Debuting last year, Lego began to release sets under the Lego Art branding, designed like a well-known form of fan-made creation, Mosaics. The fundamentals were pretty straightforward; each set comes with nine 16x16 plates that builders and artists put a collection of 1x1 dots on to form an image. Each set has instructions and pieces for a few different pictures that can be made alongside the box version. I was, and still am cynical of, the ones that encourage multiple purchases to get either a combination build or to complete a whole image (such as The Beatles), primarily due to the price not encouraging multiple purchases. These are $180 each, after all. So it was a surprise to see something as big as a World Map launch in this line almost a year after the theme launched, dwarfing the rest of the theme and having the most pieces of any Lego set so far. Over 11,000 pieces to pull off a customizable map of the world. It became a group project at my house due to its sheer size. While it has one of the best price to part ratio of any set to date, potentially forever, sometimes bigger isn't better. What you see is what you get, after all.
What you get is a simple build but a mentally taxing one for those who don't find comfort in these projects. For someone working on this build alone, they would be placing down 10240 1x1 dots. Each of the continents is studded, so you can place markers (of your choice though 40 1x1 cone pieces, along with many spare tiles are provided to help make some) on the rough locations you've travelled to. The ocean is a rough bathymetric representation of the world's oceans by default. However, the designers encourage you to fill in the negative space of the map with whatever you desire. Due to this, along with the ease of rearranging pieces of the world to change what countries are in the centre, the map is one of the most versatile Lego Art sets. Customization is baked in and encouraged compared to other sets (though nothing stops you from giving Darth Maul an evil villain moustache). From a distance, the map is beautiful when finished; the trouble with it comes pre-built into the issue many people have with making mosaics. I consider myself to be a pretty fast but patient builder. When I build, I like to focus on the build, give it my full attention, and because of that, the build process for this one was mentally draining due to the constant reliance on the instructions to make sure I put each of the ten colours of dots in the right place for my map pieces. You can't autopilot your way through the set. While it's possible to form some of the more significant landmasses, the oceans require your attention all the time, making the process of putting said 10240 dots feel a lot more draining.
Part of that comes from the instructions for the build, where each piece of the map is two pages. One page showing where it is on the map and where you put the Technic pins in to connect it, and then the other showing a 1:1 picture of the map piece, with numbers relating to the colours to show where each piece goes. If the instructions were laid out with things like a part list (like other Lego set instructions) and divided the map between more pages, such as how the Lego NES handled the instructions for the TV screen, I think it would help with the process. However, while it might work for the 3x3 pieces, when you're working with a set that has almost five times the number of plates to fill, it's not going to work as well scaled up.
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| A representation of all the places in the world that I've been too... I don't do a lot of traveling... |
While this looks good as a novelty, I'd be hard-pressed to recommend it over a regular map. The scaling of the map means that some locations are outright missing, mainly smaller islands (I wasn't the best at Geography, but last I checked, Hawaii had four islands). But I dread to think of what a version of this map would be if it did have those islands and how much bigger it would be due to that. As a novelty item, it works very well, and the customization baked into the brand leads to this being a very versatile map. Still, if you want something for navigation, you're better off looking elsewhere.
