Alexandrina

I don't disagree that blue and green go together, but solid blue and green-and-white stripes are a jarring combination imo. Solid green shorts would have been perfect.

What set is that fig from?

If you don't like the set you don't like it - but the hostility towards people who do like the set is honestly baffling. It's a good set. The price-to-piece ratio is good (this is objectively true; whether it's worse than Barracuda Bay or not is immaterial, you're still getting over 2000 pieces for less than £200). And yet apparently this is a terrible set and we should all despise it? So if you yourself are happy to admit that it's a decent set, why are you so vitriolic towards people who like it and are talking about its good aspects? Wood can be black. Wood can be painted. Tudor architecture (slightly earlier than the Pirates era, but latter day Tudors definitely overlapped with early Age of Sail) is commonly depicted as being black beams. In fact, there's a house by me from the 1600s called the Black and White House on account of its black wooden beams framing white wattle-and-daub. There's nothing wrong with Lego having a black dock.

A Dothraki wedding Lego Pirates set without at least three deaths BURPs is considered a dull affair

Different strokes then I guess.

Black Seas Barracuda was also brown, though. You can just as easily say that Barracuda Bay had a brown dock to match the original ship. This is a remake of the original set, so of course they're using the same colours as the original set. And if you think every single depiction of a pirate dock is brown, you clearly didn't see the Oddsocks production of Treasure Island circa 2011

Yeah, but his shorts don't go with his vest. There's a colour/pattern clash.

That's the one! A couple of useful parts (47993 has some uses) but mostly pretty risible stuff. Aimed at kids, nothing much of value for AFOLs.

About an hour ago on my way to work? I get your point but there are plenty of brown trees out there!

It bothers me that his shorts don't match his vest. If they were monochrome it wouldn't be an issue, but they've given him patterned shorts with two colours, neither of which is his vest colour? It's a cool figure but that detail bothers me.

Tell you what, a part of me wishes Eurobricks had been around when the Jack Stone Pirates sets were first revealed. Would have been entertaining to see people's responses, if nothing else. But honestly I don't get it. Maybe this isn't on the same level as Barracuda Bay. It isn't perfect, but it's still a good set; I understand it not being for everyone but the vitriol from some corners surprises me.

I just bought the torso and legs from the Soldiers' Fort set. I've got better heads and hair than the actual set included (I'll be using the original Pippin Reed head personally, but that might be because my first exposure to Lego Pirates was the Doug Vandegrift brickfilm!) and the two combined cost me about £4. (Of course, I also spend another £25 on stuff I didn't know I wanted from the same store, but such is life! )

Bricklink has 70412 going for around £107 new (you know better than me if the box on yours is good condition or not). A quick look says that the unique parts of the minifigures in question go for a combined £12 or thereabouts (obviously with leeway for different sellers being priced slightly differently). If you're not interested in necessarily having exactly the 2015 governor or the 2015 governor's daughter, it's easy to provide your own head and hair, and the Governor's legs are plain white. The set itself looks quite lacklustre imo; your best bet is probably selling the sealed one, then buying the minifigure parts you want separately. Even with the pirate torsos, you're looking at maybe £15 plus postage, giving you a tidy £80 profit for your set. You could probably knock up a far better Sabre Island MOC in Stud.io that would cost less than £80 for the bricks, too.

I would say that eight minifigures as you have listed is lacking for more than just a swapping of heads. The Governor is a given, as is the officer (since the original set didn't include Lieutenant de Martinet, I don't see it as an issue that the remake doesn't, and at least there is an officer) but I don't see how you can argue for two - possibly one - standard soldier in the set that is meant to represent the literal soldiers' home base, and then act like there's no argument that your selection is worse than the one we actually got. Soldiers are a necessity. This is especially true in an era where there aren't lots of other sets on shelves containing the soldiers. In terms of sets, this might well be it. We need as many soldiers as we possibly can. I agree with you that Camilla would be a nice addition. I'm not familiar with the lore but I'm a sucker for civilian minifigures, especially female minifigures. However, I'd prefer to have Camilla in addition to the soldiers, not in place of one. I'm not sure we need merchants in this set, as again it's the soldiers' base. I wouldn't say no to them but to my mind they're lower priority than additional soldiers.

Bricklink isn't infallible. If it was a niche promotion they might not be aware of it, especially if nobody has tried to sell the combo. As recently as last year I corrected a set inventory for a beloved set because Bricklink had listed an alternate minifigure and not the one actually in the manual, so you can't trust it 100% as gospel

Also, it doesn't make sense to shoehorn in a goat just for the sake of it. Yes, they could make some random City set up that includes a goat, but unless it's critical to the set and also appealing to the wider audience, it's a no-go. There's a subset of AFOLs (over-represented on these forums) who would love to see the goat return. I'm one. If the goat came back in a set that didn't interest me, though, I wouldn't buy the set just for the goat. I'd get what I wanted off PAB and be done with it. If Lego shoehorned a goat into a terrible set, what would happen is AFOLs would buy off PAB but not in enough quantity to justify bringing back the mould - after all, if Lego could recoup the costs of a new mould entirely off PAB sales we'd see plenty of useful parts over the years - and the terrible set would warm the shelves. By waiting for a set like the medieval village, Lego ensures sales from the goat fans who will buy the set and a few extra goats, but also plenty of sales from people who don't care about a goat.

That review from Brickset was a good read. Seems like the crane is a little oversized but there's a few good recolours (how have we not had a dark brown rowboat before?) I know the black dock has a lot of people confused but I used to live in a house with exposed black timbers from the 1600s so it doesn't faze me in the slightest.

Just a quick clarification before I devote any actual time thinking of what to make for my entry: Option 1 is to design a new classic-style set. Does this strictly have to be a set that could have existed during the original Pirates run (1989-97) or would it be acceptable to do an entry based on an imagined 1998 or 1999 wave? There's an idea poking around in my mind but I don't want to spend too long thinking about it if it's going to fall foul of the rules.

The thing is, people calling for a return of classic themes are rarely calling for the exact sets to be re-released as is. Fort Legoredo is thirty years old, so of course the building techniques are going to be more primitive than they are today. You say yourself that you like Knights Kingdom and the latter-day City Space sets - these are classic themes. When you say classic themes are boring aside from the minifigures, you're judging it from old builds, but is it fair to say that City is boring because some set from the 80s had a boring build? Look at stuff like Barracuda Bay or the Lion Knights' Castle. Obviously they're large sets but they're a far fairer comparison for the quality of the builds than sets from an era when Lego's design philosophy was entirely different.

Dark Turquoise will always be the poster child of never giving up on a colour. Really, any colour could come back (though I suspect some of the niche, drab shades of the 90s won't just because who cares enough about Fabuland Brown or Medium Yellow to warrant a like-for-like recreation?) and the neons are popular enough that I think they'd be at the top of the list for a return. Do we even know why they've been retired? Possibly it's as simple as no current theme depending on them, so the colours are being 'retired' until they're actually needed rather than eating the cost of keeping them in the rotation for use in a handful of scattered parts a year.

Nothing about it needs to be justified, though. Dual moulded legs are 1) not essential to recreating the figures historically, 2) not important for making all of Lego's customer base have representation (unlike being female, being dual-moulded is not a condition which typically afflicts human beings) and 3) not objectively more desirable. There are lots of people who would prefer plain legs. On top of that, dual-moulded white legs have never appeared in mainline Lego products, and haven't appeared in CMF for six years - they're almost certainly not currently in production, and for the reasons above are definitely not the priority. I'm fairly sure, in fact, that even most Pirates fans would take, say, the old palm tree mould over dual-moulded legs if there was room in the budget for one more 'new' piece. And we both knew what I meant by "puttees". There's no need to nitpick on this point, especially when there doesn't appear to be an actual specific term for the part of the uniform I was describing.

It's not so much that the Islanders were offensive so much as they were very much a representation of the "noble savage" - which was a concept intentionally ascribed to Rousseau to give it legitimacy by a man who attacked Darwin's theory of evolution because it went against his own theory that different groups of humans were descended from different creatures, essentially that they were different species. It's also a trope in which the "noble savage" is enlightened about the world by the white sailors who visit them. The Islanders themselves don't represent any specific culture that I'm aware of, but they were placed in the world of the pirates, and that theme is very explicitly set in the Caribbean. The Islanders are therefore a proxy of the Caribbean indigenous people (and Polynesian, to a lesser extent) but are more a caricature of the western imagination than a faithful interpretation of a real culture. If the Islanders were divorced from the Caribbean setting it would probably be alright (especially if Lego attempted to give them a more thought-out lore; as is, it's basically stereotypical savages with primitive weapons) but as it is it doesn't really sit right.

My point is that dual-moulded legs are not the most accurate way to represent most variants of the colonial-era French uniform, which was the inspiration for the bluecoats. I wouldn't have minded myself if they were included in the set, but solid white legs work just fine for what they're trying to go for.

Is this necessary though? The bluecoats are modelled on the French army, and looking at pictures of French uniform in the 1700s and early 1800s, there are very few designs which would warrant dual-moulded legs. Look at a picture of Napoleon or the French revolutionary army, they have white trousers and white puttees over their boots.

I'd argue yes, it is. There are lots of groups who are going to be buying this set. Yes, the diehard original line fans who know all the lore are among them. But there's also the people who got into Lego in the early 90s and never had the comic, and who didn't learn some or all of the additional lore because it wasn't released in their region. Even amongst classic Pirates fans a large swathe won't be married to the old lore. I wasn't around in 1989 but I know my buying habits as a kid and had I been, I'd never have learnt the lore. Why? Because I never enjoyed reading comics, so I'd have got a different set instead of 6255. I wouldn't have bought supplementary Ladybird books aimed at small children. As I'm in the UK, I wouldn't have heard German audio dramas, nor had text printed on the boxes. People like me, but who were a little older and collecting in the 80s, are squarely in the target audience but won't have ever obsessed over the characters. Then you have latecomers. You could have bought Skull's Eye Schooner on the day it came out and missed the comic strip entirely because they didn't overlap. The majority of the original Pirates run was after the comic strip, so lots of people will have got into the theme later on (and yes, Eldorado Fortress was also gone by then but your average set-deprived Pirates fan is going to be excited for any nostalgic set) You also have the adults who were never big into Lego but have been brought into the fold by the Botanicals or Ideas sets based on their favourite TV show. They have no preconceived notions of what Eldorado Fortress should be but they'll likely still buy it. There's also the kids who come from wealthy families. The people who were kids when the 2009 or 2015 Pirates sets came out, and can now afford new sets. People who used to look at the Eldorado Fortress in catalogues as a kid but couldn't afford it back then. On top of that, global sensibilities have changed. There's a reason stuff like Islanders would be considered unacceptable today, and while that doesn't impact on Eldorado Fortress it points to the fact that people's thinking isn't what it was in the 80s. On top of that, between Eldorado Fortress and today there's been all sorts of media that has changed the common perspective of what Pirates is: Pirates of the Caribbean, sure, but also Assassin's Creed, Uncharted, etc. Even the Master and Commander film will have impacted on people's perceptions of the soldiers of the period. Very few people will not buy the set because it deviates too far from the lore of the comic. Longtime fans are a sure thing and the core of the target market, but they're far from all of it. If Eldorado Fortress doesn't sell well with newer fans, it'll be a failure and probably the last Pirates set we see for a long time.