Number: 6076

Name; Dark Dragon's Den

Theme: Castle

Subtheme: Dragon Masters

Year:

Minifigs: 4 (plus a dragon)

Pieces: 206

Price $43 (US)

Parts:

No picture of the parts for two reasons, first, I had a problem with a memmory card, but also I did have to substitute quite a few colors

http://www.bricklink.com/catalogItemInv.asp?S=6076-1

Here's the inventory. Five large rock pieces, Two castle turret pieces, a spiral staircase and quite a few tree pieces. Normally this type of thing drives me crazy. Here, I'm ok with it. The way I see it is that even if there is something you don't like, there is also something you love. Also, before building the thing, I realized that the two hated castle turret pieces can be combined into a spiral shape, and it would be perfect to do that on top of the staircase.

People:

A great variety of people and weapons. Not pictured is the dragon and I just realized that all the helm ornaments should be red....oops! They look a little dated today, but these a very good minifigs for their era.

Build:

Sigh, this is where it gets really bad, I don't have a lot of good things to say here so I'll start with the bad. The mix of black, light grey and dark grey is muddled. As an example, the stairs start off ligth grey and then merge into the black spiral staircase. The tower is completely weird, but the absolute worst thing about it is how confusing the instructions are. It has no parts list (except for the first step) and the rock pieces and the trees block your view of further steps. I KNOW I didn't build this correctly, but I have no idea where some of the pieces go.

Now, the good features. The back of the structure actually has some finished parts. The cave of the dragon has a door on the front and the back. There is also a side cave with a secret door and access to the main cave. The partially finished back is waht is going to make this hard to judge. It has terrible features, and then this one nice feature which is almost never seen.

MVP: Most valuable Piece

Brown Brick, Arch 1 x 5 x 4

Allthough not exactly rare, this piece was only in brwn in 10 sets...all of which came out in my dark ages, so I am very happy to have 6 of them now. Also this piece in this color can be used in a lot of different settings. Trees, wooden buildings, caves etc.

Conclusion:

Parts: 9/10 For me 10/10, but I figure that on average some people don't like rocks, most people don't like turrets & staircases and few people don't like trees.

People: 10/10

Build: Normally I give a perfect score and downgrade from there. Here I'm going with my gut 5/10

Playability: 10/10 Very easy to imagine a variety of scenarios for this set. Sieges, theives, dragon hunting/trapping, etc

Price: 4.7/10 I was expecting something low with all those large pieces, but 4.7! I expect that $30 would be a fair peice for this set, but $43 is ridiculous

Overall: 77.4%

My den! It's a pretty bad set, no denying that. It has a great name though!

This set marked the beginning of my dark ages. Pretty terrible.

The review is good, but it is a horrible set... Even for the time (I do love 90's castle lego, but I am careful not to mix old with new parts. I like new castle sets much more than old ones, although Fright Knights might be my favourite series...) :) I only have a few Dragon Master knights however, since that was before my time (I was born in '93).

It's by no means pretty, but it sure is a lotta fun to play with! Which is, in the end, the point.

Too bad it had so many BURPs.

~Dwarf

Could you take more pictures? I think 1 picture of the main model and no pictures of dragon... It's just lazy :P

About the set? Great Piece pack! :D

Edited January 29, 201312 yr by Lordofdragonss

Could you take more pictures? I think 1 picture of the main model and no pictures of dragon... It's just lazy :P

About the set? Great Piece pack! :D

Part of the problem is that the original pics were lost due to a memmory card problem. After it was built, I relized that if I took too many pictures, I would give the wrong impression due to missing pieces, color substitutions and building errors from teh horrible instructions.

I'll take some more pics and put them on my brickshelf file, but I won't post them. Even a terrible set needs to be treated fairly.

http://www.brickshelf.com/cgi-bin/gallery.cgi?m=Jareth

My original thought was that it was a good parts pack. If you had four of them, you would have enought parts to build a decent mountain, a grove of trees, the start to four great towers and enough minifig parts to jazz up an existing army. But at $43 it's just too expensive.

When this set came out and a friend owned It, I thought It was a cool set. Now looking back at It in the present, I'm glad I saved up money to buy the Fire Breathing Fortress back then.