MAB

Best Theme: Creator Expert, Honorable Mentions: Star Wars, Creator, Ideas Best Minifigure/bigfig: Retro Spaceman (CMF), Honorable Mentions: Darth Vader from 75183, Beetlejuice, Butterfly Girl (CMF), Elves Goblin King, The "I" from 40178. Best Set: Ninjago City, Honorable Mentions: Old Fishing Store, NASA Apollo Saturn V, Assembly Square Worst Theme: The Lego Batman Movie, Honorable Mention: Brickheadz Worst Minifigure: TLBM Robin or Dick Grayson, any and all variations. Worst Set: 70917 (Ultimate Batmobile), Honorable Mentions: 70905 (Batmobile), 70906 (Joker Lowrider), 10256 (Taj Mahal reissue) Most Anticipated 2018: I'll wait and see.

None of them are "classics". And Pirates of the Caribbean is a current license with three sets currently out.

Yes. I doubt there is much work to do on it, since it is so small but it would be very surprising that they would name it in a catalogue before the actual announcement. Especially when they use a code name for Voltron.

Read the above few posts.

Someone has posted on brickset that Tron is in a catalogue (I presume a trade catalogue). No evidence posted, and a newly signed up account too so could well be a wind up.

There are plenty of larger sets being released as normal, but these don't really celebrate 60 years of lego.

You do, you receive fractions of a point per piece but they just show as zero. But they are all totalled up.

For the torsos, the BL search "short sleeves" works well: https://www.bricklink.com/v2/search.page?q=torso+short+sleeves+&rpp=100&tab=P#T=P or you can do a similar one for arms. For legs it is much harder, since the footwear varies in name.

They occasionally change designs before production and don't update box art correctly.

I think if you squeeze them together and hold them long enough they will eventually have increased clutch (like you do for hands), but it is a lot of work for something so cheap. Local heating while clamped will help speed it up a bit.

Yeah, they could. I understand the wanting of classic style type sets for space, castle, pirates, but those sets are not so far from what we have had in the recent past. I think it is good to remind people that lego should be about free building as well as building sets following instructions. I would have liked them to do some retro-style service packs too - so a pack of various sized and shaped roof slopes all in a single colour, or a variety of windows and doors, again in a single colour. If necessary they could mix up the colours but hopefully produce each type of element in each colour so you could have a continuous coloured roof. Brick packs in a single colour would be nice too, but this is (almost) provided by PAB.

These were summer promos to get people buying during the summer months when sales were low. I guess they decided that either they didn't need to do it again, with the popularity of Batman and friends, or that they have done enough of them, or that they didn't work as well as hoped.

I think they are quite nice, and a bit of an antidote to the "this set makes only this model" view, which is the spirit of LEGO, of course already done through the Classic boxes. They appear to me to be a bit of a cross between the normal Classic boxes and the MBA series from 5 years or so ago due to the themes. Even as parts packs, they seem to have a reasonable selection of parts plus some nice new colour torsos. Although the rainbow really shows that there is a missing piece in the current stacking arches. The theming doesn't seem very strong though. The Mission to Mars doesn't seem to be very martian, with a bird type creature, a rubber duck, a pirate, ... I guess the helmet just off the edge is meant to be a spaceman's helmet. Ocean's Bottom has a castle and dragon? World Fun seems more like Ocean's Bottom, with Atlantis styled ruins with seaweed growing on them. But then there is the octopus in Ocean's Bottom so they are probably correct.

You've got the right one for the set. They occasionally change contents before production and don't update the graphics / box art.

Another way is to put in a very slither of paper, or some tape on the part being clipped in. Or just chuck them away and get new ones on bricklink, for most colours they are cheap enough.

Centre the pretzel with a 2x1 brick with a clip on the side. Do you need the roof to open? If not, there are some better ways of covering the gaps.

There was an article on it a couple of days ago on brickset, although you'll have to decide for yourself whether things are revised or not. https://brickset.com/article/31838/re-released-sets

You might also want to have a minimum fee for a table, to stop people using a narrow table but lots of stock piled up behind it.

Lester is a revised re-release. The original comes with different packaging and without accessories, whereas the polybag set comes with an umbrella.

If he had complained about lost income, then they could have got him on being a reseller. I imagine they had already agreed to sell all five to him as, like most stores, they want to sell their stock to people at the prices advertised. Then they had the problem that someone else wanted one once it was then OOS. The behaviour was pretty bad if it happened that way, the guy should have just paid for what he bought and left without interacting with the mother.

If you prefer that to £400 of new lego then yes. That is cheaper than BL prices, if the set really is excellent condition and is complete, includes manuals, not fake, etc.

Maybe better with fans of Ninjago (and afols), but that may have taken away sales from that theme. So I imagine they went slightly more whacky to appeal to others rather than appealing to the same group of fans.

They could have stopped the buyer buying all five if they had wanted to.

I'd forget about price per part and buy one you think you will enjoy building, especially if it is one of your first major purchases.

Mine 5 (girl into friends and elves mainly but she loves Macy) and boy 8. Neighbours kids 8, 9 and 11 (11 year old lives jestro and dressed up as him for Halloween). Friends ages 8-11 too. Why? I think it is the whacky characters and vehicles. They haven't seen the media side, but do occasionally play the game.