Ninjago City (70620) - The Adventure Begins!!

We dug into the set last night and managed to finish Chapter 1 in record time - I think it took us about 1.5 hours. Since this is a new set, the instructions have a red border around each of the new pieces in each step. This made it a lot faster for mom to find the additional pieces and get them in place.

The first thing we built was one of the mini-figs - Kai Garmadon. Never having seen the Ninjago Lego movie, the name really doesn't mean much to us. We re-named the figure Daylin after my sister's fiance. The hair looks a lot like his just after he has woken up and the croissant that he has poised to shove in his mouth is quintessentially Daylin as well.

The first thing we noticed was how compact the build is. The image on the box makes it look quite large and grand but the baseplate that it sits on is no bigger than a regular city module base. From what we can tell though, this building is significantly taller than a regular city building. And in fact, this is backed up with the little history given at the beginning of the instructions. It said that due to crowding issues and lack of real estate, the building had been forced to grow vertically rather than spread horizontally. That is definitely captured well in the set.

Chapter 1 just lays the foundation of the building and there really isn't much to see. The black, dark and light green section to the left looks like it will eventually be the small canal that flow through the area. You can see the lilypads and other water greenery that dot the area.