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Hey all,

We haven't discussed it much, but one of the themes upcoming in the new year is Elves. This line will feature minidolls and wild colors, and also lots of interesting new pieces or pieces in new colors. So what do you all think? Will you incorporate these sets into your castle worlds? Or do you see them as completely separate?



Bruce

Oh my, another attempt to cement the gender-gap - something which really should be obsolete by now. Lego is definitely heading into the barbie-direction, which I'm not happy with to say the least.

I'd be much more into them if they were minifig scaled and yellow. I do have my eye on a few that I hope to pick up on discount for parts.

Steve

Interesting, I haven't heard of these. Thanks for posting them, Bruce.

I don't believe there should be "girl LEGO" and "boy LEGO". However, I don't want to carry that discussion into this topic. I just want to say that before proceeding to avoid people mistaking my next comments for genuine enthusiasm.


I buy some Friends and Disney Princess sets; typically on sale. I don't use the figures, but they often contain interesting pieces or uncommon colors. I like having some variety.

Like with the Friends and Disney sets, I will probably buy some of these. In particular, I will probably buy a couple of the Elves Treetop Hideaway. They haven't released any new Forestmen sets since 1996; I'll take what I can get. I'll enjoy the purple and pink foliage parts, and the new fences look nice too. I also like how they used a variety of slopes to create somewhat interesting tree roots, and I like the blue they are using for the water. I also like the hair in Nadia's Epic Adventure Ship.

I would have loved this theme if it used traditional minifigures.

I hadn't heard of these yet either. As with most sets, I see them not for the set that Lego has made, but rather what I can MOC out of the parts in the set. I am excited! I see these sets as having great potential!

I am a huge fan of the Friends Disney Princess line. I have been a rather big fan of the Friends line...for the most part. But for these elves, I am going to reserve my judgment on these sets until I actually see them. But for the most part, they don't really excite me. But that may change in time. For what I have seen, I find a lot of the colors odd. I can tell you that I am glad they are venturing out of the standard friends sets. A lot of them looked quite similar and I heard a lot of comments on "why buy this juice bar? It looks just like the beauty saloon."

Will it have useful parts for castle? Not sure yet.

Some of the parts have potential

TBH, I think these are the least girly of the girl LEGO sets. I mean, I don't know how many boys(by this I mean general public buying LEGO, not FOL s in the community) will be going wild about these, but they seem a wee bit less exclusively girly. That said, as a MOCer FOL, I like the colors of pieces in here, and maybe try to get a set or two.

My LEGO budget is pretty small (and will probably be reserved this year for PIRATES!!! ) so I probably won't pick any of these up. The new colors are interesting though. I think the purple and pink leaf elements would make a really cool fantasy forest and remind me of something out of Avatar or Patrick Rothfuss's "Fae" realm. The figures are cute, but other than maybe being able to reuse some of the headpieces I don't know that I would use them. New parts in new colors is always welcome, I'm sure someone will build some really cool stuff with it and we'll all get to enjoy it.

When these sets were initially announced a while back I had no clue what to expect, and so these don't really excite or disappoint me. There are some great pieces/piece colours (the new tan arches, for example), but overall I'm not too bothered about them. It's also hard to guess if they'll do well or not....

IMO the best/most useful set will be Azari and the Magical Bakery (?!) due to the interesting yet possibly useful purple colour and also the fact that there's rather a lot of tan and bley included.

Overall, I'm not too impressed. That being said, some of the accessories are nice and there are some new parts that look interesting. The increase in the variety of parts available in pastel will probably be welcomed. I do like the design of the boat, though its decoration is not as appealing.

I'll be interested to see what people do with the parts. I can especially see something cool be made using all those purple leaves. Some sort of Avatar type forest or the like. I won't be dashing out to buy them. To be honest 2015 looks like a fairly cheap year for me lego-wise (having seen the other release pictures so far) which is probably a good thing!

Hey,

While I'm less excited about minidolls than I would be about figs, I could see including minidolls as a race of elves in the same world as fig humans, so this could work. Also I like the new elf-ear hair possibilities, though of course these are limited to fleshyfigs.

I know the ship has sailed on this one, but my biggest complaint about minidolls is the neck diameter. I wish they had made these so the heads were interchangeable with figs. I don't think the thicker neck would have hurt the minidoll aesthetics. Oh well.

Speaking of figs, I'm intrigued by the fact that one of the figs in the treetop hideaway does not seem to be an elf. I wonder what the storyline is? Perhaps it's like Epic, where a human gets magically shrunk down into the elf world?

My favorite set is the boat - I really like the shape they've come up with, and I love the sail. I wish the ship weren't such a riot of color, though. I get going with purples or blues or whatever, but I wish they had at least gone with a fairly self-consistent color scheme.

Dark purple leaves seem really interesting for some sort of magical or alien forest (agreed on the Avatar suggestion, also various Star Wars scenes will use these). I'm less interested in the pink, or are they lavendar, ones. Someday I want them to do yellow for Lorien, and of course fall scenes (also more dark orange and dark red, please). I guess we always have AltBricks.

I see lots of brown carrot tops, which is nice, as that has been pretty rare to date. Other interesting inclusions are that newish plant piece (BrickLink calls it "plant grass stem") in tan (I think), that clam shell (is that totally new?), some new printed (hopefully) tiles (particularly the scrolls), new animals, a new railing piece in a couple of different colors.

My biggest design complaint, aside from the inconsistent color schemes, is the way they did "roofs:" in a few of the sets. Rather than have an actual roof, using slopes, or plates attached at an angle, they just threw these two pieces up, attached them with a clip, and then angled them towards each other so that from exactly one angle they look vaguely like the eaves of a roof.

Bruce

That does look like a new clam, like 4x4ish in size rather than 2x2ish in size. Cool.

Taking a look at the buildings, they do all seem to just be building "flats". Could this series be tied in with that new real brick/computer interface? All of those buildings seem to be "flats".

Overall I see lots of potential, too bad the figs are all fleshy...

Frank

I haven't looked at it in detail but it's clearly not what people hope / expected (at least from our AFOL / castle perspective).