Legoist

I think it's good above average, but not outstanding. Also there aren't that many pieces in Maersk blue if you look carefully, I think people are a bit overreacting about this. I had promised myself a treat this spring if I had succeeded at something related to my profession, and I was thinking of this set... But now that I won the prize I'm not really sure anymore. Maybe I'll just get the engine from someone who buys multiple sets to have lots of wagons. BTW, thanks for excellent review otherwise!

I think Series 4 is my favourite among the 5 series known so far. The design of the minifigs is really good this time, there is not a single minifig I dislike. The only thing I would improve, is the number of accessories per minifig. I would like those with only a 1-piece accessory to have at least a spare one, like it used to happens with some minifigs of Series 2.

First is definitely Trains, even tho it might be considered a sub-theme. But in practice I rather consider City/Town a subset of Trains Second is Castle (with the exclusion of the 90s series). Third is Classic Space, but not any other space theme than Classic!

Currently at Toys'R'Us @ IdeaPark there is a lot of stuff with discounts around 25%. Most discounted sets I've noticed belong to Prince of Persia, Star Wars (not the biggest sets) and Atlantis, but there's a little bit of everything on sale. Actually I passed by there because I've seen an ad about Public Transport Station 8404 at 50% off (60e), but that is not discounted at all (maybe the offer is already over? or not yet valid?).

At the store is best for me, they cost 1.90e while online you always pay them more and must add shipping.

Now that I see the picture, I have to admit that this is my favourite series so far... If the "dots code" still work for identifying these, I might try to get almost all of these.

I gave the series my own first (small) attempt at indentifying the figs. And found out I am utterly useless at touching the bags The only fig I could identify correctly by touching was the Rapper, thanks to the 1x3 "stereo" brick which stands out easily. I failed to identify all the others I have tried to (practically all bags in a near-full box). I seriously wish TLG didn't put the sheet list in each bag, that piece of paper makes identification harder and even increases the cost of the "set", and it's pointless to own more than one sheet list. Actually I would even prefer not to have the 3x4 base, but at least those pieces can find a use in some MOC. I was a bit skeptic about using the "dots code" because there is more than one "cheat sheet" going around the web, the older one being incomplete and the newer one mentioning that some bags vary, and furthermore some people have been reporting cases of not matching dots. Nevertheless at least the dots for the Rapper matched with my touch-guess, so I tried to buy a bag the dots of which seemed to be those for the Elf, since this appears to be one with least chance of confusing its dots pattern with another. It worked and it was indeed the Elf. Still, before opening the bag I spent 20 minutes (10@shop+10@home) trying to feel the content and in the name of God I could not single-out either the shield (!) or the bow At least the dots seemed to match with the "cheat sheet" in these 2 cases, which is definitely promising. There aren't many more figs I'm interested to in Series 3, but at least I'll have another "touch & feel" session next time I go shopping.

They're here now. I've seen them since a week ago in Prisma chain shops.

The first nice item found on sale after Xmas: Shop chain: Toys'R'Us Location: Idea Park Lucky find: another huge SW set on 50% discount: - 8129 AT-AT Walker(Star Wars) down from ~130e to ~65e TRU has many other items on sale, with a much smaller discount, but I think SW fans would really appreciate this one.

I think I now understand more or less all the different points of view and buying habits related to these minifig series, except for one. I still don't understand why people would buy these for reselling. It must take an awful lot of time to resell hundreds of these, and while it seems possible to resell the most wanted ones for 5$ (i.e. 3$ of profit each), it's hard to believe that a reseller buying for example 500 minifigs would get rid of more than half of them within a year, and be stuck with the rest for a much longer time. I can understand resellers buying huge Star Wars sets, but not these minifig series. It's not worth the time...

This should go straight next to the bakery

I voted 3. The good thing about this set is 3 excellent and new minifigs, and a few accessories. The bad thing is that there is not much to build, and it's too simple. I think this set is more comparable to the 2008 City minifigure set, compared to which which it costs 1e more, has 3 minifigs instead of 4. But the minifigs are definitely much more unique, and they are clearly the reason why to buy this set. Overall I think it's just fine. Not being interested in the theme itself, I think this set is anyway a fairly good way to get some mummies, which can come handy in other themes/MOCs. The collectable series 3 mummy is cheaper (if you know how to identify it), but the mummies in Pharaoh's Curse are IMHO much, much better.

I think the same way. However the matter with popularity is not so black-and-white. There are indeed some minifigs which have been heavily targetted for army building, but they are not many (the Spartan has been quite unique in this case, there are people who literally amassed hundreds of these). And for all other minifigs, just read the forums and see how different views people have about which should be "must have" in significant multiple copies. For instance you mention the mummy and driver as possibly the least wanted. But the mummy is potentially a fairly better army-builder compared to most of the other figs in this series. A lot of forumites said they want a fisherman and a rapper, but how many copies? What could really tilt the matter is just a few key minifigs that are both cool and unlimited in how many copies you may like having (everything that works as a "soldier-type" qualifies), especially if the minifig concept was unprecedented / previously unavilable in Lego form. The Spartan definitely topped these 3 parameters big time. The Elf probably gets close to the same this time, except that while there has never been something that could really pass for a Spartan/Greek/Roman before, to pass for an Elf is easier (e.g. old forestmen, or any castle figure with long hair). But otherwise minifigs that are just "cool" but won't be needed in masses won't tilt availability significantly even if a lot of people use codes. Even if we all agreed which should be the most wanted (and we don't), most of the people will just buy these first but later end up buying at least some of the others too. Take the Fisherman (apparently one of the most quoted here), and let's presume it's really one of the most wanted (to me this one is a bit like the female minifigs: could be most-wanted by AFOLs but probably KFOLs won't see much cool factor in it). Even if we all try to get some fishermen, how many really are we going to get? You can't build an army (i.e. you CAN build an "army" of civilians, but for it to be serious it needs variations) with them, so you're going to have to re-use the parts and mix them with other minifigs. But more than a small bunch, there's not much reason to really buy for any purpose.

Thanks for the perfect review! I think this set has both excellent design, playability, parts selection, and minifigs as well. Price discussions aside, it's hard to argue about the quality of this set! Usually I don't like raised baseplates, but this time I have to say that they have used this one in a very clever way.

Why do you feel you should do charity to a company? In my case, they'll get definitely more money from me already if I can guess the minifigs. My "good will display" for Series 3 will be the same I've done for the previous: I will buy only what I want to keep and NOT for reselling purposes, and I will buy max 1 minifig of a specific type at a time. Just so that I doesn't contribute to depleting boxes of "most wanted" figures.

Great and scary! And the minifigs too. Are you going to use this MOC to run some D&D adventure?

I don't think I'd have any issue with prints being really exclusive to the collectable series, but at least some accessories could pretty damn be re-used in regular sets because they would make excellent standards for fairly should-be common parts. On the top of my head I'm thinking about the skies, the nurse syringe, the mic... would be useful in sets. Of course they could use different moulds to represent the same accessories, but why throwing away a good mould that can work for years to come? (assuming they do, maybe they are using different technologies for these series...) Personally one of the main reasons I bought a bunch of these was the new hair and headgear pieces, just to add some variety to my civilian population. I would be happy if they later re-used them in regular sets so that they become more easily available, and also in more colours. But generally speaking, no single hair or hat is necessary, so we aren't losing anything if this doesn't happen.

He would definitely make much more money, but how long would it take to add all the entries? It's a huge work... and then he'd have to wait years until selling most of it.

If they used one mould for both, then it would certainly make it quite necessary for them to sell straights and curves in the same pack. I never thought of that possibility. My point however was that TLG has been selling them together because they thought people on the average wanted them in the same amount, which carries a bigger profit as a consequence. Of course the profit is the real target, but you presumably increase the profit if you give people what they want. Not what they SAY they want (especially because the most vocals are we AFOL, and we're not the customer base)... what they REALLY want, which is what they speak with their wallets. If flyers would really value comfort more than cheap prices, flights would end up on average being more comfortable and expensive. "More or less" the market seeks balance, but at the same time let's not overestimate the capability of a company to make the best choices, because economy is not a science (despite what economists may like saying), and in fact TLG itself made bad choices in the 90s and had its share of business trouble. And on the other end, KFOL are not consciously making serious decisions when buying a set, and neither are parents who most of the time just buy what makes the KFOL happy, so even the "wallet votes" are pretty scrambled up at the end. But on the average of averages, TLG can check what sold well and what didn't, and guesstimate the hidden desires of their customer base. It obviously is all complicated by factory constraints, such as the mentioned mould availability, manufacturing cost of each piece and so on... That is why I also added that IMHO the new straights+flexi set could be the result of having spent a lot of money into designing the flexi track (and maybe even manufacturing already) and not selling enough yet, so by bundling it with straights in place of curves they may justify the costs and hope it becomes more popular. The granted fact is that with trains set on sales there has to be a way to get extra straights, curves and switches. Flexi can be used to replace the first two. How they bundle these together is not granted however, and in fact this year the bundle is going to change. My point is simply that this fact shows that there are so many variables (which themselves change over time) that we cannot say the way TLG is doing it now is the best way to sell them. They guess it's the best way now, but it can always change and they may be even wrong about "now". The only easy guess is instead which is the best way now to BUY these for ourselves, from each of us' point of view individually; and from my personal point of view the answer is just that they should sell them separately, half a box of straights and half a box of curves (actually, I'd like also a separate generic "bundle expansion" with straights+curves+switches if it would ever be possible).

Hell no... 10 cent per piece where all pieces are RANDOM and second hand, AND you have to buy 200.000 of them is not at all a fairly priced deal. Unless someone is a very bored rich man (or someone wanting to start a re-selling business, but in this case it's a gamble to guess how many complete sets are there), he would be insane to buy this lot.

It seems a fine selection to me (except the garden gnome, WTF?) although too much sports perhaps. I'm probably not getting any unless some new way to identify the bags comes up, but if I do then at least 5-6 of them will be worth checking out. I don't mind the re-hash of the surfer and skateboarder themes, and I bet the second one is female too, so neither will be non-sense. Probably the surf and board are the same pieces as in series 2 and 1, but with a different colour and print. I also wonder if the mad professor will have a grey or white version of the Clown/Disco hair. Besides the concept, it's way too hard to guess how cool these will be. Some obvious new parts will be the hockey stick and the skates, and presumably some kind of mohawk for the punk. If the artist is a painter then he should have a nice hat (but could be just the same as the mime), a palette and a brush.

I think the potential for new farm sets is somehow limited by the need for new animal molds. Also, a Farm theme is actually very educational but doesn't come with the same level of action than Police, Firemen, adventurers-type or space themes. Farm is the kind of theme that suits AFOL more than KFOL, girls more than boys, and parents more than children. Put these together with the odd fact that Farm sets have been somewhat more expensive than average (at least the large Farm and the Pig Farm), and the future doesn't look good for the theme. What I don't understand then, is why isn't Lego capitalizing on the Cow and Pig molds. It must have been pretty expensive to design them and then create the molds for them, so why isn't Lego putting out more cows and pigs in upcoming sets? Partly, they are doing this with the pig which is present in 3 sets (the Pig Farm, the Farmer impulse set, and the Kingdoms Advent Calendar), but the cow has been out for a year longer and has been seen only in 2 large sets (the large Farm and the Medieval Market Village). I really hope these 2 animal molds are here to stay forever like the classic Horse, but I am surprised not to see them used more massively. That said, I would myself have quite a lot of ideas for possible farm-themed sets, but almost all of them would be unfeasible and attractive only to AFOLs. Maybe only a new edition of the iconic Horse Stables and a "farm battle pack" would sell well.

Wonderful! My favourite part is Hansel & Gretel.

YES No I don't. I never buy a set of which I need only half of it, because I don't want to spend time trying reselling the other half of it. If they were selling two separate boxes for straights and curves, I'd be buying about 4-5 boxes of straights for each box of curves. Right now for the same need I buy a combined box, and then buy the rest of straights second hand. I don't understand why some people subtly suggests that after acknowledging that TLG is profit-driven company we are supposed to accept being loss-driven customers. They don't do charity, we don't do charity either, the simple truth is that the dynamic just balances out on the long term so that the farther their sets are from what we really want, the less we buy (except on the early AFOLs years where the tendency is to over-buy). That's just how it works, they change their packages when it's convenient but then they have to change them again after a few years if customers aren't buying enough. They do this all the time, and in fact they just did change, from straights+curves to straights+flexi. They removed curves because they know that the average customers of the train theme are generally currently unsatisfied by having to buy both. The idea behind combined straights+curves packs was not "evil" as in just forcing people to buy something they don't need (if they really wanted that, they'd sell combined Star Wars + Castle, or Lego + Duplo, just so that you have to buy twice as much every time?), but rather to provide a reasonable "layout upgrade pack". Except that it is (or was) reasonable only on a short term, now that it's been sold for so many years AFOLs are full of curves and have a hard time re-selling them (KFOLs are always much more, but trains KFOLs not so much, and they rarely go far with layout expansion), so they have to change the packaging to tilt the balance back towards curves, and with the arrival of the flexi they had a great idea with bundling it since it can count both as straight or curve depending on your need (but also of course, they might have a lot of manufactured flexi to sell, if people didn't buy it separately online). It's definitely possible that they later go back to separate packs of straights and curves. In the RC era, we had a the straights+curves set, the switching points set, and the double-switching cross set = 3 track sets. So maybe another reason for combining them had been the number of total sets. Now the double-switch is dead, and if flexi doesn't become popular and disappears, it's not impossible they go back to straights set, curves set, switching points set = 3 sets. It's understandable that they try to estimate what is convenient: selling X straigths + Y curves or Z straight+curves? But you cannot assume that Z > (X+Y)/2, at least it doesn't have to be forever, but people assume that it must be so because TLC has been selling the Z. Well that's not true... TLC makes its best GUESS but it doesn't even know how many it would have sold if they made the other choice. Just because they made the choice doesn't mean it's the right one, or that it will remain the right one forever.

I think it's too difficult to sort out TLG strategy details about these series. Probably even they don't know. In fact there are at least 4 types of people who are buying these minifigs: - those who try to "collect" the complete series - those who buy a small bunch of them at random - those who cherry-pick only those which they want (but sometimes dozens of them) with barcodes - those who just buy a case Each of these common types (and of course there's combinations of these too) have different desires from the series, and they also will have different endurance before stop buying the upcoming series. "Case buyers" of today may slow down a lot if there are too many frequent releases or recurring figures and parts. I am myself in the 3rd group, and I wouldn't mind re-releases or variations of older figures at all, but with the disappearance of barcodes I don't even mind because I most likely won't buy any of these again (but then I bought so few that I don't really qualify as a target for TLG strategies). As a quite average AFOL, I use these minifigs in the same way as all the others from the sets. I certainly would like to see the best new accessory/hair molds used in future regular sets as well, but if TLG starts regularly doing that it would certainly piss off the collectors who want exclusive parts and prints to increase the reasons for spending 60-80$ to complete each series. It would be reasonable that the 1st group is the real target for these series, but I wouldn't underestimate how the 3rd group (so far, since it's not going to exist anymore at a statistical level) and the 4th group have allowed sales to go so well.