71857 Ninja Vehicle Tree House Battle LEGO Review - Ninjago Dragons Rising, 2026

A clunky name for a pretty cool set

TL;DR:

• Original Price:  $79.99
• Pieces: 642
• Minifigure(s): Kai, Acid monster, Zane, Jay dragon form, Euphrasia, Loyalist
• Sticker Sheet: Yes
  
• Pros: Minifigs, new pieces
• Cons: Tree house plays second fiddle to the vehicles

Assembly: 

Bag #1 - Kai, Acid monster, motorcycle

Bag #2 - Zane, helicopter

Bag #3 - Jay dragon form, base

Bag #4 - Bridge, first floor

Bag #5 - Euphrasia, Loyalist, top floor

 Leftover Pieces

• Interesting Steps:
• 26: I appreciated the use of white 2L bars with stop ring to join gold aeroblade centers to the light bluish grey frictionless pins, allowing for tail rotors with very definite Ninjago styling.

• 35: A 4x4 corner plate (the "big L") and various slope pieces not only lock the vertical layers together but also give a good roundedness to the helicopter's overall shape.

• 18: Using the light bluish grey container with four corner posts as the legs for the toro (Japanese stone lantern) is a good use for this unusual part, and the matching 1x1 flower piece easily blends into the shadows.

• Interesting Techniques:
• This set is broken into 3 sub-builds, each with its own instruction book. I imagine this is for the Build Together approach: one person can build the motorcycle, another the helicopter, and a third the entire tree house, each with at least one minifig in their portion so no one  feels left out.
• The use of 1x2 bricks with pins to anchor the liftarms that hold the wheels results in a solid join, with no wobble.

• Interesting Pieces:
• Red wedge 5 x 1 x 1 1/3 with 4x1 base. There's no way I'll be able to remember that name, but it's a cool part, and it fits well with the flat 1x2 wedge tiles, as shown in the second picture. The motorcycle also makes use of two more (in black) for the samurai helmet crest shaped spoiler.

• Large costume dragon tail. This is an excellent new mold, and would have been great to use on CMF 28's Crocodile costume (as mentioned in my review). The only detraction is the massively hollow underside, which adds flexibility and removes a lot of extra material, but also doesn't look as nice as it could. It will be interesting to see how these look in the show, when the new season comes to Netflix in April.

• Angular plant leaves. This was created, like the tails above, for the Dragons Rising Season 4 sets, and has a very bladelike, Ninjago-ish vibe to it. They also come in trans-bright green, trans-orange, pearl gold, and satin trans-clear; all appropriate stylistic uses, given that this could easily be crystalline growths or gold decorative elements as much as plant leaves.

• While it's not a new piece, I never realized that the narrow end of the reddish brown "dinosaur tail" pieces are small enough to fit into a normal bar hole, such as in the end of a bar holder with clip as shown here. If you look closely, you can see that the last few millimeters are cylindrical in profile, rather than conic.

• I can see the Darksaber blade being very useful for custom minifigure weapons or build details—especially once it gets molded in different colors.

• Pain Points:
• I'm putting this here because sticker sheets have gotten to be a pain point lately, with many sets relying too much on stickers to keep manufacturing prices down. In this set, however, there's just 6 stickers, and they don't really require too much special attention to get placed properly. That may be because most of the details of this build are either in the vehicles, or else handled by the texture and shape of the treehouse parts; there aren't any wide swaths of plastic that need decoration or other non-built accentuation.
• Play Features:  
• The gear is directly connected to the helicopter blades, allowing the hand that holds the vehicle to also spin the blades. It's always neat to see how sometimes the most uncomplicated solutions are also the most effective.

• The bridge is connected by a Technic axle to the 2x2 round plates at the left, allowing it to be twisted from side to side, potentially dislodging any invaders. The bridge itself is a great design, and one that would work well even without the play feature. The one detraction is that the log piece tiles on 1x1 brackets pop off of the deck very easily, and are hard to put back in place with the rest of the railings in the way. A 1x4 plate spanning them would lock them in place, but also might visibly affect the bridge's look, making it seem more a solid construction than a flexible rope suspension.

• Much like the Ewoks and Swiss Family Robinson, this tree house comes with a log roll trap: pull the pin and they come tumbling out to flatten any wood-be would-be attackers. If I were designing it, I would have used a taller housing to store more than one log chunk at a time.

 

Overall:  Two things I like about the Ninjago theme are, first, that the visual style is unique and engaging, and second that you're more likely to get a structure in a set, in addition to mechs and vehicles. Those are all well and good, but it's nice to have a building to give context to things. I also appreciate when a set has a "battle pack" feel to it, where both the good and bad guys have their parts of the build, and it's easier to dream up stories pitting the one side against the other. In that respect, it's interesting that this set seems to be 90% good guys, with only the acid monster and Loyalist figure to represent the baddies. As of right now, Season 4 hasn't released yet, so there might be some story aspects that would better even out that balance (for example, if the tree house is actually the Loyalist's base, and he has to try and defend it against the overwhelming ninja forces while the acid monster acts as a guard dog), but as of now they very much feel like a pair of interlopers (perhaps sent to spy on Kai and the gang?).

 

Also, unlike other sets with more fleshed-out buildings (not to mention ones where that's the focus of the whole set, like the Four Weapons Blacksmith), the tree house seems to be more a study in the suggestion of detail, in contrast to the two very detail-heavy vehicles built with the first two bags. And this isn't because it's a tree house, there have been many tree houses with plenty of dimension and detail, such as the intricate Ideas Tree House, or the playful and childlike, but still well-rounded 3-in-1 Treehouse Adventures; even the for-younger-audiences Antonio's Animal Sanctuary seemed to have a bit more treeishness to it. The bases of this set and their connecting waterway are fine, with good scatterings of detail and that fantastic bridge. But once the tree house starts to rise above that basement level, it feels more like a doll house, simplified and condensed down to the bare minimum: brown curves and slopes for tree? Check. Balconies and a table for tea? Check. Leaves stuck everywhere? Check.

Now, don't get me wrong, it does look delightful, and—like a doll house—gets the point across. I would have liked to see the rooms built out a bit more than just a roofed-over doorway, perhaps on par with the bridge's level of attention to detail, proof that you can pack a lot into quite a small space with a judicious use of a few parts. Even a few panel pieces with some stickers (maps of battle plans, perhaps, or tool racks) would have helped to make it feel less like a theatrical set piece.

 

By contrast, the vehicles—especially the motorcycle—feel very fleshed out. It's always interesting to see differences like that and wonder what the particular interests and strengths are of the design team who worked on this set as opposed to say a Friends or Monkie Kid set. While the tree house feels in part like an afterthought in comparison, I'm still glad to have it, and hope that the series gives it some attention too.

 

On the whole, it's a pretty good set. $80 feels a little high, but that's likely due to all the new molds utilized in the Dragons Rising Season 4 sets, and especially in the minifigures. With the exception of Zane and the acid monster, the minifigures are all unique to this set, meaning this is the only set that you can get Zane's dragon form in (with the exception of the Dragon of Life set, which has Cole's and Lloyd's dragon forms), each ninja's reptilian version is limited to a single set, making this definitely a collect-them-all situation. Here's hoping they get released in other, smaller, sets and also used in other lines.

Score (out of 5 🧱):

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

• Total: 🧱🧱🧱🧱🧱

Lego Instructions: here