 minifigs! This set was only known to me through the older-brother otherworld. Mere little brothers were not permitted to lay hands on such things. This castle lay in a dank, dark bedroom along with posters of scantily clad women and the waterbed.
A real play set.
This set always looked really cool to me in the catalogs, magazines, and posters, but my brother and I never ended up getting it. I guess we were just too preoccupied with Aquazone and Launch Command at that time? We did end up getting 6044-1 and 6078-1, from the same theme, though.
I definitely loved the Royal Knight heraldry and the first obvious "King" minifigure (it's bewildering that some of the older sets, even those with the word "King" in the title, have no minifigs in obvious regal attire, nor even a throne room, today a staple of any King's Castle worth its salt). I appreciated when some of this stuff was revisited/re-imagined in Knights' Kingdom I.
My appreciation for the ludicrously oversized chrome broadsword also probably somewhat foreshadowed my love of the over-the-top weapon designs in themes like Bionicle, Elves, and Ninjago. Unfortunately, being like… four years old, I still had a tendency to put stuff in my mouth from time to time (even just to hold a piece when I was looking for a minifig to give it to), so a lot of my old chrome parts from back then ended up losing a lot of their coating.
But my favorite Castle themes always tended to be the really fantasy-heavy ones like Dragon Masters and Fright Knights. I was never a big fan of big battles between faceless, nameless knight and soldier characters, preferring characters with at least a design that suggested some kind of unique personality, motives, or powers. I guess in that regard it's a good thing that I became a LEGO fan in the early to mid 90s and not earlier, when there were no characters of that sort. Wouldn't have minded getting into LEGO after they were out of their 90s and early 2000s slump, though! :P
It's weird that the raised baseplate shape from this particular set didn't really get used anywhere else to my knowledge… it was one of the cooler ones from what I could tell. But overall I think raised baseplates are better kept in the past, now that LEGO has gotten much better at putting actual buildable terrain in their sets. I always had a really hard time getting my own original creations to really conform to such specific preformed foundations, plus they drove up the prices of sets that used them to a sometimes outrageous extent.
Let's see… $95 USD in 1995 is equal to about… $160 in today's money? Yeesh. Can't see myself springing for that these days, when lately we've gotten vastly more imaginative, detailed, and impressive builds (60200-1, 41180-1, and 70679-1, just to name a few) at similar or lower prices. They might not have giant baseplates to pad out their perceived size, but I'm not gonna pay more for an inferior building experience just so it takes up more space on a shelf and gives it fewer parts I can repurpose in entirely different ways.
Reflection of a time before everything became a colorful mess...
Bring back castle!
One of the best classic castles, for sure! I like the grandeur it breathes because of the height and the space it has inside. Great to have some many minifigures too. You can still buy it boxed for a reasonable price nowadays (I paid €120 a few years back I think).
oh, yes, a real classic! this one generally gets pride of place on my windowsill so it can get the attention it deserves
Such a great set! Why is it discontinued?
Yes! I have it on display on my table right now! :) Good castle, except if you're a baseplate hater. Royal Knights was an underrated Castle subtheme.
I still remember crouching on the bottom row of a Service Merchandise (remember those?) lifting the flap panel of this box in aw of the raised baseplate with the secret stairs, the chrome sword etc. Got it as a birthday gift and it was amazing. This Castle set had it all.
Perfection?
I disagree slightly with the love of this set. Although some of the details, such as the well, were great, and it looks fantastic from the front, from behind the defensive wall is only a brick high! I know that's fairly standard now but at the time I felt cheated by the move towards 'film studio sets'.
Since my Dark Ages ended the Royal Knights traded this to the Dwarves, who find one brick high walls a lot more defendable.
TLG should have put this back on the market again, just he did with pirates sets in 2000.
I liked it very much as a child, but did not get it because it was too expensive or already retirerd. However, I managed to order a baseplate from customer service for a small sum of money. I'll use it one day in my layout ;).
@Your future president: The most recent and similar one I remember being featured was 6086-1 Black Knight's Castle, from the same era. As you can tell, they are VERY similar.
I have this one! :D
...mostly.
Actually, it came to me second-hand; several years ago now, I was given a box of old Lego that included most - but not quite all - of both this set and Rapid River Village. At first, I didn't much bother trying to recreate the set accurately, but some years later I decided to give it a try... and still had most of the pieces, and bricklinked the ones I didn't (except the fabric parts, which are too expensive for my tastes on the aftermarket). Even twenty-something years after its release, it still stands up fantastically.
Mine, however, is... very underpopulated, as the box of parts I got it from contained only the king and a one-legged skeleton xD
Compared with the castles of the 80s this is deeply inferior!
Open at the rear and a ridiculously open tower.
No good!
Bought this set second-hand when I was in college, ended up giving it away to charity some time later. Pretty cool set for what it was.
The blue and black color scheme always made this one pop to me!
@eggbert20 The last time we saw a raised baseplate was in 2011 with the Scorpion Pyramid from Pharaoes Quest. I hope they bring them back someday! While custom molds and prints may jack up the set's price, so do BigFigs and I'd rather have more of these than more of them. If I'm paying for a giant immobile hunk of plastic it better have a reason to be immobile! Make my larger figures buildable with ball joints and make my foundations not so flat!
@Aanchir Cool weapons and interesting baddie designs have definitely become a staple of LEGO, especially with the themes you mentioned. I think that's why those themes and Space always interested me the most out of the company's long running original IPs.
I was very fortunate to have this one growing up! So many little details, like the hidden skeleton, prison, and the "secret" entrance! I loved how many minifigures came with the set as well. I built this time and time again before my dark ages.
Epic LEGO castle set. Maybe the best classic castle playset ever made. It didn't have the structural intregity of Black Monarch's Castle (6085) or King's Castle (6080), but more features and more open and playable.
I love this one. I got it for Christmas in 1997 and it was just everything I wanted in a castle.
A friend had this but probably lost many of the pieces :(
Aanchir : would be neat to see the broadsword again. of course it wouldn't be chromed but may work with the new metallic colors.
Eh, it's alright, but would look waaaay better blinged out with Clikits.
Let me get one thing clear before diving into my recollections with this set: 6086 (Black Knights' Castle) is superior in design and function. Royal Knights' Castle is empirically second fiddle to it.
That said...what a second fiddle!
The year 1994 may have been the birth of my Lego MANIA, but 1995 was the year of expanding that and absorbing all things LEGO for an entire calendar years' worth of memories. It began with Aquazone in January and that theme alone would have made 1995 a banner year. But that summer brought the Royal Knights! After falling in love with the chrome pieces in 1994's Hot Rod Club, seeing a King minifigure with a CHROME SWORD and a GOLD CHROME CROWN was just too much. I had to have him. For my birthday in October, my parents obliged and I got the King's Royal Carriage. But my greedy little Lego Maniac eyes had already seen that castle! It was huge! It had so many knights! A ghost! And a SKELETON! I was amazed. And most importantly, unlike the Black Knights' Castle, I could actually go to the store and see the RKC on the shelves! I could hold it and look past the flap and drool over the pieces, the baseplate, the imagery of the knights riding out to battle! Black Knights' Castle was the dream, but the RKC was reality. And still, I could not have it!
Years would pass. In fifth grade, I got to visit the home of a classmate to work on a project. I wasn't there long, but at one point, we went to his room and there at the center of the table was the RKC in all its glory! Now, this guy was sort of an arrogant dweeb, and I knew he lorded his Lego collection over mine before. I came prepared to dole out some immature prank with a barding piece from my spare pieces. It was the red variant with yellow dragons on it from the Crusaders theme. When he wasn't looking, I swapped out the unique barding on the king's horse for my ringer. You see, I had the small Royal King set at home, but was dismayed by how unroyal his horse looked with that plain red saddle. He didn't notice, and I still have it to this day. It wasn't right, but it's too late to do anything about it now. I don't even know if the guy is still alive.
Anyway, that would be my own connection to that set until I buckled down in college towards collecting all the great, "Holy Grail" sets I always wanted as a small child. I trawled eBay in 2009 until I found an opened copy of RKC with the box and instructions. I was taking a risk, but the price was right. With shipping, it came out to $109, and when I received it, I was pleased to find it was only missing a couple of common pieces I supplemented from my collection. But it was like new! The pieces were all shiny and dust-free, and after building it, I couldn't have been happier!
Now what do I do with that extra horse barding???
One of the best blue-roofed castles of them all.
I never had this one but the smaller Royal Drawbridge of the same year instead, which was still very fun, as they made a few more drawbridge tower sets after that.
Used the included Dragon Knight (which weirdly enough used a Black Knight logo shield), and the Dragon Wagon from 1993 to assault it.
Also had the Skeleton Surprise, Royal King and Wizard Cart sets of that year.
As an addendum to my previous post, people wishing to relive their own days of yore with ye old LEGO Royal Knights' Castle should check out the photos I took of the set back when I first built it in the summer of 2009!
http://www.brickshelf.com/cgi-bin/gallery.cgi?f=397566