#55 of 365 Lego 10193 Medieval Market Village

Nick said to open a Lego set for today. I had the choice today between something easy, and something really complicated. I chose the complicated set. This note is written almost 6 hours later after opening the set - I've been building it in the meantime. Phew.

This set is a Lego exclusive set. Definately not available outside of Lego stores. I ordered this from shop.lego.com and it arrived together with Faker (or was it Man-At-Arms?), but have held off opening this because of the time it would take to actually build it. Well, I wasn't mistaken. The set has 1601+ pieces in the box and boy, it's probably one of the sets with the most tiny parts.

Opening the box heralded a surprise. I've been so used to numbered bags for such a long time that when I first saw these bags, I thought there were some sort of mistake. Nope, no mistake there. No numbers on the bags. Well, one has to wonder why Lego decided to harken back to the old days. Perhaps its the set theme? Anyways, being a seasoned veteran of unnumbered bags, I wasn't too bothered and reverted to the system I had before the advent of numbered bags.

I like the bag with the two cows and their horns. I thought that was a nice touch that these cows had their own bags. The decal sheet is surprisingly skimpy, but that's a good thing. I had a look at the images and wondered if I'll apply them at all. Well, I did apply all of the decals to the model because they were so tastefully done.

There are two female minifigs in the set, or 25% of the minifig population. That's not too bad for Castle sets I guess.

I didn't take many pictures during the build. It was taxing enough trying to put the model together in good time. Unlike sets of old, it was hard telling apart dark grey and black in the instructions, as well as between tan and beige. There's also brown and dark brown, but thankfully those were few and far in between. I think this is the first time I've seen significant amounts of dark brown in a set.

And that's the build 5+ hours later. Phew. It's pretty nice though, but somehow, this could have been made into an entire line of smaller sets. Unlike City Corner though, I have no complaints that everything is in one big box for this, as each model seems to segue together rather nicely to form a complete whole. As usual, there are some more pictures in the photo album.