I built Fawn's little forest with my two aforementioned CFOLs, girls aged 5 and 6. This is of course the lower end of the target audience for this set so we're a perfect match. Never mind that the 37 year old dad has OCD regarding collections. The most obvious thing about this set is the new mold for the deer. LEGO calls it Bambi. How sweet. I would hope that soon we will get Friends sets such as Skunk's Attack, Raccoon's Trash Can and an endearing Owl's Catch.
In true Friend's style the orphan cervid has huge doe eyes and something that resembles a partial animal grin. When animals grin it's always hard to tell if they have an itch or if they're getting ready to eat you. The deer has a stance that is very fawn-like. That is to say the legs are very gangly and stick out a bit behind. The fawn can grip onto a 1x2 plate much like your fireplace tongs might grab onto the ends of a flaming log. Should pressure get lax at any point, the gripped piece will certainly fall. In order to give any substance to the legs, they have been built thick enough such that even though it can grip a 1x2 plate, it overhangs all around.
As far as the landscape, some sort of brick-built shrubbery is included. I say shrub because it's too fat to be a tree. Maybe it's an overgrown bonsai. Or possibly krummholz. The instructions are a touch vague due to the angle that the images are set at. At some points my little target audiences weren't quite sure how a piece was supposed to be attached and we had to refer to the poly picture for verification. The other piece of greenery is a leaf with a flower and a dish of berries on it. I'm not sure how many deer would eat out of stoneware but this has all the appearances of an Admiral Ackbar cameo.
The coolest part of the flora is the mushroom built from a cone and printed dish. Not a novel combination but certainly timeless. But even neater than all this are the magenta cherries appearing for the first time since Belville was on clearance. It was dark pink back then - magenta is not excitingly different. These also appear in the Downtown Bakery 41006
. While a reprisal of an old color is kind of cool, I'm really looking forward to these being made in dark blue or maybe purple someday. That's what the picture on the poly would have you believe.In a completely bizarre mashup we built two sets that were involved in some play value together. The Galaxy Squad Mini Mech 30230 was the subject of the second build (stay tuned for next week). Strangely, play leaned towards the sci-fi sort of things with Bambi mounting her shrub ship and fighting epic battles by flinging magenta cherries at the invading space craft. Hilarity ensued.
This set includes 35 pieces + 4 extra. At $4.99 that brings it to over 14c per piece, even more if you live in a sales tax state. But for a set this small, does that really matter? The really worthwhile part of this set is the deer and the mushroom cap. Maybe the magenta cherries. But the mashup play value is over the top.
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