The play action is a bit ineffective, but the microscaling and minifig are on point, especially for the price.
TL;DR:
- Original Price: $4.99
- Pieces: 55
- Minifigure(s): Cho Chang - quidditch uniform
- Sticker Sheet: No
- Pros: Efficient microscale, Exclusive minifig
- Cons: Play action ineffective
Assembly:
- Pain Points:
- Aligning so many 1x1s can be tricky. The easiest way I found is to assemble the four towers as best you can, then press them sideways against a hard surface so they're all aligned.
An interesting attempt at forced perspective, we see Cho on her broom chasing the Golden Snitch around and around the quidditch pitch, which is accomplished with the stacked 2x2 and 4x4 plates with holes on a 2x2 plate with a pin (it would have been better in matching green instead of white) on which are two transparent antennaes, one for Cho and one for the Snitch. Below these high-fliers, we have the micro-scale pitch, with the three rings on either end represented by pearl gold bars with 1x1 plates, and the four house bleachers represented by stacks of 1x1 mounted on 1x2 jumper plates. It's simple, but pretty effective, and pairs well with other microscale Harry Potter builds (I'm looking at you, 2022 Advent Calendar, easily one of the best ever IMHO, and the Build Your Own Hogwarts Castle polybag as well).
The Cho minifigure is acceptable, with solid blue legs and a generic female head. The torso printing (a Ravenclaw quidditch uniform) is nice, but leg printing would have made it nicer. It's a limitation of minifigure anatomy that they aren't able to properly ride a broom; the best I could manage was as photographed, and from the right angle it almost looks as though she's riding it, though there's still an "about to fall off" quality to the pose. Add to this the set's built-in play feature, namely the fact that Cho and the Snitch rotate around and around the central pin, as though in mid-air chase. It's cute enough, but only for about 30 seconds. Better to take her off the antenna and go whooshing around by hand.
Given the large number of small pieces, this set comes with basically one extra of every 1x1 piece; when these were clearanced out at my local Walmart, I picked up a few, just so I could have extra pyramids (so useful for microscale buildings) and Snitches. This is probably one of the cheapest ways to get a Snitch in a set (the other cheap way, at original price, being Draco Malfoy from the Harry Potter CMF Series 1), and that at least is a nice unusual element that could be useful for architectural detailing, for example.
On the whole, it's one of the better polybags I've seen in terms of display, and makes good use of a limited part menu.
Score (out of 5 🧱):
- Price: 🧱🧱🧱🧱
- Process: 🧱🧱
- Presentation: 🧱🧱🧱🧱
- Play: 🧱🧱🧱
- Pieces: 🧱🧱🧱
- Total: 🧱🧱🧱
Lego Instructions: are not here, nor are they available at any of the third-party archivers (Rebrickable, Brickset, Brick Instructions, nor even Google Images. Again, I reiterate my usual point against having online-only instructions, as it can be so very easy for such files to be lost or otherwise rendered unavailable. As such, I'm including them below, for anyone who wants to build this themselves:
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