70671 Lloyd's Journey LEGO Review - Ninjago, 2019

The sort of set you really only get for the minifigs.

TL;DR:

• Original Price:  $14.99
• Pieces: 81
• Minifigure(s): Lloyd, Blizzard warrior, Akita
• Sticker Sheet: No
  
• Pros: Minifigs—especially Akita—and some good details
• Cons: Small build, price

Assembly: 

 Leftover Pieces

• Interesting Techniques:
• The use of rocker plates as wall shields is pretty neat, and gives the build a taller feeling, almost like a smaller scale version of a much larger fort. I could have seen them adding tiles, maybe even white teeth or rock profile pieces (as elsewhere in the build) to hide the studs on the outside of the rocker plates and further add to the snowy feel. I could also see them being clipped to the top—rather than the side—of the build to act like roof tiles.

• Interesting Pieces:
• Not having grown up with Ninjago, this was actually the first set I'd built that contained these shuriken pieces. They are molded of stiff rubber (otherwise those points would be pretty painful) and come attached to this little sprue piece. I really appreciate that—intentionally or not—the sprue's underside actually is a standard anti-stud, making this super useful for greebling, tiny jet packs, and a lot of other unusual applications.

• The crossbow is a nice piece too, which looks more realistic than a lot of other shooters. Interestingly enough, only old Ninjago and Elves sets used the black crossbow with the reddish brown trigger, most of the rest used it with a grey trigger piece (and a few Elves sets had tan crossbow pieces).

 Overall:  The blizzard warrior is pretty cool, especially with his dual-molded armor (the use of trans-light blue to indicate how he was partially frozen by the Ice Emperor is a nice touch, as are the medium azure katanas), and the printing on Lloyd makes him exclusive to this set, but the real star of the show is Akita.

She is a Formling who lives in the Never-Realm; like other formlings, she can shapechange into her spirit animal—in this case, a three-tailed wolf. When I was building the set, I thought that only the three-tailed piece was unique, but in fact the whole thing is a new mold; surprisingly, there's no other instance when this was used that I can find, which is a shame. While the legs are immobile, the head and tail parts do move, and the overall detailing is really nice. Perhaps at some point LEGO will resurrect this mold, add a single tail, and re-cast it in different colors for other large canine figures.

The build was very small, something more appropriate for a $10 polybag than a $15 box set, especially at the prices of half a decade ago (inflation calculators put that at just shy of $20 in 2026 money). I do appreciate that the designers packed as much detail as they could into such a small footprint, making each piece really pull its weight. The four log profile bricks make it feel like this is just a small part of a larger barricade, and also make the grey bricks and slopes stand out and feel more stony.

If you can find this set for cheap, I'd recommend it, but if you don't care about the minifigs and wolf, you'd be better off just building it yourself with pieces you already have. The nice thing about the build is that it's so straightforward that it shouldn't be too hard to take the design and expand it into bigger structures, if one were so inclined. 

Score (out of 5 🧱):

• Price: 🧱🧱
• Process: 🧱🧱🧱
• Presentation: 🧱🧱🧱🧱
• Play: 🧱🧱
• Pieces: 🧱🧱🧱🧱

• Total: 🧱🧱🧱

Lego Instructions: here