This review has been written in its entirety by William, aged 8, who's the son of one of my cycling friends. He has previously reviewed Minecraft sets for us but his real passion is building runways and airports in his living room, so he was the natural choice to ask to review the new City plane, 60367 Passenger Airplane.
I was very excited to build and review the airplane, I love airplanes. My first impression when I looked at the box was that it looks so cool. I thought the tail looked a bit funny, but I couldn’t wait to build it. I was really excited that there was a pushback truck as part of the kit. I’ve tried to make one of these before myself, but the one in the kit looks much better than mine.
10326 Natural History Museum is the 19th set in the official modular buildings collection and the largest by piece-count: its 4,014 trumping the previous record-holder 10255 Assembly Square by 12.
Rather than squeeze several buildings onto a single 32-stud wide baseplate, as has been the case with recent modulars, the museum has a full 48-stud width to itself, which has allowed designer Chris McVeigh to create an imposing and impressive structure befitting of such an institute, with ample space inside to fill with exhibits.
The Icons botanical collection has appeal far beyond LEGO's usual customer demographic, so it comes as no surprise that new additions are forthcoming, including 10329 Tiny Plants.
The collection of nine small plants in flowerpots will be released in time for gifting to the green-fingered members of your family at Christmas.
40659 Mini Steamboat Willie is currently a gift with purchase at LEGO.com, free with purchases of Disney, Star Wars and Marvel sets exceeding £95/$100/€100.
For such a low threshold it's a substantial set, and not that much smaller than the LEGO Ideas set 21317 Steamboat Willie that was released four years ago.
New reviewer James, aka jaymo1, has evaluated 21248 The Pumpkin Farm for us:
What better way to approach spooky season than The Pumpkin Farm, one of this year’s new Minecraft sets? This pumpkin farm, however, doesn’t require you to pay an entry fee to traipse around a muddy field and pick your pumpkin, although you will have to deal with a witch ready to douse you with splash potions.
Additional credit goes to my 9-year-old Minecraft consultant who has helped me with some of the names and details.
This appraisal of 71422 Picnic at Mario's House has been written by new reviewer Freddy_Hodson:
The Super Mario theme started back in 2020, which was also when we had our first rendition of Mario’s house.
Repetition is often the bane of licensed themes, but given the endless creativity of the games, we may have been forgiven for not expecting another house so soon. Mercifully, however, there’s much more to this set than meets the eye.
This is the second review of a Super Mario set that's been written by a new reviewer, in this case Jonathan D:
For this review, I built 71423 Dry Bowser Castle Battle and then allowed my nephews to play with it, so that I could assess it from the perspective of both an AFOL and the target demographic. My nephews are six and nine years old, have LEGO Mario sets and are huge Super Mario fans.
So, it’ll be no surprise to reveal that they had very strong opinions about it!
The fun and quirky 40596 Magic Maze will be a gift with purchase at LEGO.com next month.
It's a hand-held version of a classic maze game in which a ball is rolled through a series of tricky and varied obstacles by tiling and jolting the board.
Following our quest to expand our team of reviewers we invited a number of applicants to help clear our backlog of review sets. This one, by Jonny, aka SetToBuild, is the first of a few that we'll be publishing in the coming weeks:
If you had told young SetToBuild that someday LEGO and Nintendo (his two favourite things) would join forces, his head would have spun faster than a chain chomp on a merry-go-round! A LEGO Super Mario theme which was essentially an expandable board game wouldn’t have been what first came to mind, but I’ll take what I can get!
Airships are seen throughout Super Mario games in many different styles. In later games, their design often includes a sculpture of the boss character’s face at the prow of the ship. Although I was excited to see how the set design would tackle these vehicles on a smaller scale than 71391 Bowser's Airship, while building Larry’s airship I found myself wondering what could have been.
LEGO has made nutcracker figures that mimic the traditional carved wood ones in various sizes over the years, from the minifigure in series 23 collectable minifigures, to a huge Technic version given as a gift to employees in 2017 to celebrate the theme's 40th anniversary.
40640 Nutcracker is the latest one, which is now available at LEGO.com in Europe and will be released in North America on 1st October.
With just 105 days until Christmas and LEGO having just launched its festive assortment, now's a good time to review the latest one, 40642 Gingerbread Ornaments, despite being in the middle of a rare British heatwave.
LEGO and the LEGO Foundation announced their intention to produce bricks to help visually impaired children to learn Braille in 2019. The first kits were launched a year later and distributed by charities around the world to those that could make use of them.
Now, they are being made available to all in selected countries at LEGO.com. 40656 Play with Braille – English Alphabet and 40655 Play with Braille – French Alphabet can be purchased now, with German, Italian and Spanish versions following next year.
I am fortunate to have vision so have not had to learn Braille, and I'm probably too old to do so now, so in this review I'll merely take a look at the set from an AFOL's perspective. However, if the opportunity arises I will pass my review copy on to someone who can evaluate it properly.
After examining the butterfly and mantis in parts one and two of my review, in this article I put the third creature in 21342 The Insect Collection, the Hercules beetle, under the magnifying glass and draw conclusions on the set as a whole.
21342 The Insect Collection was revealed earlier in the week and the review embargo was unexpectedly brought forward from the end of the month to yesterday.
That's good because we can now publish our article sooner rather than later, but also not so great because I haven't finished building our review sample yet, thinking there was no hurry to do so!
So rather than rush to complete such an exquisite set, but not wanting to keep you waiting, I'm going publish the review in three parts, starting with the butterfly. That way you can savour each of the incredible builds over the coming days, and I can lavish my articles with plenty of photos.
Last year LEGO invited selected LEGO Ideas members to participate in a Test Lab Challenge, developing digital models with fewer than 200 pieces from a limited range of parts.
42146 Liebherr Crawler Crane LR 13000 is the largest and most expensive Technic set ever produced. Consequently, it's been scrutinised and criticised more than most, especially as it does not appear to be an accurate rendition of the crane it's named after.
I therefore did not have high expectations for it, especially as it is reliant on the much derided Control+ app to operate it, but, well, read on to find out what I think of it now I've built and played with it...
LEGO's desire to appeal to a broad demographic has resulted in some remarkable models being released that would have been unimaginable a few years ago, and 10315 Tranquil Garden is a good example.
I am quite surprised, however, that it's topping the list of most anticipated August releases, according to yesterday's poll, trumping all licensed sets and even the Corvette. There is clearly something about it that appeals to people, so let's find out what.
