I got this set when it came out last year, and still have it intact on my desk. As a MOCer, I think that right off the bat says something about the quality of this set. Apologies in advance for the dark photos.

Box/Instructions

The box is standard fare, although it is much wider than it is high for a set at this price point. The instructions and stickers are loose inside the box. Also inside are 4 numbered bags, and a pair of wings in their own sealed packet. Mine came a little bent, but the cloth is soft (I think it might be the same as the type used for the new capes), so there was/is no obvious damage to them.

Interesting Parts

As is typical with Skybound sets, this one comes with a whole lot of interesting, unique, and rare parts. I think this time I'll let the pictures speak for themselves. I will at least say that the tassel piece is very, very nice and, that this is the first set I've seen with bigfig arms not on a bigfig.

The Build

The build is split into 3 parts: the catapult, the tower and the bit of landscaping it sits on, and the dragon itself. The first 2 are fairly simple and not particularly interesting - the tower especially. It is laughably small compared to everything else in the set, including the catapult, which stands at about the same height as the tower. The dragon of course absolutely dwarfs it. Honestly I'm not sure why it's even included. The Vikings theme covered similar subject matter like in 7021 without any sort of structures, and did so very successfully. The longer I have this set displayed on my desk, the more superfluous the tower feels.

But the dragon. Let's talk about the dragon. This was easily one of the most satisfying build experiences I've had in a while with an official set. There are all sorts of ingenious techniques and parts usages, like the beautifully detailed head and bigfig arms which I'm assuming are meant to be some sort of shoulder muscle. The tails are a bit monotonous with all the Mixels joints, but they go fast so don't detract much from the overall experience.

Overall Opinion

This has to be one of my favorite sets of 2016, if not of all time. The details are well done and the build is loaded with interesting techniques. I still think the tower is unnecessary, though I'm not sure what the parts could have been used for - maybe a more substantial tail for the dragon. The legs feel a little big compared to the body (they look better than in the official image), and the use of the A-frame for them is a bit strange, and the tails likewise feel too short, but all things considered these are minor issues. For the price this is a fantastic offering, and it's even better considering the discounts you can get from Amazon or Bricklink. Definitely recommend this set.

Picked up this set to finish off the first wave of Skybound (minus a couple very evasive polybags). Before buying/building this set, I thought I was getting it just to complete the theme. Now that I've finished it, I think it's a much stronger set in person than in pictures, as is usually the case.

Box/Instructions

The contents of the box are pretty straightforward, with 4 bags (numbered 1-4), Dogshank in her own separate bag, a small sticker sheet and a single (thankfully) instruction booklet.

Parts

This set is a treasure trove of rare/interesting parts that are not clearly included from the main pictures. The tan 2x4 tile is covered with a sticker that appears to be instructions for defending against the Tiger Widow. The tan prickly bush on the palm tree is only in one other set (Samurai X Cave Chaos); Dogshank is unique to this set; The dark brown tentacle/palm tree trunk is only in one other set (Temple of Airjitzu); the dark brown 2x2 round pillar bricks are also only in that set and this one; dark brown lightsaber handles in 2 others; green whip in this set and Jokerland; the dark green triangular sign in this set and Kanan's Speeder Bike; the medium blue corner plates only in this set and Heartlake Private Jet; dark flesh minifig heads unique to this set; the dark red claw and the Lloyd Djinn blade each only in other set; sand green 1x1 plate w/ clip only in 2 other sets; pearl gold pan in 2 other sets; pearl gold minifig head in 2 other sets; the list goes on. In total there's at least 15 pieces here that can only be found in 4 or fewer other sets. Asajj Ventress' lightsaber handles also appear here - Tiger Widow Island is the only non-SW set to include them.

So yeah, this set is a pretty fantastic way to get a lot of pieces that only show up in much pricier sets.

Minifigures

Dogshank is my first bigfig, and man, these guys are gigantic. I'm not sure how helpful Sensei Wu's coconuts will be in taking her down. Dogshank's anchor weapon is a little messy; replacing the hammer with a normal bar and removing the dark tan tooth should clean it up a little.

Dogshank also comes with two brickbuilt flags that are attached to her back. I think these stick out a little bit too much, but from the front it is not noticeable at all.

Nya also makes an appearance here in a new outfit, different from the one in Ninja Bike Chase. Nya on the left is from the latter set; the Nya on the right is included in this one. The right Nya makes another appearance in Lighthouse Siege, but the next set to include her, Samurai X Cave Chaos, returns to the design on the left. I'm guessing there's a story element for these changes. Whatever the reason for the two designs, I personally like the one on the right a lot better. Her head is the same on both.

The build

This build was a lot of fun, due to a number of ingenious techniques. The first involved some inverted building via technic parts to construct Sensei Wu's balloon. The mini island with the palm tree is built on a drill piece, which again involved technic to create a stable, yet very good looking structure. The new A-frames are used in the main island to create the angled base for the main structure. The main structure uses some sort of technic pneumatic piece and megaphones to create smaller and smaller pillars. My only real complaint is the Tiger Widow. Not to be pedantic, but the spider should have 8 legs, and only has 6 here. Its head also just looks really strange. The use of the pearl gold piece for its jaws doesn't really work very well. The abdomen, though, uses a samurai helmet very well to create an organic, round shape.

The completed model

As you can see from the lighting above, I had some trouble fitting this in my photo setup. The island is much larger than I expected; overall, the whole build feels like a scaled down City of Stiix from the previous wave. Dogshank is too big to go anywhere on the set other than the floor, which must make for an interesting game of hot lava monster. Without flags, Dogshank can almost fit in the cave beneath the temple, to give you an idea of scale. Speaking of the cave...the stone statue face thing looks suitably menacing, using pearl gold wings very effectively to create eyes. There is a lever in the back that you can open and close the jaws with which is fun to play with.

There's not much of an interior. The bicorne hat + mustache combination makes an appearance here again; not sure if that is some sort of running joke in the show. The round tile on the left is stickered with a map; I left the right one blank, as mentioned earlier. The lantern is a speckled trans-green cone, which looks very good. Even better, the lantern is balanced on a bar between some cheese wedges, enabling it to swing, and just adding a lot of life to the interior in general. For the price I think the interior could have been a little larger, especially with the building occupying such a prominent place on the island.

Overall opinion

The set in its entirety, with a veritable army of extra pieces. In the end, I'm really happy with this set. It looks fantastic, and I appreciate the use of medium azure and palm leaves to give the island a tropical feel. Really my only major gripes are the design of the spider, and how difficult it is to pose Sqiffy's glider or Sensei Wu's balloon due to a lack of attachment points. The island itself fits very nicely with the rest of the Ninjago sets, and provides some sort of base or defense against the overwhelming number of pirate forces. If you're looking for a nice display piece, or a whole lot of useful and rare parts, this is definitely a set you should consider.

Sorry for the pun.

I'm just going to say this right now: this set is one of the best, aesthetically, ever made by LEGO.

Box/Instructions

Nothing special here. The set comes in one of the longer boxes that has become the norm for sets at this price point.

Parts

The first thing I noticed before buying this set was the new balloon pieces, here in dark orange and unique to this set in that color. The balloon is the perfect color for steampunk MOC's, normal hot air balloons, or just MOC's in general.

In the box there are 2 plastic flags (1 extra) packed with the instructions; for whatever reason, Misfortune's Keep only comes with 1.

The Djinn blade included is Jay's (or contains Jay?).

There are a number of useful white pieces used in constructing Zane's speeder and the skull on the bow of the zeppelin. There is also a sticker for a 2x4 black tile with control panel designs. And, like almost every other pirate vehicle in this subtheme, the wings are mounted with anchors.

Minifigures

This is the only set in the first wave of Skybound with Clancee and Doubloon, the two pirates included. Doubloon will appear again in the Green NRG Dragon, and Clancee in the Lighthouse Siege. Both of them look fantastic, especially Doubloon with the samurai-esque printing on his head. His head is double-sided, but the other side is just an upside down version of the front...not sure if this is an error or intentional. Clancee has a snake head that is much more simply molded than some of the stranger snake characters that has appeared in this theme. As a result, it doesn't look nearly as ridiculous as some of the latter characters. Clancee also comes equipped with a broom. I'm not sure what good that would do in a fight...

Right now it looks like Zane in his Skybound outfit is unique to this set. He has a pearl silver head, one with a plain face and the other with some sort of blue HUD covering it.

The build

Zane's speeder is a very quick build, probably under 30 pieces, but is still fun to make. The use of Ninjago spinners as wings/propellers looks great. I don't really like where the stud shooters are, though. I moved them to the bar on the bottom and added spears where they originally were, for a more swooshy look.

The zeppelin is a lot of fun to build, and it is a good mix of unavoidable, repetitive parts and more interesting parts, like building a certain play function and making the balloon. The balloon and the awning over the computer consoles on the back make for a nice switch from system to Technic building techniques, and finishing touches on the zeppelin bring it back to system. The highlight of this build was definitely either making the skull at the front, or mounting the balloon. One thing about the balloon: to make a complete one, you need 8 of the new balloon pieces. This one has 7. The reason being, the bottom one is left out to make room for the technic beams used to attach the balloon to the hull of the ship. It's unavoidable, as there's no other way to mount the balloon at this angle, but it does mean you can't make a complete balloon later if you wanted to.

The completed model

When finished, the zeppelin looks so. Darn. Good. With a few SNOT modifications and color tidying for the hull, I might easily have mistaken this for a build by an expert MOCer. It is surprisingly light for its size, and is one of the most swooshable ships I've ever built. The colors chosen are just perfect. There is a little bit of inconsistency in the hull, but most of this is covered with details like the skeletal arms and the bracket-mounted wings. There are 4 stud shooters on the deck of the ship and 1 brick-shooting cannon, as well as 2 more stud shooters on Zane's speeder.

The last play feature is the bombing function. There is a tile in the center of the ship where a barrel with dynamite fits very snugly. This tile is actually the top of a long 2 x something plate that pokes out just 1 stud in the back. By pulling this part in the back, you can create a hole where the dynamite is, allowing it to fall. It is a lot of fun to play with, and I only stopped to avoid damaging the barrel/dynamite pieces.

Overall opinion

So yeah, this is one of my favorite sets. It fits perfectly into my growing Skybound display, but even on its own is a stunning model. It captures the steampunk aesthetic perfectly, and does so at a reasonable price. It is actually pretty big for the price point, and at just about 300 pieces (I'm including extras), it fits the "golden ratio" of 10c / piece almost perfectly. If I see these on sale, I might even pick up a couple more to make a little fleet. It's that good.

The title summarizes the weirdest part of this set: the ninjas are mostly going into battle on dragons and flying backpack things, and the pirates on airships and other cool flying stuff. And here we have Kai and Nya on bikes. Hmm.

Box/Instructions

The contents of the box:

The first thing that jumped out to me was the presence of 2 instruction booklets. This is a $20 set. The first one corresponds with bag one and builds Sqiffy's jetpack thing and Kai's bike, and the second bag/booklet builds Nya's bike. It just feels excessive. I don't care, really, but it seems like this all could have fit in a single instruction booklet.

Parts

TLG has made so many different kinds of wheels now that I honestly have no idea what kind these are. They're big, though. The tires are extremely thin; the thinnest I've ever seen. Some other parts that aren't immediately obvious in official pics are the black bowl piece (cheapest set to get one), reddish brown fez (also in Airjitzu Kai Flyer if you want a cheaper way to get one), and those two dark bley technic pieces which are new to me. There are a number of dark red slopes, 7 of the new studs with holes (5 in light bley, 2 in dark red), 6 dark bley angled flags, 2 pearl gold exhaust pipes, and somewhere near a million pearl gold katanas. Ok, 7. I thought they were hard to find until I started buying Ninjago sets. Goodness, they're everywhere. A low 4 for parts, since there are some surprises, but this isn't really "parts pack" level stuff, especially considering Kai and Nya's bikes use different wheels/tires, making it harder to re-use them in other vehicles.

Minifigures

This set comes with Sqiffy, who always seems to have a glider of some sort, and Nya and Kai in their Skybound outfits. Fun fact: Kai has already appeared 4 times in Skybound sets. I'm getting the impression he's important. Sqiffy comes with a transparent 1x2 neck bracket for mounting the glider.

The build

There isn't really too much unexpected stuff here. The technic construction on the outside of Kai's bike is reminiscent of the bike in Swamp Raid. I'm impressed with the amount of construction made possible with brackets, but TLG has been using them a lot recently, so that has definitely dampened these techniques' "impressiveness", if possible. A solid 3, as there was some interesting sideways building on Sqiffy's glider made possible with clips and hinges.

The completed model

I honestly got this set just to bring me 231 bricks closer to finishing off Skybound. Now that I've finished building it, I'm happy I got it, and not just because I'm a completionist. I'm big on sets "feeling" like they are worth the cost (pretty arbitrary), and this one definitely feels like $20. There's a lot of playability possible, with 3 bikes and a glider. Sqiffy also comes with 2 bombs (there's enough extra parts for 1 more) that he can lob at Kai and Nya, which is a lot of fun. Unfortunately, there is no built-in function for this...but there are bigger problems.

It's Nya's bike. I just think it looks ridiculous. Kai's bike had a beefy, intense feel to it. This one is just all over the place. I think the problem is that the sides look very unfinished, as you can see in the photo above. Katanas just don't cut it (ha) as vehicle-building materials. I like the thing on top just for the pearl gold exhaust pipes. I guess they're guns, since they raise up and down, but it honestly just looks so strange. Thankfully, the bike looks darn awesome from the front and back, where the side issues aren't noticeable. The stacked dark bley fins look fantastic from any angle, and create a really neat effect that I might have to copy in my MOC's.

Another thing about Nya's bike is that the wheels shift side to side. Now, recently, I've been making a lot of mistakes building official models - skipping steps, etc. I even rebuilt this bike once due to misplacing a key plate in the center. But the wheels on Nya's bike definitely shift in their axle, no matter how I build it. The wheel just isn't wide enough to fill the space. One of those always-useful bushes will fit in there and probably solve the problem, but it seems like a strange oversight by TLG.

Now we come to Sqiffy's glider, and another problem. First off, I love the way this looks. The combination of the black bowl and fez mentioned earlier make for a great engine-esque detail at the bottom of the glider, and just the general shaping of the wings and dart pieces looks great. That's not where the problem is. The problem's the bombs. The container in the back holds one bomb comfortably, and will just barely balance another one on top. But, since they are made from ball joints and flame pieces, there is no way for our poor pirate Sqiffy to hold and lob them. Of course, this is pretty minor, but it really hurts the playability of the model not having some way to toss bombs at those pesky ninjas.

Overall opinion

Here's an obligatory shot of the set plus extra parts. Also, if you think it looks plain, it's probably because I usually don't use stickers.

So...should you buy this set?

If you're looking to complete Skybound, as I am, then of course! Otherwise, I'm not so sure. I mean, it's a solid set for $20, but the playability is really hurt by the lack of interaction-ability between bikes and glider, and there really isn't any consistency at all between the two bikes' designs, if that is an issue. I would say the only reason not to get this is that there are better sets to save money for (if that is an issue), or just better sets at this price point. If you're looking for a parts pack, Elves has probably the best value out of any theme right now, and that is probably a better way to spend $20.

All that being said, it's not like "oh, no, I have to buy this to get all the Skybound sets!

It's nice to have. It's just dwarfed by a lot of quality sets out there right now.

The title pretty much sums up all I need to say in this review: FREE. LEGO. But, if you want to know more about this "free LEGO" and see pictures, read on...

Box/Contents

Nothing special here. Typical square box used for $10 sets, with an instruction booklet folded in half and 2 bags inside: 1 for small parts, and 1 for big(ger) parts.

Parts

Goodness this is a good parts pack. It's pretty much everything you can see: pearl gold frogs, yellow-orange bike, lime green inverted dome, grass stalk with 6 branches, etc. The only things you can't really see are the trans-clear neck bracket for mounting the statue's wings, and a 6x6 round medium azure plate on the base of the fountain.

Minifigures

Here's where it starts to get a little ridiculous.

Ok, so the lady has a plain smiley face. Whatever. Her torso with the press nametag comes in 5 other sets, the cheapest of which is $40 (the other options are $50, $60, $150, and $200). Needless to say, if you want this torso and other good pieces, this is easily the best option. She has a cookie and a printed (PRINTED) 2x2 white tile with a newspaper design. Admittedly, this piece appears in 16 other sets, but it is a nice addition regardless. As nice as this fig is, what really impresses me is the statue.

The statue has plain light bley legs, torso, and head; the torso has dark bley hands, which is unfortunate, but it's barely noticeable. The helmet is rare-ish in light bley. What's amazing is that this isn't the only statue you can make. LEGO could have just left it at this knight guy with wings (before I forget; the golden wings are a bit distracting from the bley color scheme). But instead, they included a hairpiece that you can switch out with the helmet and a flag (not pictured) that you can switch out with, or add to, the sword. Fantastic feature, especially for a promotional.

Oh and there's a dog.

The build

Not much here.

Overall opinion

Since this is a free set, the criteria of value and all that changes a little bit. It's obviously not "value for money". IMHO, it becomes "does it justify spending $75?" The answer?

Yes. Absolutely, yes. It is worth it. The above picture shows the set in its entirety, plus 6 extras. I would spend $15 on this as a normal set, just for all the rare parts and pretty colors, but for free? :)