This year, Lego has gone full ornamental with CNY sets, coming out with two playsets that serve as the perfect home decorations. — Photos: The Lego Group
Welcome to the Toy Box, an occasional online exclusive column where we take a look at the latest in toys and collectibles out there.
Since it is officially the Year of the Snake, now is as good a time to finally take a look at Lego’s latest Chinese New Year festive sets.
But first, a bit of history. The toy company started making CNY festive sets back in 2019, with playsets that depicted typical CNY traditional settings like the Reunion Dinner and Dragon Dance, then the Lion Dance and Temple Festival sets the following year.
Somewhere along the way, they must have realised that people were using these sets as decorations for their homes during CNY, and began adding more ornamental and decorative sets, like the Lunar New Year Traditions set in 2022, 2023’s Lunar New Year Display, and last year’s elaborate Auspicious Dragon set.
However, these sets were still accompanied by another bigger set that depicted traditional CNY occasions and events, like a Lunar New Year Parade, and another reunion dinner complete with an entire restaurant building in 2024.
This year, Lego has gone full ornamental with CNY sets, coming out with two playsets that serve as the perfect home decorations not just for CNY, but are suitable for display all year round as well – Trotting Lantern and Good Fortune.
Here are a few thoughts I had after building the two sets.
The set makes for a pretty nice display for the home, whether during CNY or otherwise.
The first set comprises a few items representing symbols of good fortune.
These include a fan decorated with two magpies, a vase of fortune red fruit, a persimmon fruit, three golden ingots and a calligraphy pen with a scroll.
This is a pretty timeless set - all the items can be detached from the base so you don’t have to stick with just one display option, and makes it easy to store for the next CNY.
The Good Fortune set makes for a pretty good school holiday activity as well.
The fan even has two designs (both with instructions), so you can switch them out when you want to change the colour and the look of it.
The build itself is meant for kids over nine years old, and is fairly simple – my 10yo daughter actually finished building it in just under two hours, which makes this a pretty good school holiday activity as well!
The Trotting Lantern set is a great decoration that doubles as a fun playset.
The Trotting Lantern is also for ages 9 and above, but is slightly more complicated than the Good Fortune set. Though it is still a relatively simple build compared to many adult-oriented sets, I still took roughly three hours building it solo.
It IS a beautifully designed set though. It has two tiers - the bottom tier has a rotating light-up feature that displays one of two silhouettes onto the lantern’s windows.
The removable top tier is the fun part. It opens up to reveal three festive scenes – a food stall, a decorations stall and a shadow puppet theater.
The upper tier of the lantern opens up and can be removed for the kids to play with.
The set also includes minifigures of two adult and two children, and also one in a Year Of The Snake costume, which is one of the constants of Lego’s CNY sets since the very beginning.
Personally, I thought the Trotting Lantern is one of the more innovative CNY sets yet, as it serves several functions. You can choose to display it as a purely ornamental display in its closed lantern mode, or remove the upper tier to let the kids play with the scenes. It’s a neat way to incorporate the traditional festive scenes of yesteryear sets into an ornamental set.
