Review: Extra DOTS – Series 6
Posted by Huw,
The Extra DOTS packs are a great way to bolster your cache of 1x1 tiles for crafty creations.
The latest one, 41946 Extra DOTS – Series 6, provides another selection of colours, and also brand-new charms to adorn your bracelets, one of which is unique to this set.
Summary
41946 Extra DOTS - Series 6, 118 pieces.
£3.49 / $3.99 / €3.99 | 3.0p/3.4c/3.4c per piece.
Buy at LEGO.com »
A pocket-money pack of interesting new parts and colours.
- New transparent 1/4 circle tiles
- Charms
- Requires repeat purchases to obtain all prints
In this pack are 1x1 round tiles in bright purple and spring yellowish green, and 1/4 circle tiles in bright blue, lavender and, new in this set, transparent florescent green. Surprisingly, this is the first year that the part, which has become ubiquitous since its introduction in 2016, has been cast in transparent plastic. Transparent blue ones can be found in 41942 Into the Deep Bracelets with Charms.
The new charms, helpfully named 77814 DESIGN ELEMENT, NO. 1 and 77817 DESIGN ELEMENT, NO. 2, are designed to be used on DOTS bracelets, held in place with the new loop piece below. The purple heart is unique to this pack, and four of each design are provided.
77813 DESIGN PLATE, NO. 1 is a 1x1 tile with a loop on the top. The charms are made from a slightly flexible material that allows them to be clipped onto them securely. In fact, with large adult-sized fingers it's quite hard to remove them.
The hole is too small to thread a 318 bar through, and I can't think of any other part that will connect to it.
Update: Thanks to MauriceMoss for suggesting that 53551 CHAIN LINK 1X3X1/3 might connect to it. It does!
In common with the other extra DOTS packs, this one contains unique printed 1x1 tiles. The pack contains 10, and I suspect that in common with earlier packs there are 16 different designs. My bag contained eight of them.
Here you can also see how the charms connect to the loops.
The packs are a great source of 1x1 tiles and are often a useful thing to add to your LEGO.com order to take it over a gift with purchase threshold. The charms might not be that useful for MOCs, but they are nevertheless interesting, and of course children will love adding them to their bracelets.
They are available now at LEGO.com, priced at £3.49 / $3.99 / 3.99€.
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37 comments on this article
My 6yo daughter would love those charms. She has a few bracelets and other Dots sets (also a million Friends sets) but the problem is: she HATES pastel colours and she HATES pink.
Please LEGO, add some more non-girly colours to the Dots theme!
Those charms could be used in the future for Christmas stockings or similar during winter scenes, thats depending on there being appropriate pieces in the future of course.
As usual, getting myself a few packs of these, though I'll end up with too many of these charms (there's enough in one pack for me). I like that they introduced a few more emoji faces continuing from the Series 1 style. The sea star tile is making me want to grab 41942, though...
@Reinier said:
"My 6yo daughter would love those charms. She has a few bracelets and other Dots sets (also a million Friends sets) but the problem is: she HATES pastel colours and she HATES pink.
Please LEGO, add some more non-girly colours to the Dots theme!"
Series 4 and 5 have a pretty balanced mix.
I grabbed so many of the one with the cheetah spots but I guess that was a fluke. None of the other series have grabbed my attention
Those charms could be used to secure threads with. I can already envisage a mechanism that moves naturally by virtue of threads being tensioned and loosened.
Thank you for the review. The little Dots packages are nice little add-ons, but I would LOVE to be able to buy little packets of 1x1 square tiles. I would like to buy individual colour packets (I would buy a foolish amount of white and black ones) and I would also like packets of 1 x 1 tiles in coordinating colours. That would probably be quite dull for kids, but I would love it :)
Thank you @LegoSonicBoy, you are right. Series 2 is quite good as well.
Would antennas fit in the clips?
@Reinier said:
"My 6yo daughter would love those charms. She has a few bracelets and other Dots sets (also a million Friends sets) but the problem is: she HATES pastel colours and she HATES pink.
Please LEGO, add some more non-girly colours to the Dots theme!"
Another option is to splurge on ART set 21226 with a great variety of colours in large numbers..... albeit way beyond the cheap pocket money purchase for kids.
I just built the Koenigsegg Jesko a few days ago and was wondering why they didn't use trans red 1x1 quarter circle tiles for the rear lights and instead they used opaque red. I thought surely I had some trans ones in my spares, but then I realized trans 1x1 quarter circles tiles didn't exist.
Hope to see more trans colors of this part in the future, also in Speed Champions.
There's quite a lot of parts being produced in transparent colours for the first time recently. I wonder if its the new plastic that's allowed for that
Looking forward to the dot message boards, mainly as there are lots of plain square tiles allowing you to make letters and larger shapes, which are missing in all these extra dot packs.
Will be getting this
77813 is interesting! I'm seeing a bath plug. I'd love to see a chain piece using that as the end.
Even though a bar can't be passed underneath this new tile, can it be clipped/attached to a minifig's hands? This series looks good. I still haven't found series 5 in stores.
@LuvsLEGO_Cool_J said:
"Even though a bar can't be passed underneath this new tile, can it be clipped/attached to a minifig's hands? This series looks good. I still haven't found series 5 in stores."
Any 1x1 can be attached by the antistud to the top of a minifig's hand. You can even get the corner antistud of a larger part to do so with some effort.
@Reinier said:
"Please LEGO, add some more non-girly colours to the Dots theme!"
Didn't Lego pledge to de-gender their sets?
I'm curious how secure the hook is to the loop. Are wearers likely to lose the charm in a normal, kid-energy day?
I'm also curious why NOT let a 318 bar fit the loop. Does it open too many cans of worms? I feel like Lego usually has some kind of engineering math behind their decisions; I guess I'll see what New Elementary figures out
"The hole is too small to thread a 318 bar through, and I can't think of any other part that will connect to it."
Bikes and skateboards will fit it so you can create hoverbikes and hoverboards! Those thinner connections are the perfect size for these.
@Padmewan said:
" @Reinier said:
"Please LEGO, add some more non-girly colours to the Dots theme!"
Didn't Lego pledge to de-gender their sets?"
Last I checked, colors didn't have any gender.
Any gender associated with a particular color is a cultural thing, not inherent to the colors themselves. Historically, colors weren't associated with gender until the 20th century ("blue is for little boys, pink is for little girls").
Would part 4654504 connect to the new 77814?
@BJNemeth said:
" @Padmewan said:
" @Reinier said:
"Please LEGO, add some more non-girly colours to the Dots theme!"
Didn't Lego pledge to de-gender their sets?"
Last I checked, colors didn't have any gender.
Any gender associated with a particular color is a cultural thing, not inherent to the colors themselves. Historically, colors weren't associated with gender until the 20th century ("blue is for little boys, pink is for little girls")."
Also there's nothing wrong with anyone liking pastel colours, same as there's nothing wrong with preferring more saturated or subdued ones.
Personally I want that 1x1 corner tile in dark brown because I have a custom BrickHead that's just not right without it.
If part https://brickset.com/parts/design-77813 is ever made in a gray color, it would look like a MF scale burger press. Put that part on top of a 1X1 round plate, and it would like one of those things from curling.
@MauriceMoss said:
"Would part 4654504 connect to the new 77814? "
Yes it does! I've added a photo to the article. Thank you.
@Huw said:
" @MauriceMoss said:
"Would part 4654504 connect to the new 77814? "
Yes it does! I've added a photo to the article. Thank you."
Not sure how useful it will be yet - but maybe if 77814 is recoloured in a darker tone it will become a vital pairing for all medieval mocs!
@magmafrost said:
"There's quite a lot of parts being produced in transparent colours for the first time recently. I wonder if its the new plastic that's allowed for that"
I would love to see 1x4, 1x6, 1x8, 2x4, 2x6, 2x8 in trans-clear and also potentially 8x16 in trans light blue (for ocean surface - maybe those plate with less studs on top).
@Reinier said:
"My 6yo daughter would love those charms. She has a few bracelets and other Dots sets (also a million Friends sets) but the problem is: she HATES pastel colours and she HATES pink.
Please LEGO, add some more non-girly colours to the Dots theme!"
Agree with others. Colours in themselves are not feminine, rather we perceive them that way because they're marketed that way. I personally love those pastel and warm colours and I use them liberally in my builds. Besides, who wants to live in the Galactic Grey Empire from Star Wars anyways ? :)
I got a pack on New Year's day. The charms are an oddity - they're elements which are completely out of 'system'. There's no way I could see of them fitting into the original Lego 'system of play' other than connecting the clip to the handle, which is nothing like anything else in system. Even the handle tile is slightly higher than 2 plates high. Weird.
@Paperballpark said:
"I got a pack on New Year's day. The charms are an oddity - they're elements which are completely out of 'system'. There's no way I could see of them fitting into the original Lego 'system of play' other than connecting the clip to the handle, which is nothing like anything else in system. Even the handle tile is slightly higher than 2 plates high. Weird."
They also connect to the chain piece pointed out in the article, as well as https://brickset.com/parts/design-66199 and regular Lego chains
@crazylegoman said:
"If part https://brickset.com/parts/design-77813 is ever made in a gray color, it would look like a MF scale burger press. Put that part on top of a 1X1 round plate, and it would like one of those things from curling."
Rob Zic made a curling vignette that looks excellent. https://www.instagram.com/p/CYfhy30LrUi
Getting this set for the fun faces.
53551 CHAIN LINK 1X3X1/3 is one of my favorite BIONICLE/Technic parts. I find it's customizable length far more interesting than the default length of other LEGO chains. I'm overjoyed there's now an easier way to integrate it with System models!
@STUNT said:
"I'm a man in my 30s but I love these bags xD got a lot of the first series and unfortunatellty I haven't been able to repeat with the other series but I always get at least a pack; this time I'll get two though in order to increase the chances of getring 4 of the prints (player1, player2, alien and ufo) but the regular tiles, of course, will be awesome too
@Huw it should come with 10 prints and you only got 8? Or did you mean you got 8 of the designs?"
2, and the spare, were repeats.
All I'm seeing is a part for kettlebell handles. Sadly, minifigs can't grab it, so only for static displays though.
@BJNemeth said:
" @Padmewan said:
" @Reinier said:
"Please LEGO, add some more non-girly colours to the Dots theme!"
Didn't Lego pledge to de-gender their sets?"
Last I checked, colors didn't have any gender.
Any gender associated with a particular color is a cultural thing, not inherent to the colors themselves. Historically, colors weren't associated with gender until the 20th century ("blue is for little boys, pink is for little girls")."
I couldn't agree with you more on a personal level, but that's not how marketing currently works. The hard push that started in the 1980s to create a "pink girl aisle" still leaves its legacy today, which is why you had (and still have) Lego fans(?) yelling about Friends being too pink, or whatever they seem to be so upset about.
Yes, in my rarified little world my children of different genders both appreciated Lego Elves, but for mainstream marketing purposes it was coded as "for girls." Moving past this binary perception requires a two-step dance of parents tossing "boys vs girls toys" in the trash, and manufacturers either pushing that agenda (courageous) or getting pulled along (the least we can expect).
I can tell you that some of my efforts to gift Friends sets to boys and Technic sets to girls did not always go so well.
@Padmewan said:
" @BJNemeth said:
" @Padmewan said:
" @Reinier said:
"Please LEGO, add some more non-girly colours to the Dots theme!"
Didn't Lego pledge to de-gender their sets?"
Last I checked, colors didn't have any gender.
Any gender associated with a particular color is a cultural thing, not inherent to the colors themselves. Historically, colors weren't associated with gender until the 20th century ("blue is for little boys, pink is for little girls")."
I couldn't agree with you more on a personal level, but that's not how marketing currently works. The hard push that started in the 1980s to create a "pink girl aisle" still leaves its legacy today, which is why you had (and still have) Lego fans(?) yelling about Friends being too pink, or whatever they seem to be so upset about.
Yes, in my rarified little world my children of different genders both appreciated Lego Elves, but for mainstream marketing purposes it was coded as "for girls." Moving past this binary perception requires a two-step dance of parents tossing "boys vs girls toys" in the trash, and manufacturers either pushing that agenda (courageous) or getting pulled along (the least we can expect).
I can tell you that some of my efforts to gift Friends sets to boys and Technic sets to girls did not always go so well."
Yeah; the way I see it, LEGO (and I reckon other toy companies) is at the mercy of these societally deeply ingrained gender roles, and so they do have to conform and use these colors to some degree in order for their themes to succeed. It's not necessarily that LEGO simply agrees with these gender roles and stereotypes, as it's clear that they're frequently making strides in bucking stereotypes and introducing diversity. It's an uphill battle and these efforts should be commended. It's not as easy as simply de-gendering everything.
The hole is too small to thread a 318 bar through, and I can't think of any other part that will connect to it.
I saw these as door handles, will mini figure hands connect to them?
I'm glad they finally decided to make more emoji faces! That's all I've been asking for since Series 1 had them.
@number48 said:
"The hole is too small to thread a 318 bar through, and I can't think of any other part that will connect to it.
I saw these as door handles, will mini figure hands connect to them?"
Not securely but that probably doesn't matter for that use case.