Set Review - Puppy's Playhouse 41025

As we roll on through the Friends Series 3 Animal sets, I want to take another moment and thank varko.cz for their incredible service in getting six sets to me in a timely and affordable manner.  There's been a slight benefit to receiving my sets from Europe.  The packaging.  None of the Friends polybags have had the set name on them.  "Series 3" is noted in five different languages (4 of which spell "Série 3" the same).  But of greater note is the back of the polybag which has all sorts of death warnings in no less than 29 languages.  For a linguist, this is fascinating.

At first glance I was disappointed.  We JUST had another dog in Series 2.  And not just any dog but a poodle!  This set is sort of a step backwards.  This mutt's littermate also showed up in Stephanie's Soccer Practice so it's not like there's a new mold or anything.  I wasn't holding out high hopes.

There are three and a half parts to the build.  First you place a bow on the dog.  Then you place a bone in the dish.  Then you build a catapult.  Finally you build the target, Puppy's Playhouse.  Reminds me too much of Peewee's Playhouse.  I'm not sure what's playful about the house.  Maybe it's supposed to be different from his sleeping house and eating house.  After all, he only gets a bone, not any chow or kibbles.  I ran the build like a draft again where each of my three kids got to choose a single part at a time.  One child kept going after plates, one tried to make sure she had duplicates of every single part, and the third one didn't seem to have much rhyme or reason to her selections.

Instead of diving directly for the instructions though, I had them show off their building skills.  They spent a couple of minutes building and then had to tell me what they had.  First was a bone station.  Dogs could come here to get bones, obviously.  Second was a flower shop run by the dog itself.  Interesting but cute.  Third was my 2 year old boy who stacked a bunch of parts on the largest plate and then stuck the plate in the middle of it.  I swear his older sister helped when I wasn't looking but she swears she didn't.  I was pretty impressed.


Then we got around to the build.  There was a little confusion and complaining but they got it worked out.  Whoever had the parts for that instruction step got to put them on.  After we were done I showed the kids how to use the "teeter-totter" in direct opposition to the 'no cannonballs in your eye' symbol.  In fact my oldest was completely oblivious to the slash mark going through it and picked up the small build proclaiming, "this is the cannon-shooter!"  Good girl.

Overall I was slightly underimpressed.  The build is a little blah and the species reboot is too soon. We do get the 3x3 plate in bright pink and the dog in tan.  Everything else is already existing AFAIK.  What I did notice was that there is a nice abundance of 1x3 white bricks, medium dark flesh brick bricks, and tan parts.  Oh, and medium lavender roof slopes.  What I'm really disappointed in is the lack of solutions for topping off a 3x swath for a roof.  We get an inverted version, but it's mirrored topside cousin would be fantastic.

If you can deal with a dozen dogs and durn near 50 medium lavender slopes (a color I have yet to see on any real life roof) then this is a nice parts pack.  On sale.  At 39 pieces plus 5 extra the price point is 11c per piece, 12c with 8% sales tax.  At this very moment however, you can purchase it direct from The LEGO Company for $3.98 which is more reasonable.  Somehow it's already sold out but I have to wonder if they'll be producing more soon.  Try your luck by clicking on the image below: