Hello Lego Gaf I'm back, and I have a few sets to go over and thoughts to share on them!
First of all, I absolutely did in fact pick up The Brick Bounty when it was reduced to £55.99 in the new year retirement clearance:
At the time of purchase when I enquired about it here someone said its too simple a build and etc, but I enjoyed it regardless. It looks good and turned out to be bigger than I expected. I've never owned a lego pirate ship, even though I always wanted one as a kid, so I was super excited to put this thing together and man does it look great, but it has totally left me with the a variation on everyone's favourite First World Lego Problem:
When you want more of a kind of set, but everything surrounding it has been retired.
The 2015 Pirates line was utterly baffling last year. I understand Lego has certain lines they recycle every few years - Space theme, Knight theme, Pirate theme - but it really feels like they've been shitting the bed pretty hard with both of the "recent" pirate revivals. The Pirates 2015 line was out 9 months. It debuted last March and (with the exception of the chess set) is now already retired. And all of the sets were lackluster at BEST and it has the same problem that the 2009 line had. Almost all of the builds look absolutely rubbish (except the ship). I get the need to have a diverse price point, but please put some more effort into this, Lego Group. There is one super important thing related to Pirates that they seem to be repeatedly ignoring:
Ships.
Both the 2009 and 2015 Pirates line only have one ACTUAL ship, pirate or otherwise. The rest is dodgy looking, vaguely pirate themed, playsets where you might (if you're lucky) get a rowboat..... and it might be in blue if its for the Good Guys, if you're lucky.
Where is the fun in that? Pirates are inherently about two things:
1) Fighting The Man
2) Pillaging other ships.
How is it even nearly a fair fight if the Good Guys only ever get a few vaguely fort-looking buildings and a cannon, against the might of a well armed, fully crewed, SHIP FULL OF CANNONS? And that kind of feeds in to my core problem with both of the recentish attempts at doing Lego Pirates again. Its all well and good having a big cool Pirate Ship as the... flag ship ... of the line, but that means nothing if it has no other ships to be impressive next to by comparison.
"But Kyari!" I hear some of you cry. "How can they possibly be expected to introduce more actual ships to a modern toy line while still catering to multiple affordable price points? That's impossible!"
Not true, as it turns out. They've even done it before over multiple price points and piece counts. I get that the large ship pieces are more expensive to create (resulting in the Brick Bounty being ~$0.13/piece as a result), but here let me run it down for you all with a look at some of the neater sets:
Renegade Runner (171 pieces)
Armada Flagship (280 pieces)
Caribbean Clipper (372 pieces)
But either way, I am now in a position where my Brick Bounty looks cool as heck and I need to get another (possibly smaller) ship to sit next to it, but there is absolutely nothing available. My desperation is causing me to look at the chinese knock off sets that can be picked up dirt cheap, like Enlighten and etc, but I really have no idea what the quality of them is like and the only other option would be to spend a small fortune on super old official sets people still have.
Also I absolutely replaced the captain with the zombie pirate (who looks a lot like LeChuck) and replaced the crew with skeletons and ghosts.
Also also this post has already gone on way too long, so I'll talk about my thoughts on the Deli Corner later (I like it a lot)
