Inside the wizarding world there is only one safe place for your cache of Galleons, Sickles and Knuts and that is Gringotts Bank. Located inside Diagon Alley, it is one of the safest places to be. The goblins that own and operate Gringotts are not known for their sense of humor, charm or wit but they are extremely clever, perhaps too clever. There are two goblins in the Gringotts Lego set, both of them are in somewhat formal attire which is a good throw back to what you see in the film and can gather from the book. It would have been impossible to recreate the whole of Gringotts but the designers really went cheap with the track that the cart moves on. When you see the box that this was originally packaged in you don't get a fair representation of how short the track is. The solution? Buy more than one set and make the track longer. Oh, well, there is that little issue of price; it has a suggested retail price of $30.00 when it was out in 2002, you can still find it for that price in some retail stores. Only the most dedicated or insane Lego fanatic would buy more than one set just to make the track longer. Yes, I am sitting here raising my hand like I am in Snape's Potion Class.

The Gringotts Bank set is good and bad; there are a lot of small things that make the set worth having in a collection but there are times when the bad things severely overshadow them. I've already mentioned the minimal amount of track that comes with the set but there are other things that irk me. The actual Gringotts set up is weak. It is too small and doesn’t really convey the dark beauty of the bank or vault area. I know, there is only so much that you can do with plastic bits but seriously, I would have rather had this sell for fifty dollars and been more visually impressive than to get spanked on it and have to buy multiple sets to make it look good. But maybe that is what Lego wanted. Give them a taste but let them finish the meal. The good parts are the stenciled vault door and the Gringotts name element. The stenciled gold coin bag is also a nice touch but you don't get enough gold coins to make the scene really feel like you are in a goblin vault. You go get a total of twelve coins [four of each denomination] but that isn't enough to really be even remotely accurate.

You get a total of four figures with the set; Harry Potter, Hagrid and two goblins. The goblins have the same facial features but are in different clothing; one is in blue and one is in red. It is assumed that Griphook is in blue but I could be wrong about that. Hagrid is a great figure, he is a lot like Chewbacca because of the amount of textured detail and the chocolate brown color. The Harry Potter figure is one of the many variations of the young wizard. Here he is in street clothes long before he dons his Hogwarts robs on the train to school. If it were not for the stenciled glasses and scar on his forehead he would be able to blend in with any of the Lego mini figures. This isn't one of my favorite Potter figures, it's rather plain and boring but it is still an essential figure to collect if you want to show him before he transformed from a muggle.

The scene isn't really that of Gringotts, it is an extremely small scale of some of the sections of the bank. The vault for it is pathetic, like they couldn't stencil the number of the vault on the door? Aside from there not being enough gold coins, the designs did redeem themselves a little with the stenciled money tile that you can have drop out of the bottom of the safe area. If there were more of them, well, it would be a lot cooler. There is a clear blue magic tile and several magic / spell book pages included with the set. These are nice because they can be used for so many things in other scenes and sets. These are not spell books, they are pages with a stenciled design on them. I know that there are limitations to what the designers can do but if they can create a monster sized replica of the Death Star then why couldn’t they have made Gringotts look nicer?

I won't call this set a necessity but it does have some great elements; if you can get it on sale or on clearance then that's even better. Having more than one set to work with allows you to expand the chamber area or make multiple rooms; it also means that you can have more than one vault. Since there are only two keys in the set you will have to use them wisely and try not to lose them. Personally I think the little buggers are bewitched because the disappear on a regular basis and turn up in the oddest of places. Some of the extras and accessories that make this set almost worth it include the rat, two owls, bat, green dome, arched pieces and vented slats. I don't hate the set but it seems a shame that it had such possibilities and only a few of them were actually put into motion.


Name: Gringotts Bank
Set Theme: Harry Potter
Set Number: 4714
Piece Count: 250
Age Recommendation: 6 and older
Difficulty Level: Moderate
Build Time: 15 – 25 minutes
Price: $29.99


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Recommended: Yes

Amount Paid (US$): see review
Type of Toy: Other
Age Range of Child: Whole Family