LEGO Set #10244

This is a truly spectacular set for many reasons! It’s a bit pricey, but well worth it. You get a whopping 12 minifigures, plus a whole lot of playability in this set.

The twelve minifigures are great, and many are female which are rare in the LEGO world. I’m glad to see more and more female minifigures being added to sets, and in this one you get some great diversity in terms of hairstyles and faces. Unfortunately, several of the minifigures are children, and as you may know I don’t like children. You get four children in this set with their stunted little legs that can’t bend. So when they go riding the Mixer, they have to stand up. That’s definitely a lawsuit on your hands. Best to put a “You must be this tall” sign on the Mixer.

But you do get the incredible “puke face” minifigure head, and that’s almost worth it right there!

You’re going to spend several hours putting this set together, but when you’re done you’ve got an amazing centerpiece for your LEGO town. The Mixer is the main attraction, a giant spinner that can take up to 12 people on a vomit-inducing ride. You can turn the crank with your hand, or buy a LEGO motor (sold separately) to let it run on its own. Since several of the 12 minifigures that came with the set are essential to the operation of the carnival, I had to populate the ride with some people from my collection.

This set has a lot of moving pieces, the greatest of which is the Mixer itself. Here’s a video of my minifigures riding the Mixer:

But there are other attractions at the fairground! There’s a strongman game, where you hit the target with a hammer, propelling a marker up to hopefully ding the bell if you’ve got the strength. This little game actually works, though it’s difficult for a minifigure to win. You can tap quickly with your finger and easily hit the bell, but you’ll probably end up knocking the thing over too. The other game is the dunk tank. This comes with a woman in a wetsuit waiting to fall into the tank below. You can’t actually fill it with water, though. You can try, but the water will all run out. The trigger is a bit sensitive, but you can rest it just so and once the target is hit the platform gives way dropping the woman into the empty tank. It comes with three red balls to toss and a table to hold them.

The carnival includes a ticket booth too because it can’t all be fun and games. At the end of the day, these carnies have to make a living. Inside the ticket booth is a chest with two drawers. One holds money and the other holds tickets, in the form of 1×1 orange plates.

There are a lot of decals in this set, which is frustrating. The most frustrating is the Mixer logo which goes on the hood of the larger truck. The problem here is that it’s split in half, two decals that have to be positioned on two pieces in a way that they look like one perfectly even image. Sticking those decals almost gave me a heart attack! The dunk tank decals also threw me for a loop because there are two of them and the instructional manual doesn’t do a great job of telling you where they go exactly. In my first go, I put the “Dunk Tank” one off to the left side, which looked a bit silly. I redid it, still off-center but better. There’s also a fish decal, which could represent an actual fish inside the tank or maybe it is simply a decoration on the tank. That’s up to your imagination! The tickets sign on the ticket booth and the “LEGO Amusements” sign on the smaller truck are also decals. The other decals are mud flaps and license plates.

The amount of detail in this was fascinating too. There are windshield wipers on the larger truck! How cool is that? And the dunk tank has a ladder for getting on and off the platform. The cabin of the larger truck includes a small bed and a computer/television screen perfect for long hours on the road.

One of the neatest things about this set is that it all packs up nicely into the two trucks. The whole carnival collapses down into two vehicles that can easily take the equipment and crew to the next LEGO town as they make their carny living across the great United States of LEGO. The Mixer folds up onto the trailer that it rests on when in use. The rails surrounding it detach and stack into frames that go on that same trailer. And the ladder folds up too. The strongman game, ticket booth and dunk tank all fit onto the smaller truck.

I had wanted this set for a long time, and I’m glad I finally got it. I initially only cared because I just had to have the puke face minifigure head. But the whole thing turned out to be a lot more fun than I expected, unlike real world carnivals. The only real downside was the allotment of pieces into three numbered bag sets. It could have easily been four or five sets, which would have made the whole thing far easier to build. One set of pieces filled my whole table space and made it difficult to find the pieces needed for each step. I was also initially worried about the size of the thing, thinking I wouldn’t have anywhere to put it once I was finished, but with it all packing up onto two trucks, that’s not an issue at all!

If you don’t have this set yet, I highly recommend you get it. And did I mention there are pieces that GLOW IN THE FRIGGIN’ DARK!?!?! Yeah, the safety bars on the Mixer and the cone tips of the rails are glow in the dark bricks!

Pieces: 1746

Minifigures: Ticket Lady, Man, Flower Shirt Woman, Polo Shirt Woman, Surfer Dude, Wetsuit Woman, Juggler Carny, Operator Carny, Teddy Bear Girl, Baseball Cap Boy, Glasses Girl, Bowl-Cut Boy

Time to Complete: 6 hours

Recommended Ages: 16+

Released: 2014

Price: $149.95 on Amazon

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