REVIEW: Advent calendar 18 December 2023

The last week has been one with ups and downs when it comes to the models and minifigures in this year’s advent calendar. I hope that now we’re on the home stretch, the quality will be in the higher end more consistently. Let’s open door 18 and see what we’re getting today…

After a pretty good day yesterday, with Madam Rosmerta’s arrival, today was a bit of a deja vu of the experience the 16 December where I thought some pieces must had fallen out of the plastic bag. Today’s bag was lighter than ever it seemed.

Opening the bag, I counted only five pieces in total! This was a new low record.

To be fair, it did please me to see the butterbeer glass (but why didn’t we get any of those with Aberforth Dumbledore and Madam Rosmerta?) But the rest of the prices are not really too exciting.

Putting together the few pieces will give you a table for the Three Broomsticks, where Madam Rosmerta is the barmaid and owner.

For the other three buildings we have covered so far in this year’s advent calendar, I’d at this point start to praise the choice of colour scheme.

There are not many good photos around from what it looks like inside the pub, but I’m not sure I think the grey, tan, dark blue combo really associate well with the location (see one photo from inside the pub below). But then again, they probably wanted it to be different from the brown/dark brown colours from Hog’s Head.

Looking at the Three Broomsticks building that was included in the Hogsmeade Village Visit set from 2021, they did actually use a dark blue plate (see below), so maybe that’s the connection, though the other colours (tan and grey) doesn’t really match well either (medium nougat or dark tan would have worked a lot better than tan for the table top).

Summary

I had really hoped that after a somewhat unimpressive “middle part”, the calendar would start to ramp up and finish with a blast. But today was another let-down to be honest – with the lowest part count to date, a confusing colour scheme and uninspiring design. I’ll give it a low score of 1.5 out of five house points – and that is after adjusting it up because of the included butterbeer glass. A decent average daily model should have had one or two more glasses, or a couple of chairs.

I’m expecting another Three Broomsticks model tomorrow. Please let it be a better one! Time will tell, I guess, so check back tomorrow on the 2023 Advent Calendar page to see what we got.

Till then, Build the Magic!