Alternative builds: LEGO Harry Potter – Build your own Adventure book

Having been exposed to COVID-19, I had to self isolate. While overseas and far away from all the sets I’ve still got to review, luckily I had packed the rather excellent LEGO Harry Potter – Build your own Adventure book, which I reviewed the other day. It had a small selection of parts, which I in my boredom of isolation soon tried to use for alternative builds. Here is what I did…

Already a few days into my isolation, I felt bored watching television. So I disassembled the latest model I built for my book review and tried to come up with something else using just those bricks.

Troll

The first thing I tried was building a troll. I didn’t get that far before I realised building a full troll figure with the parts available would be difficult, so I focused on the head instead. It did look a bit troll-like, but I wasn’t that impressed. It got packed away as I started feeling unwell.

Harry’s four poster bed

I was following advised I had COVID-19. It didn’t came as a surprise, as I was rather unwell for a couple days. Didn’t feel like doing much, but did build this four poster bed for Harry. He looks sick as well.

It is built upside down as I wanted the 1x2x2 slope to represent the curtains of the four-poster. It worked out reasonably well.

Hogsmeade skyline

While getting better – I started looking into other potential builds. I felt the 1x2x2 slopes would be perfect to create the skyline of the houses in Hogsmeade. Not sure the result was as impressive as hoped though, but I like the idea of using the book as a door.

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Soon after I had finished the model, I saw the new LEGO Winter Village model had been revealed. The Elf Club House. It begs being used to recreate a Hogsmeade house given the roof construction (as discussed here). So that’s another project added to the to-do list, when I return back home.

Dumbledore’s lectern

The final model is the one I like the most. It is a larger (i.e. not minifigure scale) model of Dumbledore’s lectern, and I used almost all the pieces for this one, with only a handful remaining unused.

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The lectern features an owl with spread out wings, with candles held at either wing tip. It all stands on a narrow swirly base. Ideally it should have had more candles, but only two came with the book.

A neat little minifigure-sized version is actually suggested in the Build your own Adventure book, along with many other amazing models.

For comparison, here is Dumbledore standing behind his lectern at Hogwarts.

I hope you’ve enjoyed these small models. It is an interesting challenge to build things with limited supply of bricks, and you often get some great ideas of innovative part usage.

Having now fully recovered, I can hopefully get on my flight back tomorrow so I can start reviewing more of the 2020 LEGO Harry Potter sets.

Till then, Build the Magic!