Assault on Hoth

The Great Work is nearly done - every Star Wars set that I intend to build is, in theory, now built!  I've managed to achieve this about on target - I was aiming for Saturday but missed it by 3 days because I took the wife away for the weekend (more important than Lego!).

I do have a couple of missing pieces on the Cube Dudes that I discovered the other day and they are in the post.  But I have no sets left unbuilt and nothing remaining "in the boxes".  Rebrickable tells me that I therefore have 868 sets built up - something I'm going to have to verify over the coming days.  

Sadly, I somehow managed to leave one of the more disappointing sets for (nearly) last: the "UCS" Assault on Hoth (75098).  Lots has been written about this set and I'm sure it's the reason that Lego introduced the "Master Builder" series to make a distinction between the true UCS sets and what are effectively very large playsets.  

The AoH is not intrinsically a bad set - you get lots of minifigs and something like 10 different components.  Tons of playability in there.  However, it was preceded by so many other Hoth playsets (Hoth Echo Base, Hoth Attack, Battle of Hoth, Hoth Wampa Cave, Hoth Rebel Base) that delivered many of the constituent components of this that it doesn't feel in any way new or fresh.  Also, the fact that you get so many piecemeal components reduces the overall cohesion of the set in a way that say the Ewok Village or the Betrayal at Cloud City don't suffer from (in fact, both of those sets are really excellent).  

As such, I'm going with the majority and registering my overall sense as disappointed.  

The final (for now) sets to be built were the latest magazine gift (Jedi starfighter) and the build your own adventure y-wing. Both are nice little sets but the Y-wing is very reminiscent of the microfighter that came out the following year. 




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