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It's that time of year again when you have to fight your way through crowds of crazy shoppers in order to spend lots of money on kitschy decorations and expensive presents! This may include ornaments for your Christmas tree, and being the smart company they are, TLG has released three new ornaments for all the holiday celebrating brick-lovers out there!
In this time it is good to know what exactly you want to buy so that you can manage your budget. Therefore I have decided to make this little review so that you know if these Lego ornaments are worth buying. So let's get going and jingle all the way!
Set Number: 853345
Name: Gold Ornament
Theme: Seasonal
Year of Release: 2011
Pieces: 40
Minifigs: 0
Price: $7.99 USD / £3.99
S@H Brickset Bricklink
I found this ornament hanging from a rack in the Lego Store next to red and green versions of it, but I was only interested in the Gold one due to its rare colors, so this is the only one I bought. There are no box pictures to show since these ornaments are being sold as they are, with only a tag giving you a little bit of information about the product. There is no type of protection for the product, so some of the ornaments might be scratched, and the information on the tag is very limited. On the front, it only shows the recommended age, and on the back, the item number, price, and the barcode. The tag can be folded open, but on the inside you'll only find the usual small print. No product name, no piece count, no nothing. It doesn't even have a nice holiday design, just the generic Lego Accessories yellow baseplate texture. Very lazy and cheap effort.
Some of you may remember that Lego released very similar holiday ornaments two years ago, the 852744 LEGO Holiday Ornaments. That set required you to buy all three different ornaments together, but at least they came in a nice and handy box.
The printing on the ornament is quite nice. It depicts detailed snowflakes, whereas on the old ornaments they were simple white dots, so that's an improvement.
The only thing keeping the two ball halves from splitting and spilling all its contents is a small, round, transparent sticker at the bottom. It does its job, but probably wouldn't be much of an obstacle to thieves.
After removing the sticker, the two halves of the ornament still hold together pretty well, although I'm not sure if they would still do that after falling from a tall Christmas tree. Let's take a look at what's inside, shall we?
Here are the emptied ball halves. They are the same mold as in the old ornaments set, so they still have the inserts for medium-sized radar dishes. If you have one of those dishes, you can make your own custom ornaments with holiday scenes in them.
Here's the main reason to buy this set: the contents are comprised of 12 trans-yellow 1x2 bricks, 14 dark tan 2x2 bricks, and 14 metallic gold 2x2 bricks!
And... that's pretty much it. There are no instructions and no hint at what you could do with these bricks, so you are left to your own imagination. It's hard, though, to come up with something one can build solely out of 1x2s and 2x2s.
Ratings
Design: 4/5 - The ornament looks quite nice overall, especially the detailed printing on top, but it's nothing to get overly excited about. Personally, I would have preferred a golden ribbon instead of a yellow one, seeing as this is supposed to be a Gold Ornament, but I guess the yellow retains the playful spirit of Lego. Either way, it'll look good on any Christmas tree, especially together with the red and green ornaments.
Playability: 0.1/5 - Uhm... It's a ball with bricks in it. Not much you can do with that except make primitive structures with the bricks. But it's meant to be decoration in the first place, so it doesn't really matter how playable it is.
Parts: 4.5/5 - If anything, this ornament is great parts pack. Over a third of the parts in this set are metallic gold! What's not to love about that? Plus it comes with bricks in two other semi-rare colors which compliment the gold quite well. The only thing that could have made this better would have been a wider variety of bricks, but oh well.
Price: 3/5 - At roughly 20 cents per piece, one might think this set is about twice as expensive as it should be, but you have to keep in mind that this is an accessory, not a regular set, and that the printed ball halves and the ribbon have to be included in the price too. Besides, I think it's great that the Gold Ornament has the same price as its red and green counterparts despite all the gold bricks it includes, and the price-to-piece ratio of these new ornaments is much better than in the previous ornaments set which had a ratio of 30 cents per piece!
Overall: 4/5 - Despite its lack of packaging and relatively high price, it's a nice holiday ornament that's filled with many rare bricks, so I can definitely recommend it. If you're really only interested in the gold bricks, though, you might want to just bricklink them.
I can't show a picture of it hanging from a Christmas tree right now since I haven't gotten one yet, but if you want me to, I can take a pic as soon as I have my tree.
I hope you enjoyed this review and that it it was useful to you somehow.Oh, and don't let a Grinch like Gold Tooth ruin your holidays.
Happy Holidays, everyone!
Edited by Rufus, 05 May 2012 - 10:17 AM.
Indexed
I really like that dark tan, now to just find out a use for it...
