REVIEW: Hogwarts Castle – Part 3

Finally, here is the third part of my review series of the 2018 Hogwarts Castle, which I built one bag a day (there are 37 bags!). It has been on my wish list for so long, so great to actually be building it. Read on to see the progress as I make my way through the third of the instruction books…

This is part 3 of a series of posts, reviewing the so far excellent Hogwarts Castle set from 2018. This was the first time LEGO released a direct-to-consumer (D2C) Harry Potter themed set. Luckily we’ve seen many since then.

To see the other parts, click here:

• Hogwarts Castle – Part 1
• Hogwarts Castle – Part 2
• Hogwarts Castle – Part 3 (this post)
• Hogwarts Castle – Part 4 (coming soon)

This post covers the build based on the third of the four instruction books. The first two let us build the part of the castle with the Great Hall its forecourt and the Central Tower. Now we are back at ground level again, to build the base for the second half of the castle.

As a recap, here is what it looked like at the end of book 2.

The build – Book 3

To start with, book 3 gave us the third minifigure of the Hogwarts founders. As noted in the previous posts, the figures will be be discussed in more detail in part 4 of this review series.

And then we were off to a good start with a nice little stand-alone “micro-build” of Hagrid’s Hut. I love the detail jammed into such a small space, including the pumpkin patch.

Then – as in the beginning of book 1, we started with building a Technic frame with wedge plates along the border to give that rocky look. As it progressed, we started adding height to it as shown below.

This is still only part of the base. Below you can see the full base from book 3 completed.

At this stage, after some repetitive builds, we finally got to start on building the first of the rooms. The background is based on some bigger panels with decorative stickers. Quite a few of those to apply, and I’m not a big fan of the larger panels for these exclusive sets, but those are the only parts you can put larger stickers on I guess.

Once you add the parts to the front, the big panels aren’t really visible and the stickers do add to the feel of the rooms I must admit. Here is the Potions classroom.

Next to it we have the Room of Requirements. A lot of weird stuff is stored in there. I assume the angled black piece to the right is the vanishing cabinet that Draco was fixing in Harry Potter and the Half-blood Price. It had a shape like that in the 2010 Hogwarts Castle set (and matching copy in Borgin and Burkes in the 2011 Diagon Alley set).

With those rooms completed, we could put down the floor for the next level.

At this point we were given another bag of microscale figures – many great ones in there. Can’t wait to find their optimal locations in the castle. I’ll get back to these figures in the next (and final) part of this review series.

We now started on the last part of the (sub) base level. Again, this led us to some interesting room – in this case the challenges Harry, Hermione and Ron had to overcome in the very first movie, starting with the giant game of wizard chess and the rooms with the winged keys.

Once again, the combination of panels and stickers formed the back. Once again, I was sceptical…

…but once you add additional detail, it does look pretty cool. In the photo above you can see the chess game now completed and to its left the final challenge with the Mirror of Erised. The transparent red brick to the very left is assumingly the philosophers stone (though hugely oversized considering everything else is microscale.

The room with the winged keys also looks great once completed, with a few transparent tiles adding “winged keys” to the room. And I really love the paintbrush representing the broom. Behind it to the right you can see a bit of green (also visible on the photo further down to the left). That is the devil snare, which is the last of the rooms from that series included in the model.

Having completed the rooms, we could put down the floor for the level above and that completed Book 3.

To be continued…

This is still a fun build and I cant wait to continue with book 4. Looking forward to add more towers and more iconic rooms – and the viaduct!

I’ll try to get this to you soon!

Till then, Build the magic!

(Note that the set was kindly provided by LEGO to review – the views expressed in this post are however my own)