I picked up one of the nanoblock Neuschwanstein Castle sets. It's $14.99 and it has about 550 parts. It took a while to build, nearly an hour, but I thought it looked nice when it was done. It's just so small, and some of the other sets are even smaller. I feel like I could accidentally swallow one. Ok, maybe not the castle, but one of the small animals. Doesn't that pig look great. Well, maybe not good enough to eat, but, in my defense, it does look like a PEEP. Luckily they didn't have those at the TRU in Bloomington when I got the castle set and I was saved. One of the guys in TwinLUG, Chris, lives in Des Moines and he said there were more sets in his TRU. If they sell well, the stores here might have more sets in stock to pick from. Here's a nice shot of the real castle and a pic of one of the project drawings by Christian Jank from 1869. That's pretty sweet, huh. Looks like a magical place. think of the magic with brick the colors in that drawing.
I liked the colors of the bricks in the set. Lots of white, sure but there's some nice dark blue, some gray, some green, some brown and some tan. However the pieces 
are so frigging small that had a hard time picking them up and puttiing together, especially when it got down to the huge number of 1x1 bricks. I bet more than 2/3 of the set is either square or round 1x1 parts. I had to use my stamp tongs. I use a Showgard 902. It's great for picking up super small parts. I don't use them for stamps as much as I use them to hold small pieces and to put them in place. I've already been using them for this purpose with LEGO pieces for several years. Some of those small 1x1 plates and the like are much easier to pick up with a smaller set of fingers. I use them to snag small accessories when sorting through those pieces.
Some where during the time it took to put the set together I got to thinking aobut how it might be fun to build the set but replace the nanoblocks with regualr size LEGO blocks. I used one for one. Here's that below.
The LEGO version sure looks all stretched out doesn't it. Both the sets are built on a 20x20 base. The nano blocks and the LEGO blocks aren't the exact same ratio. Without actually measuring the pieces I thought that the side to side measurement of the bricks was fairly close. Height wise, the scale is off. If I change 1 nanoblock high to 2 stacked plates then it might work better and and not look like someone stretched the picture in Photoshop. Mind you I've gotten used to the shape and I am thinking of adapting that to a Micropolis building.
Normally I won't plug Toysrus but they are the only ones carrying these sets in the USA. You can get them for a larger price from imports of the Japanese sets. I do think the nanoblocks deluxe version of Neuschwanstein Castle is much better than the small version. It looks close to the real thing. There's some shots below. Makes a nice display model, huh. It was over $300 on ebay when I looked a couple of weeks ago, so I'm not rushing to get one. I'll probably pick up a set or two of the cheaper nanoblocks. Maybe I'll even build somethign with them. For now it's nice enough to have as a decoration. For some more coverage on nanoblocks check out Ocre Jelly's blog The Living Brick.
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