Four years ago, LEGO released an intriguing Creator set that stood out for its uniqueness: 31122 Fish Tank. What a great idea! A way of bringing some aquatic LEGO into your home without all the yellow of their traditional underwater themes. Clearly, some bright spark at LEGO saw that set, and went: OK, but what if we made it bigger? That’s clearly just speculation on my part – but the end result is the same: 10366 Tropical Aquarium, which releases this November 13 for US $479.99 | CAN $599.99 | UK £399.99. Among its 4,151 pieces, it counts a large number in new or rare colours, and in good quantities at that. But there’s more to this set than just new re-colours! Take a dive into the tropical waters, and let’s check it out together.
LEGO Icons 10366 Tropical Aquarium | 4,154 Pieces | Available November 13 | US $479.99 | CAN $599.99 | UK £399.99
The box and build
The box is enormous, and gives a near 1-to-1 impression of the fish tank. I like that the top of the box looks into the top of the aquarium too!
Inside, we have another white box, and between this and the main one there are 41 (yes, forty-one!) paper bags.
Alongside that are half a dozen unnumbered plastic bags, containing multiples of some of the larger parts in the set.
The heavy-set instructions have the now-customary blurb at the front, talking a bit about the contents of the tank. There are also some double-page spreads with more info throughout the booklet, alongside notes from the designers here and there. Sometimes these are a bit superfluous to the build, but I found the ones included here to be really interesting.
A large black frame is the first order of business, making the floor of our aquarium. The seabed (tank-bed? Aquarium-bed? Answers in the comments please!) consists of modules built upon 12 16×16 plates. The stage is set.
There are several moving features hidden in this LEGO coral reef, and the workings of those are as varied as they are intricate. The first one to reach a completed state is the mechanism that will allow the crab to pop out of its hole. Those BURPs (Big Ugly Rock Pieces) hit me straight in the nostalgia, even if their BURP-iness is hidden by some judiciously placed sideways slopes.
As well as giving us an idea of how this particular mechanism will work, we can also see that the main centre portion of the aquarium is actually built off-grid. That’s what those turntables and round 44 plates accomplish! It’s a great way to make a LEGO build look slightly more natural.
And with that done, it’s #TimeForCrab! This little guy is made up of a neat selection of medium nougat parts, including an unprinted recolour of the Iron Man face mask for the shell.
The crab’s hidey-hole goes up, and with it a bunch more connection points whose purpose will become apparent later.
As the instructions say, no self-respecting aquarium is complete without a cheesy nautical-themed gimmick. In this instance, it’s a treasure chest that can open and close (and in a real aquarium, would no doubt release a stream of bubbles in doing so). In our LEGO one, we have to settle for a neat technique to ‘sink’ it into the sand.
With that in place, it’s time to take a break from the main build as we make the backdrop from the next six bags (numbers 15-21, incidentally). Once again, we start with a black frame…
… And then cover it up with a copious amounf of baseplates, this time 16 8×16 medium azure ones. This is the first time the build starts to feel tedious; bag 19 is literally nothing but two types of curved medium azure tiles (74 of one, 89 of the other). This was apparently a tricky part of the design too. As the instructions say, it had to look organic, yet use a limited number of parts to make construction easier.
After doing that I was grateful to be turning to some seaweed, with the first of our really interesting re-colours! We’ve got a trans-green leaf for the first time – loads of them, in fact, to mimic the refraction of light that seaweed has in the water. My gratefulness for these quickly subsided when building two lengths of seaweed turned out to be equally repetitive. At least I didn’t have to pay as much attention as with the swirling blue tile patterns.
Let’s check in with our main model. As you can see, we’ve braced our backdrop against the central rock formation, and rigged up some more axles for the moving parts.
The last of the moving parts is built next, consisting of this box of gears. This goes on the right-hand side of the tank and will enable some of the coral to move.
And with the exception of one more rock formation (which I, ahem, forgot to photograph), from here on out it’s pretty much all fish or coral. But you know what that means? It’s time for the new re-colours! We start with some reddish orange tubes and light nougat stem pieces. The flipside of these exciting new colours is that the building is starting to get repetitive again.
Perhaps my favourite of the sealife is the large anemone at the centre. Not only do we get a fab new colour for the Pixar lampshade, we also get loads of tail elements in lavender and trans-pink. The end result is really lifelike.
The following three bits of coral life are shown out of sequence, but for good reason: they all share the same construction. A ring with bars, clips (sometimes in new colours like lavender or light nougat) to hold the outer elements on, built in multiples and stacked. With the exception of the purple brain coral, they’re all built in pairs, too. Once again, the new colours are fun, but I got really quite bored of building these.
Thankfully, we do also have some fish to break things up a bit – often paired off with some of the smaller plant life. All the fish make use of a brand-new fin element, which comes in several different colours too: reddish orange, pale yellow, light aqua, trans-clear and trans-green. The designers say they’re excited to see how builders make use of this new element, and I concur!
While most of the sea life in this aquarium is based on real flora and fauna, the designers were able to take some creative liberties with the biggest fish of the lot. This is the ‘striped brickfish’, looking something like a cross between a parrotfish and a clownfish. It also uses a SNOT core to attach its scaley outsides, but unlike the other fish, this one has ball joints to enable it to ‘swim’ – the last of our play features to be completed.
With most of the contents assembled, we can enclose our build to complete the tank. Perhaps surprisingly, this frame is fairly light on Technic elements, instead relying on multi-sided stud connections to keep things secure.
One more fish goes on after these – a rainbowfish – and then we’re done.
The finished model
The finished article is a real explosion of colour! It’s just the right balance of bright coral and muted seascape.
From the back, there’s obviously not much to see other than some of the supporting structure.
The further we move round the side, the more we can see the various mechanisms at play. They’re well-concealed from the front, but the same can’t be said for the side. Still, at least they’re better concealed than my photography setup is in this photo.
In my defence, moving this monolith around is no mean feat. It’s almost 2′ (52cm) wide, and the only place with any kind of structural strength is the base. On the plus side, that means there’s plenty of room to welcome visitors from other themes.
Even before we get to the play features, there’s plenty to admire in this mini coral reef. They may have been a pain to put together, but the effort is really worth it.
Let’s look at these moving parts then. All of them are actuated via knobs hidden around the sides (you may have spotted them already). Some, like the treasure chest, turn that rotational motion into an up-and-down motion:
While in the case of the crab, it’s turned into linear motion to pop it out of its cave. I really like how snappy this one is.
You can swap the crab out for a squatter, too. Although be very careful when you do! I managed to pull some of the rails off while setting this up, and the repairs – which involved fishing around the back for discarded parts – took a good 15 minutes.
Over on the right hand side, we have what the designers found to be the funniest part of the set: wiggling coral. This one is better when the lever is turned back and forth; the tendrils have a tendency to lock up and get jammed when it’s only span in one direction.
And finally, the swimming brickfish. This is one that would really benefit from being motorised, and I can absolutely see the community doing that once this set releases.
Conclusions and recommendation
So if you hadn’t worked it out by now, this set is a real bonanza for the parts monkeys out there. Not only do the interesting colours make it interesting in itself, but they come in high enough quantities that the prices on the aftermarket will hopefully not be too crazy. It’s great to have on display, and the frame of the tank should lend itself quite well to some creative options. You could string some LEDs around the insides, or treat it like a gigantic book nook, if you have really deep bookshelves.
It’s hard to call a bargain though. With no minifigures or printed pieces, and only one new mould (albeit in good quantities and multiple colours), 11.5 cents per part is a little on the high side. Still, if you have the funds and want something to wow both AFOLs and non-LEGO friends, this makes for a very interesting choice.
LEGO Icons 10366 Tropical Aquarium | 4,154 Pieces | Available November 13 | US $479.99 | CAN $599.99 | UK £399.99
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