Medieval Villager Minifigures for My Town (Not Lego)

 

Hiya brick fans!  Welcome back to bricksandfigs.blogspot.com!   This is just a quick post to fill you in about another purchase I made from Aliexpress.  As you might know, I recently acquired a set of medieval soldiers for my fledgling town.   The town currently consists of the JMBricklayer observation guard tower and the Lesdiy small windmill.   None of these sets came with any minifigures, so I figured I start to populate the town.

So I ordered them from Aliexpress and they arrived very quickly, like less than 2 weeks.  Each of the minifigures is packaged separately, however the bags have no markings.  Someone on Reddit told me that Marstoy and Brixtoy carry them as well.

A quick check on the Brixtoy website shows the product number for this minifigure is AH011.   Pricing for the villager ranges from $1.20 USD per single minifigure to $10.49 USD for a set of 10 on Marstoy.  However both of these stores do not include shipping.  I got mine from Brickpanda on Aliexpress for $16.88 CDN (discounted) for a set of 10 with free shipping.   So I think at the end of the day, the prices should all be pretty equivalent.

The minifigures require some assembly and they look and feel pretty decent.  There's some nice printing of the tunic on both front and back and each minifigure comes with a black hood and an axe.

I didn't want all ten of the minifigures to be identical, so I set about swapping the heads from my minifigure stash and now they are all unique looking.

Testing the Kyglaring LED Light Kit for the Lego Palace Cinema 10232

 Hi brick fans, welcome back to bricksandfigs.blogspot.com.  Last month, I finally found a light kit to illuminate my Lepin Palace Cinema.  The brand is known as Kyglaring.  It's a brand I'm not accustomed to, as all of my other light kits are from Briksmax and Lightailing.

The kit arrived superfast, like within a week and I did an unboxing blog post which you can find here.  Now before I install it into my Palace Cinema modular building, I want to check the quality of the kit and test out each of it's components.

So let's open up some of the packages and make sure everything works.

First, you'll need to get some fresh triple A batteries and put them into the battery pack.  I've left off the battery pack cover so you can see how the batteries are arranged.  Next, plug the USB connector into the battery pack.  

Take one of the expansion boards that come with the set and connect the USB connector to one of the ports on the board.   This will be your base testing configuration.  From here you will plug each of the lighting kit's components into each port of the expansion board.

This kit for the Palace Cinema contains some light strips, probably for the interior.

Here are some led accent lights.

As I was testing the lights, I found a non working port on one of the expansion boards.

These colour changing led light strips will be placed on the first floor exterior I think.

The Palace Cinema sign light features blinking led lights.  There are some light kits that don't feature the blinking lights, but this was one of my must have features.

There are two colour changing spotlights that will replace the existing parts.  

Finally, there's the streetlamp that gets lit up.

My observation about the Kyglaring lighting components are as follows:  

- the wires feel flimsier than the ones you get from Briksmax

- the ports and port connectors are a tight fit and sometimes they are hard to pull out

- the brick parts they give you are just generic bricks, Briksmax gives you actual Lego replacement parts

- the lighting seems to be ok, especially the colour changing ones

Pertaining to price, the Kyglaring set is about 20-30% cheaper than Briksmax. 

Regarding the faulty port on one of the expansion boards, fortunately I didn't have to use that port so not an issue for me.

Hope this will help you to decide whether to buy LED lighting kits from Kyglaring.com.   Let me know what you think,  bye for now!

Random Medieval Soldier Lego Compatible Minifigures Set from Temu

 

I was browsing through the building blocks category on Temu a couple of weeks ago and I saw this set of 12 medieval themed Lego style minifigures for around $9 CDN.  That works to about 0.75 cents per minifigure.

Here's how the medieval soldiers came in their packages from Temu.  They are unbranded and the packages don't have any set numbers on them.

The minifigures come packaged two per bag and you have to attach the hair, arms, hands and capes yourself.

Of the 12 minifigures, 6 are wearing a gray chainmail outfit and the other 6 are wearing a blue crested tunic.  All 12 of them come with a hard plastic cape in either black or red.  Each minifigure comes with a sword as well.  There are actually two females in this corps of medieval soldiers, which is something unique to this set.  You'll notice that every minifigure has a unique face, no two are alike.

Some bonus items in this set include 3 shields with dragon crests, a black cowl for one of the minifigures, and two dogs.  If you look closely, you can see that the two dogs come from different molds.

Overall the brick quality was excellent and everything fit together well.  The prints on the torsos were great too, except their wasn't any back or arm printing on them.  I especially liked the hard plastic capes instead of the flimsy fabric ones you normally get with these soldier sets.  The only improvement I would like to see on this set is if they all came with shields and extra helmets.

I'll most likely add these minifigures to my Lego compatible medieval buildings to enhance their displays.