In hindsight, the several years with this style of castle were quite charming.

I remember standing in the store looking at the Mill Village Raid, so it must’ve been a year or two later. My dark age was still thawing, so I wasn’t buying much Lego but a couple of small sets here and there. There was no way I could justify an $80 set. So naive, so innocent.

@NotProfessorWhymzi said:
"inb4 Professor Plum tells us all the ways the catapult is massively historically inaccurate."

Too late.

Happy Knight Knight nite.

A Kingdoms set I don’t have, but also one I feel like would add nothing to my collection. I’ll spend my $30 on something that does.

It is a decent set, but back in the day the set would have included 2 horses like 6021.
What is a knight without his horse :P

@MCLegoboy said:
"I'd say that bringing a catapult to a melee fight is unfair."

Yeah, for the guy with the catapult. Do you know how long it takes to wind back, load and launch one of those things? You’ll get hacked to bits before you ever get a chance to use it!

Forsooth...We are runneth over with "Castle"...and tisn't a bad thing:)

Again, more of a "Space" guy, but...don't hate Fantasy/Castle/Kingdom:)

More Castle! Huwbot knows what’s cool… ;)

@Roebuck said:
"It is a decent set, but back in the day the set would have included 2 horses like 6021.
What is a knight without his horse :P
"

7090 was what you got for the same amount of money 3 years earlier
Only 1 horse but 3 figs

Ayyy i have this one, nice set with sweet figures, really sad i didnt get more of the line though, had no idea castle would be canceled so quickly

I’m looking at these sets thinking why didn’t I buy all of these?
Ah ha! This is the year I bought 2 of every Prince of Persia set and had no money left for anything else.

I used to own this one! But I'm not a minifig guy and the four smallest sets of the theme (7950 Knights Showdown, 7949 Prison Carriage Rescue, 7953 Court Jester and 7955 Wizard) plus 7187 Escape From the Dragon's Prison were basically all about the minifigs. So I sold all but the wizard one.
That was a mistake.

Specifically this set once showed up in a thrift store. I bought it and sold it without a second thought. That was also a mistake.

Last year I took it upon myself to re-acquire them all. And as it turns out... they're SUPER expensive now. This one isn't too bad because it's a small set, but it's clearly inflated because castle army builders are scary.
Fortunately I have re-acquired all of them again. As dimunitive as these builds are it's nice to be able to put them together whenever I want once again :)
Oh, and the Dragon's Prison was the second most difficult set I've ever had to retrieve for any sort of reasonable price (nr 1 is 8939 and nr 3 is 8925). I was insanely lucky and even then it was because it came with a second set that was also super inflated. Oh, and the clips of the barding had broken, which is something I'll just live with.

And then I found one AGAIN this april in a bulk lot, missing the minifigs. I didn't bother to try to re-complete it and sell it as a set as most of the cost is in the minifigs anyway. So I parted out the pieces.
That was not a mistake anymore ;)

@watcher21:
The “unicorn” horsey hats that, sadly, became obsolete soon after when they updated the horse design…

@BirdDeadWorld:
Would those be African or European coconuts?

@Brickalili:
I mean, he’s already been outmaneuvered, and he hasn’t even aimed it in the right direction.

@Ridgeheart:
Batman wouldn’t have been so clearly caught off guard. Lion’s standing there with just a sword, while the shield he so clearly needs is still hanging on his catapult, while the enemy managed to set up a weapon rack with a sword and a flag, and cut Lion off from his front line with a large axe.

@NotProfessorWhymzi:
It’s made of plastic, which wouldn’t be invented until the 1900’s. It’s only a couple inches tall, and isn’t tensioned to fire properly. And it’s based on a design from 2010, a year which wouldn’t happen for several centuries.

This set was my first Castle-type set I ever owned!

@Roebuck said:
"It is a decent set, but back in the day the set would have included 2 horses like 6021.
What is a knight without his horse :P
"

"A horse, a horse! My kingdom for a horse!"

@Ridgeheart said:
"Oh, we're not seeing the same thing. I'm assuming the dude on the left is the prepared one. I imagine that's his catapult and his weapon-rack, and he stole lion-guy's shield, without lion-guy even noticing it."

I could go with that. Lion simply wasn’t prepared when he showed up, so who knows if he’s even wearing his smallclothes anymore, or if the other guy managed to swipe those without being noticed as well.

@PurpleDave Yeah sadly, luckily I still have plenty of old horse, but would have been nice if we got more horse hats.
The old one (dragon masters) was used a lot.

These sets were releasted right when I was coming out of my dark ages and I remember just casually peeking at the LEGO aisle at Target from time to time. And there would always be this set and the prison carriage rescue on sale for 50% off. So me not even thinking of army building at the time would pick one up. Then I'd go back to Target another time and pick up another. I'm surprised no one else was buying them inbetween my visits. I then finally just put all of them in my cart. But I miss those days of great clearance on a set I actually would want.

I didn't appreciate Kingdoms enough in 2010. Of course, I didn't have money to go nuts with them, but I thought they were a bit of a letdown after the 2007-9 fantasy era, and looking back, I'm not at all sure that was right. I have this set, because it was small enough to easily pick up, and that might have factored into that assessment: it's a pretty thin set, with some of the weakest figs in the theme: I never really liked the torso the Dragon Knight has here--the chains are just a bit too much for me. And while I like the Lion Knight torso, getting it here as a knight, rather than making him a soldier or giving him the knight torso marks him down a bit for me.

Put all that together and compare my then-paltry Kingdoms collection next to my fairly robust Fantasy Era stuff, and I can see why it always felt like a lesser theme. Looking back from 2023, though, it was a Golden Age. The true theme of the decline was yet to come.