Pieces: 243 Minifigures: 4 Retail Price: $29.99 Price I Paid: $23
December Special! The final Hobbit movie comes out in the middle of the month. Unless Peter Jackson has J.R.R. Tolkein’s body dug up and reanimated to write more books, it should be the last we see of Middle Earth on the big screen for quite awhile. I’m a big fan of the Lego LOTR sets and will attempt to review all of them in the next few weeks. As many of these sets are no longer available, I’m going to use a 1-5 rating system where 3 is average and 5 is excellent.
Going back to a somewhat smaller set, we have the Council of Elrond. A scene from the movie in which the Fellowship (of 9) was formed and here we have a set with 4 minifigures, 2 of which are in the Fellowship. This is a very isolated scene – where Gimli tries to destroy the ring. It would have been really great if that had worked, there would be about 8 hours less of the films. And this set would have gotten the treatment it deserves with all of the minifigures.
The minifigures you do get are Frodo and Gimli who are the same as before but then you get Elrond and Arwen who do not appear in any other sets. They are both quite nice and Elrond has a two color cape (which is then jammed down by his hairpiece). The elven hairpieces are the same, only different colors.
The set is interesting as it has lots of colors you don’t usually see in Lego with the light green and orange red tree leaf pieces. The chairs for the minifigures to sit in are pretty cool but there are only 3 chairs. They also swivel – which is interesting to know they had swivel chairs in Middle Earth.
Anyway for a set that has been on sale for less than $25 for a long time I can’t complain too much about it – but it would have been great to get the full scene. If it somehow went on sale for $15 then maybe I could buy enough sets for the entire Fellowship to have chairs. Of course, first the minifigures in this set would have to be able to sit in the chairs. I think ultimately I have to give this set a score of 3. It is mostly average. It is no longer available on Amazon but still available online through Target – for $22.49 a pretty good deal.