Set Review ➟ LEGO® 76392 Hogwarts Wizard’s Chess
This time we are going to talk about the Hogwarts magic chess set. This scene appears in the Philosopher’s Stone film. When I heard about this set I automatically remembered it, it’s the one where Ron finally succeeds in winning the game. I liked this scene because when I was a teenager I played chess as a hobby for a few years and despite the fact that in the film few moves were shown for obvious reasons, the position of the game was real. Personally this game is one of the best games in the world if not the best.
The set comes with 876 pieces, 4 minifigures, one of them is the special one of Professor Snape in gold with the torso on the back printed with “20 years Lego Harry Potter” and is priced at €69.99 on the Lego website. It also comes with 3 random, screen-printed tiles of magic cards. At the end of the construction manual you can see the 16 possible tiles to collect, and by the way, the image of Rowena Ravenclaw’s tile appears with the image of Garrick Olivander, which I guess is a printing error in the manual.
Back to the scene, you can remember it here:
In Hogwarts Magic Chess the eating pieces break the eaten pieces, they literally destroy them, so we could even emulate that with this Lego chess set by taking them apart. Let’s start with the review of the set. Here is the front of the box, you can see the Harry Potter 20 years commemoration logo.
The contents of the set are 5 numbered bags with only number 1 being repeated, plus two bags containing basically some white 1x16 bricks and some black and light grey 2x16 plates. Lego could have saved at least one bag in these unnumbered bags, but I guess they are internal operations that will be complex to solve.
The construction starts with the chessboard by making some repetitive conjunctions of pieces. The result is a firm base, although at first glance it seems flimsy and easy to dismantle, but it is not. You can take the board from one corner perfectly and it does not come apart. Next comes the tiling of the structure, undoubtedly the most tedious part of the construction, and then the detail of the fires around the board. Let’s take a look at this in more detail with some pictures. In the second image you can see a detail with a pair of tyres. They serve to prevent the board from sliding easily. A priori they are flush with the rest of the pieces and it seems that they won’t do their job properly. On the contrary, if the tyres are removed, the base moves much more than without them. This is necessary and, in my opinion, effective.
The way the structure is conceived and as can be seen in this last picture, it makes it impossible to have placed a jumper in the centre of each square to ensure that the piece occupying it cannot move from the board, thus avoiding the danger of endangering the game with any sudden movement of the piece. This would have been an interesting plus in the set. I guess it didn’t make sense to put 4 16x16 plates in the board structure and change those 2x4 tiles for jumpers in the centre and surround them with 1x2 tiles. The truth is that personally I would have preferred a board like in the 40174 set, which although less aesthetic for not being smooth, it does have a greater functionality in this sense. Those of us who have played chess for fun have at some time suffered some sudden movement of the board and.... well... sometimes it can be difficult to recover the game :|. I guess to emulate the scene and play with it and to have a nice addition to our Harry Potter set collection, it’s more than enough. Either way the board is pretty cool.
After the board we will build the pieces, which in this case will be the black ones and not as I expected the white ones to be. You know, white plays first. Also here it will be a repetitive construction except for the most important pieces, the king and the queen. Perhaps of all the pieces together I like the pawn the most. I also liked to see that the shape of the king and queen are clearly masculine and feminine :).
At first I had my doubts whether each of the figures on the board would be recognisable when I saw their shape on the outside of the box, but once built and at a glance comparing them with those in the film scene I think the result is well achieved for so few pieces used. An improvement with respect to the pieces would have been to change the colour of some of the figures, such as the bishops, to plate round 1x1 with open stud (ref: 85861 in bricklink.com), as the light grey is perfectly visible and the black and white could have been used, leaving the colour of the piece uniform.
All in all this is a set that emulates the scene from the film with a good level of detail, it is perfectly playable as it is a spacious board and each piece can be picked up well.
Here we can see in detail the front of the minifigures of Ron, Hermione, Harry and of course Professor Snape in gold as well as the tiles printed on this box.
As always, we thank LEGO for making the set available for review. The opinions expressed in this article are ours alone and LEGO neither endorses nor supports them in any way.
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