It’s finally the last of the 2021 Harry Potter sets… or at least the last one I’m going to review. I decided not to purchase/review the Harry Potter Moments sets. This one is #76392-1: Hogwarts Wizard’s Chess. It was released on 18 April 2021 in the US. It retails for $59.99 and contains 876 pieces. This works out to $0.068 per piece. This is a pretty decent ratio, but a lot of the pieces are pretty small so that could be part of the reason why it looks so good. The set depicts the part of the first book/movie where our three main characters have to play Wizard’s Chess in order to continue on the path to reach the sorcerer’s stone.
The front of the box shows the full set with all of the minifigures, chess pieces, and the playing board. It has the standard Harry Potter set branding along with the 20th anniversary logos. The back shows a closer detail on each of the playing pieces and highlights the random collectible tiles that you get.
The set comes with eight parts bags. They are numbered one through five. You get two unnumbered bags as well with some larger pieces. Then the instruction booklet is separate. It is not in a bag or anything, but mine wasn’t jammed in too badly.
The first set of bags builds the board. I took a picture of one of the earlier steps so you could see the structure underneath. The picture just shows some of the substructure. You add some more pieces in the areas between the long plates so it is pretty sturdy and the board doesn’t bow in. The board gets covered up with alternating pairs of black and white tiles. Along the outside you attach some small pieces to re-create the torches seen in the movie.
This set of bags comes with the Harry Potter minifigure and then the 20th anniversary golden minifigure for Professor Snape.
The second bag builds all of the black pawn pieces. If you’re not into repetitive building, then you won’t like building eight of these followed by eight of the white ones. I didn’t think it was that bad as it’s a pretty simple build. I like the helmets and how they used the LEGO miner helmets only put them on in reverse.
The third bag builds the remainder of the black chess pieces and the Hermione minifigure. I didn’t go back to watch the movie and see how well the minifigure scaled versions match the movie versions, but they seem pretty accurate. If you are familiar with chess, you can tell what most of the pieces are without having to look them up.
The fourth bag builds the white pawns and the Ron minifigure. It’s the same design as the black ones, as you’d expect, but only using white pieces.
The final bag builds the remainder of the white playing pieces. No differences in design here.
Here’s the final set with all of the pieces lined up. Not only can you re-create the scene from the movie, you can also play a real game of chess. I guess you can dismember your pieces after your opponent knocks them out too. Within the LEGO system, there is also a lot of potential to modify this board. You could use different minifigure heads on the different pieces, add in different colors to the playing pieces, mix up the board so it is different colored tiles, I’m curious to see if anyone customizes their board.
If you’re a Harry Potter fan or collector of these sets, you’ll probably want to grab one of these. Hopefully they go on sale at some point.
And now for a break on Harry Potter sets…
Happy building!
