I had to pick up a copy of the LEGO Harry Potter Hogwarts Game. It's Harry Potter and LEGO! The game board is Hogwarts school and you need to build it. You build a largish board with corner towers for each house. There are classrooms in the middle that the players need to collect an object from. The classrooms and the hallways move during the game. That makes it harder to get to the classrooms to get the bits and pieces you need to finish the game. I sort of skimmed the game instructions. The building instructions are in a seperate booklet. The game, once built, fits into the box but you need to take down the towers in corners and tip over the larger Astronomy Tower in the middle. There are some useful pieces in the box but I'm not going to take it apart. I wouldn't mind two or three more to take apart. You can always buy the interesting parts on Bricklink but there's 322 parts and 9 of the little microfigs and I thought I would want to buy a lot of them. It's much better value to buy a set and part it out. I wouldn't be opposed to loaning a moc I was building a part or two but I'd be bummed out if something got lost and I had to replace it. That's a lot of bother, putting an order in for one part. And really, you can never order one part on Bricklink. Theoretically it's possible but practically? So that single part becomes a single part of a larger order that now costs as much as a set might cost.
A majority of the parts are small. Many of them are highly useful for the right builder. There's a cool looking yellow frog and a dark brown crouching cat. Those would be some what more useful to me, as opposed to the red and blue spiders, neat though they are. You can find them on Bricklink for about a buck each. That's not so bad. There's also 4 of those 8x16 dark bley tiles and those are usually 75 cents to a buck each on BL. They can come in mighty handy for quick road building or roofs.
These 2x2 tiles with a stud in the middle at another part that would be hard one not to plunder out of the box. You get one each of the ones shown and those babies are 75 cents and up on bricklink. There's also a dozen of the dark bleyand a dozen of the light bley. Those only start at 2 bits for the dark blay and 50 cents for the light blay. I think people will find those handy, no matter what you build.
That's a new 2x2 panel in tan. People were interested in it at the TwinLUG meeting. There are 3 dice face, one, two and three, but no 4 through 6. Those missing numbers would have come in handy to make the dice part into a traditional dice. The Maurauder's Map returns to Hogwarts. There's an interesting arrow symbol and a nice Hogwarts crest. The rest of the parts are a nice mix with good amounts of reddish brown, the grays, tan and a nice number of sand green cones.
I thought these guys were pretty cute. Amazing detail for something so small. LEGO has become good at printing on minifigs and they are taking advantage of that. Glad I don't feel a need to own all minifigs. That would be a costly and disappointing road to travel. The arms remind me of the old minifigs. I have picked up a few of those in various colors to have. They are relatively cheap 10-20 cents. The Hogwarts microfigs run about 75 cents to 3 bucks on Bricklink. Glad I picked them up. Even if I don't play the game I can use the figs for something. You never know what tomorrow will bring.
