Set Review ➟41062 Elsa’s Sparkling Palace
With two Young girls in the house singing “Let it go” at every opportunity, the LEGO rendering of their favourite Disney story simply had to end up in our house. It took a lot of restraint on my part not to build the set myself, but we had a great building session all together and although I didn’t get to build anything I had my hands full as supreme brick finder and instruction page turner.
The box for this set felt a lot smaller than I had anticipated, but size isn’t the same as quality and since this is a licenced set the price/size ratio was likely to be less favourable than that of other sets. Since the two intended builders have very different ages (4 and 8) and very different skill levels, I split the set up into the main build (Elsa’s palace) and the complements. The set contains two instruction booklets, but both my builders needed book 1 at the same time so one used the paper version and the other used the digital version. The experience met with mixed feeling – good on the one hand because each one could build at their own speed, but on the other hand the colours shown in the digital version are sometimes quite different from the parts available in the set, causing some confusion while building.
The complements of this set are rather cute: Olaf the snowman is very well characterised and means the set has 3 minifgs – the other minifigs are of course Ana and Elsa. Elsa is really cool, but my very demanding jury decided her hair was way too short. The cape she wears tends to turn around her neck quite easily and so half the time she wears it like a kind of bib. The sled is a great little detail and the ramp actually works quite well together with the sled. The skates and skis that come with the set allow Ana and Elsa to have lots of fun in the snow. It’s a good thing there is a spare skate, because they are tiny and get lost quite easily.
The palace itself had me puzzled for a while: why are the stairs not secured at the top – the slightest movement will collapse them. Then I had a look at the back of the box and it turns out that is actually a play feature! The kids love it. Elsa arrives at the palace to find a wall of ice and magics the stairs into shape. The kids didn’t like the fact that the only way to get to the top floor of the palace is by flying there. There are no stairs or ladder that lead there, but they quickly built one out of their own LEGO parts – that’s the great thing about LEGO sets: you simply customise anything you don’t like.
Inside the palace there is an ice-cream bar – another favourite of the kids. And the icicles on the tree are also a really nice touch. All in all the set was a big success. Ana and Elsa are now part of the considerable Friends family that lives on their LEGO table, ready to find out what snowmen do in summer…
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