Many of us might remember doing search and find books (like Where’s Wally), sometime during our childhood. Now there is a LEGO Harry Potter search and find book, but unlike the old days, this time you can be in it too. Thanks to Penwizard, you can now personalise your very own character that will be included on every single spread. You may want one for yourself – or maybe you know of younger wizards and witches who would love a magical experience. This is what you get…
The publisher Penwizard has specialised in producing personalised books, and do so for a number of licenses, including Dora the Explorer and of course LEGO. In this post we will review their LEGO Harry Potter Search-and-Find Personalised Book.
Ordering
Below you can see what their website looks like. Select their site closest to you in the top left corner. They have sites for US, UK, Canada and Australia. To order, simply select softback or hardback and then press “Click to personalise”. We opted for the softback version for this review, but as noted it is also available as hardback. Depending on your location, prices are as follow (as of June 2021):
- Softback: US$24.99, CA$34.99, £17.49, AU$31.99
- Hardback: US$34.99, CA$44.99, £22.49 , AU$41.99
Character personalisation
When ordering the book, you first have to personalise your character. And this is a part that kids are used to from online games – and is something they very much enjoy.
There are nine different sections of the character personalisation starting with giving your first name. That should be easy enough.
The next category is gender, in which you can chose between male and female. Character wise, the answer you choose only affects the facial pieces that you can choose between. The little blurb on the back of the book will also be affected by this choice, as it will determine whether ‘his’ or ‘her’ is written.
After choosing the desired gender, you will need to pick between an adult or child character. This choice makes the character an adult or a child and gives different options for facial expressions depending on your choice. For example, an adult male character will get more facial expression options that have facial hair, while an adult female will have red lips on her facial expressions.
Next up, facial expressions. You can choose between six different facial expressions for your character, unless you pick an adult male, in which you get a few more options with different facial hair styles. The facial expressions of the children are similar with the female expressions getting little eyelashes to distinguish them from the male.
The following option is hair colour. You can choose between a bunch of natural hair colours for your character.
After that is the option to pick your character’s hair style. All options are the same regardless of gender or the type of the character you pick.
Then you can pick the skin colour of your character followed by selecting your Hogwarts House. Are you in Ravenclaw, Hufflepuff, Gryffindor or Slytherin?
Finally, you can decide whether or not your character will have glasses, and you get two different options of glasses, should you choose to have glasses.
It was a lot of fun going through the options while making a character. Picking your Hogwarts House might just be the best part of the whole thing, as your minifigures robes now change to the robes of your house. If you are unsure which house you belong to, you can take the official Wizarding World sorting quiz.
Getting the book
Once you have completed the personalisation and completed shipping and payment details, you will get an order confirmation. Within two days, the book had been printed and was shipped. We had selected standard shipping, which took 10 days, which is reasonable in these COVID times.
While the customisation was fun, it cannot top the experience of opening the package and seeing your customised book for the first time. As the book title says, it was a very magical experience.
You see your name and customised minifigure already on the front page. The cover is glossy and wipe-friendly, making it very suitable present for a kid.
Inside you find 24 full-colour pages. Page one introduces the key characters, and you are listed there as one of Harry, Ron and Hermione’s best friends.
On the following 11 double pages with search-and-find challenges, your character appears again on each of those. An example from the publishers site is shown below. Apart from the Quidditch shown below, you will also visit Diagon Alley – and end up with the Battle of Hogwarts.
The last page presents additional challenges you can do once you have found all the main characters on the previous pages, listing both more characters and items you can find on each double-page.
The book is recommended for 6+ years and the challenges would be more suited at that lower age group. Still, it was a great hit with my 11 year old daughter Matilde, but she is also a big fan of both LEGO and Harry Potter. For her, the challenges were not hard, with the main charm being the personal touch, which I’m sure will also be appreciated by many other fans.
I have another book or two I’d like to review in the coming months, but first I will return with more set reviews of the 2021 mid year series of sets, as well as presenting a few of my latest MOCs, some of which I displayed for the first time last week. So plenty of new material to look out for.
Till then, Build the Magic!
I would like to thank Penwizard for providing a review copy of this book. The views expressed in this review are my own though.
I would also like to thank my daughters Simone and Matilde for helping doing this review. It was in fact mostly written by Simone – while Matilde kept us informed about how she felt during the personalisation and when receiving the book.
Blockwarts - A LEGO Harry Potter fan site 