As you well know by reading this blog I regularly LEGO Friends sets. That does however not mean I’m picking them randomly and indiscriminately, so I do not necessarily cover certain subjects. One of those is all that horse stuff, which most of the time is simply contained in sets that just don’t interest me. I therefore welcome every opportunity to catch up on this using other means on my modest budget and lo and behold – this year we are getting a horse special for the summer.
The issue has been out for several weeks already as I’m writing this, but Blue Ocean somehow decided to only release it in limited distribution, meaning my local newspaper agent was unable to obtain it through his channels. I therefore had to wait until I got a chance to pick it up when I was on the road for medical appointments in the next big city this Thursday.
Let me cut to the chase right away – a price of 4 Euro doesn’t bode well from the start and you can’t expect that much from the magazine. The actual print product therefore is pretty limited to put it kindly. The comic is pretty uninspired and drawn rather poorly. The funny thing is that it hints at this year’s boardwalk amusement park sets, but apparently at the time of planning the magazine and creating the artwork no finalized designs were available, so they made up their own stuff. As a result it lacks all the details that would make the comic rich and vivid and feels rather meh.
The magazine comes with the usual mix of posters plus a few games and on one page even features a cutout horse stable. Unfortunately unlike in past years they didn’t bother to print it on thicker card stock nor did they make it a double-sided print or at least a consistent solid color for the backside. Instead you are supposed to glue it onto stronger colored paper yourself. Less than ideal and really not great for a special issue.
Of course the main reason for me were the parts and within what you can expect this is actually quite nice. The black pony/ foal makes up a good chunk of the value, but the rest isn’t bad, either. It even includes one of the newer 1 x 3 on 2 x 1 jumper plate in white and overall you have a good volume of stuff, if not a huge parts count. There have definitely been less useful Friends magazine extras, so I’m happy with that.
As it is this is an okay issue and should make your kid happy for what it is. It feels a bit barebones, though, and if they keep reducing the useful stuff further while also cutting down on distribution and print numbers in upcoming years it may simply not be worth it any longer.
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