DaleDVM

Hey Si Moc. The accents are dark blue and gold, not the whole castle. Yikes that would be expensive! Remind me on Saturday what type of pizza you want. I wasn't very clear but no need for people putting in orders on this thread. I love your Great Wall MOC. Very nice indeed. I have now put in 14 LEGO hours today and it is nappy time.

Stash and I have conferred and our annual Eurobricks pizza dinner is on for Saturday night. What I need everyone to do is see me at my castle display. As long as it doesn't fall apart again it should be easy to find. It is gold and dark blue hexagonal castle. The accompanying city is 24 feet long. My name is Dale so please come introduce yourself. I am looking forward to putting a face to some of the names on Eurobricks. Come by at 4pm... or earlier is fine too. The cost is a mere 5$ for the pizza. I will pick up any extra expense this year. Please bring your own drinks as I am not sure I can fit my big cooler in the van with all of the LEGO. Also let me know what type of pizza you like so we have an idea of what to order. Pizza usually arrives at around 6 ish.

Only 5 1/2 days until the opening ceremonies. I have so much to build yet... So many traveling from so far. My hour drive to the venue just doesn't seem so troublesome any more! Safe travels to those starting out this weekend. I guess I will have to send a text to Stash to get an update to all about Eurobricks pizza night. I will post an update on those arrangements soon. Can't wait to see you all again, and it's going to be great meeting all of you first timers!

I do all of my purchasing manually on Blink. I've got to learn to use the wanted section to save myself time. I hope it all arrives and you can get it all done. Wishing the best!

Well... 10 days until we start set up. I still have a ton to finish working on! How are others doing in preparation? When do our Euro Eurobricks members take flight? Let's get this forum moving again! I for one am really excited! Hey Stash, is Saturday night gonna be pizza night again?

Great work Hinkley and Steve! I love both of the castles and fantastic techniques! Are you and Steve bringing these to Brickworld? I really hope to see them in person! Dale

Thanks Nagyzee, I forgot about the horns in the helmets. Although the viking helm looks pretty aweful without the horns IMHO, so it never affected me. My queens weren't glued and I did not know some were. thanks again for the info...

Only the vikings chess set had glued parts. The plates were glued onto the baseplate and the rooks were glued in a couple of spots as well but were made of LEGO parts. No minifigs were glued. The lack of glue on minifigs may be due to Ben Ellerman and the crowd at Classic Castle. There is blurb about this period at Brickwiki. You can find it here.My link I do not agree that this is some sort of last minute release to get rid of extra minifigs. Why would they mold a special base (even if it is ugly) if this was some sort of throwaway product? That took some time and planning. Chess sets make nice Christmas gifts and makes for a nice set to compliment the joust on shelves.

Wow this was a total shock to me. I had no previous warning at all. My inside informants are getting lax... This is a great battlepack with a baseplate (value $5 USD) and some 4x4 plates to boot. I will be getting 10 or so of these. I didn't really want to make these two factions so large but now at these prices I cannot resist. I will be getting mine next month with my Brickworld 30% off discount.

Hey FluffyBunny. It will be nice to see another new face at BW. Last year the opening ceremonies were from 8:00 pm until about 9:30 pm on Wednesday.

I like the Orc Forge. It would make a very nice display model. However, with only 4 figs and at that price multiples are now not going to happen for me. The printed armor is excellent but this set is just way too expensive for army building with. Perhaps I will buy some printed armor on bricklink? I imagine it will go for a hefty price on there too. For the people who only collected castle to make LOTR. I am glad you are finally getting what you wanted from TLC. Official LOTR sets are a dream of mine as well. I don't think LEGO will notice you aren't buying castle any more. Very few of the past castle sets really fit in well with LOTR, so I doubt you bought much in the first place. I am a castle collector. The LOTR sets will eventually go into my larger castle universe. I have over 5000 castle figs and LOTR will just be a small addition to them. I love LOTR but MOCing is what I like to do. Army collecting is nice too. I think the LOTR orcs will fit in nicely with my trolls from the fantsy era. I am not sure what I will do with the fleshies yet. Perhaps I will yellowfy them? Last but not least I am hoping for some sort of standard with a white hand on it. A proper sized army with hundreds of Uruks will not look proper without some sort of standards. I fear we will not get one as most of the sets including armies of Uruks are in this wave.

Loving the werewolf army and those Romans are beautiful. I have one Centuria. Two is incredible. I would love to get together with several people and line up a cohort for photography. No that is not a legion. 3.5 x that number is a Cohort at 500 men. A legion is 10 cohorts at more than 5,000 total men. Now that would be insanely epic!

Wow, if that hand print is for real I love it!

Looking forward to seeing all of you foreigners! I am really excited, but also have a lot of building to do. Not to mention the bricklink orders I have to get going on! This is going to be the best year yet! Perhaps besides the pizza night, we should plan a party one evening for Eurobricks members as well?

Thank you so much for the review Whitefang. It is excellent as always! The figs are great as usual and one of the best releases in terms of quality and selection. As a long time complainer about the distribution of the minifigs, I have to thank TLG for making the space marine and evil knight have 5 of each in the case. Although I liked series 6 more this is the best release just because TLG finally learned what army building is all about. I do add, don't get any misconceptions about which minifigs will fetch the highest price on Bricklink. The Space marine followed by the knight will still likely be the 2 most expensive figures. The small percentage change in numbers per case will not make up for the people who want to collect hundreds of those figs. But it is still a step in the right direction!

Anyone who has followed this thread closely knows I agree with Fives. Give me battle packs without all of the extra stuff. I loved the castle battle packs. I can't think of a good small model I would like to collect many of in the LOTR theme. Star Wars battle packs include small weapons and vehicles that an army would have in abundance. 10 small catapults don't really appeal to me especially since catapults realistically are not small like that anyway. Perhaps if the bricks are particularly useful it wouldn't be too bad. As for the photos. They are fantastic. Most of the sets look similar to the earlier photos. However, it is nice to see details of inside the weathertop set. It comes with a nice selection of weapons in new colors. Gladius in two colors and the new longsword in black! The grey microfigs are fantastic parts as well. The backpack and food will be very useful. Frodo should not have sting at this pont in the story but I can forgive that... It is unfortunate that we are not getting the new horse mold in white. Snowmane and Shadowfax really should be represented. I guess LEGO putting the white horses on the pick a brick wall was not enough to get rid of all of them yet. I suppose they will make the new mold in white when they finally get rid of all of the old ones.

Anyone want to start a betting pool on which figs will be most expensive on bricklink? I actually think the space marine is going to hit the top of the charts. The knight will come in a close second followed by the aztec. I am pretty sure that the knight and the space marine will only come 3 to a case thus exacerbating the problem. Why does TLG do this? It is one of the few things they do that really anger me.

I rant about the makeup of battle packs quite often in this thread... If you can't rant here where can you rant? I agree with you Fives that the characters should have more capes. I am hoping the other sets will make up for the lack of capes in this wave of sets.

I picked up another 38 romans. Had to hit 3 toys r us and 5 targets to make it happen though. Luckily I am almost done collecting my armies from series 6.

I don't think this falls into a grey area, of course it is bad. I would personally go to bricklink. I have barely had TLG replace missing parts out of the sets I buy. Usually, I just go to my collection and grab a piece if one is missing from a set. That said, this is not a capital offense either. You have to do what you feel is right. Also, it is very possible you will be getting multiples of the different characters in future sets. I am sure these are not the only sets that will contain the fellowship members. It is likely you will get cloaks in some of those sets as well.

I have used the dot patterns to great effect. Yes it is true that different lots have different dot patterns. However, since I am only collecting multiples of a couple of figures it was not too hard to figure out. The new dot patterns only appeared after the stores ran out of minifigs and a second wave of them restocked the stores. On day 1 (January 9th) I got all 16 figs and marked the packages with a sharpee on the dots. I also picked up multiples of the army building figures that day. Now after 3 months and tons of driving I am at 27 highlanders (done), 53 minotaurs (need 1 more), and 79 romans(need 4 more). I have only made one mistake in all of the figures I have obtained. @CM4S I think the shield is a little small but not overly so. Moreso the width of the minifigs is exagerated.

Don't worry they will do battle packs for LOTR. They would be silly not to. No they will not be expensive. They will be the most cost efficient way of getting the army figures. I just hope to the LEGO gods they do not screw them up by putting individual characters, lots of brick, or multiple factions in the same pack. We will see later this year. In the meantime the Uruk hai army set is our best bet for getting a decent sized army. A $30 set gives you 6 figs plus the horse. (I see horses as valuable as another figure) It averages out to $4.29 USD per fig/horse. Not too bad of a price overall and the included LEGO brick is a nice bonus!

I certainly understand frustrations if you just started collecting LEGO castle. However, for those of us that have been collecting for many years, the new bucket helms are wonderful. I did grab 10 of those Dragon prison sets for both the great barding and the visored helm in the new dark pearl color. Derfel I totally agree. I grabbed 4 of the tic tac toe sets and wish I got more as well. Luckily over the last 25 years I have obtained over a thousand of the visored helms. I've only collected approximately a hundred of the new bucket helms. I only have 2 of the new black bucket helms from the joust set. That will be a very rare helmet indeed if it doesn't make it into a cheaper set someday! I should have LUGbulked that item now that I come to think about it! (Just checked bricklink) Wow those black helms are going for $4 USD.

I know that is the agreement for Star Wars. However, they could have made any agreement they wanted with LOTR. I am sure they would have to pay more to do minifig packs though. I guess we will find out what kind of agreement they have soon. Anyone with news about this would be most welcome if they could pry it from TLG! The fact that the Uruk set holds more interest to you is cool. Luckily you already have that option. Now I would like an option to get 5 minifigs of one faction at a more reasonable price. Also it doesn't appear you have bought any battle packs in the past. They come with 5 different minifigs and their gear. If I was your son, I would have complained that my dad didn't get me battle packs from both the good and the bad guys. You had that option and missed out. You are suggesting that it is better not to have the options at all. I can't agree with this line of thinking.

Please LEGO no! The battle packs like castle are the way to go. 5 different figs all from one faction. Nothing to build, no treasure chests or other silly elements that I don't need 20 of. Last but not least, no individual characters, cuz I don't want 20 of them either. I don't mean to offend you Fives. I am so confused why anyone would ask for stuff like this? If you want to get sets with both factions and bricks to build, I recommend the uruk hai army set. If any battle pack has more than one faction you are forced to buy both factions even if you only want one. You also end up with even numbers of each side. What if you want more of one faction or the other? Battle packs for each different faction allows you to build armies of any faction in any numbers you would like. Why would you want fewer options and flexibility? If you want equal numbers just buy battle packs from both factions in equal numbers. It is almost like you want a battle pack that you want to buy one or two of. I say that is what the sets ar for. I typically purchase 10 to 100 battle packs to create an army. How many little catapults do you want? If you want more they aren't too hard to come by since they make one in every castle line TLG releases. Little brick constructions just eat into the value of battle packs by taking away from the figs. That would have been me Ardelon. You beat me to it while I was typing.