Lego Maze set 21305 Review

Lego Maze Set 21305 review

To start off this series of Lego set reviews, I thought I would try reviewing a new Lego set, the Lego Maze.

Even before this Lego set actually became an official set, I wanted it. Everything about this maze catches my attention, even the price, but sadly that's for the wrong reason!!! 

The Lego Maze set was released on April 1st 2016 for the price 

of £59.99 / $69.99 / €69.99

 

 This Lego Maze was actually not originally designed by official Lego designers, they got the idea from the Lego Ideas page, something that was entirely new to me. Basically, if you have an idea for a cool lego set, then you build something up and take a picture and/or video of it and upload it to Lego ideas. There, your creation will get a set amount of time to collect supporters.

Your creation will have to get 100,000 supporters before Lego will consider turning it into a set. 

Jason Allemann, the original designer of this set, is always creating cool mind-boggling lego creations. He has a personal Youtube account showing all his amazing creations. Be sure to check it out, i'm a subscriber to his channel! 

Jason's Lego channel: JK Brickworks https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUaiGrBfRCaC6pL7ZnZjWbg

So Jason Allemann uploaded his idea to the Lego ideas page and it became an official lego set! The designer at Lego really stayed faithful to Jason's original idea and mechanism. Here is a picture of Jason's original version of the set compared to the released version.

                Jason's original design                              The officially released set                                 

 As soon as the official Lego set was released, I told myself I had to get it. So I recieved the set as a birthday present. 

In the next half of this review, I will be showing pictures of the build as it progresses, and at the end I will give you my final thoughts.

They don't skimp with the box- it's really sturdy!

The contents of the box-it was certainly well filled!

In this page of the instructions, you can learn about the designer- Jason Allemann

They even show pictures of other possible maze builds!

Well, I guess we have to start somewhere! That pile is much larger than it looks!

Starting on the base.

Here we see the mechanism taking shape.

You would think the ball box (bottom left) would be the last thing to get built!

Here, we start on the outer tilt frame.

Here's the outer frame in place.

Now we start to build the inner tilt frame. The maze section will set in this frame.

Notice one side of the frame had blue tiles, and the other has yellow. This is to help line everything up.

The thing is really taking shape now! That's everything apart from the maze insert complete.

Here we see how the maze insert base is held together.

Adding the tiles is actually quite hard, you have to get them all right!

I can assure you it took much longer than just three photos!

At last! That's the whole thing complete!

These are the parts left over, they can be used to make the other maze.

Well, that's it built up! Now for my thoughts:

The build
The maze took at least 4 hours to build, that includes a break for lunch. At some points you get quite fed up because it looks like your getting nowhere. I am pleased to see that LEGO didn't skimp at all with any of the parts, they even threw in a free brick separator, that will help when you want to remove the tiles on the maze insert and build another design. As I expected, the instructions were quite unclear at some points and took a bit of studying to figure out what you were meant to do, but at no point was I absolutely stuck. All I can say is, i'm glad it's built!

The gameplay

To play, you use one of the orange balls supplied, and place it in the green section of the maze. Twisting the two handles on the side of the maze will tilt the whole board in either direction. The goal is to get the ball through the maze onto the red tile, avoiding all the black spots, because these are indentations which the ball will get stuck in. To understand this maze properly, look at Jason Allemann's own video reviewing his set.

This video is property of JK Brickworks.

The maze is actually really precise, which means that it is easy to control the ball through very fine movements. Some people complained that the ball got stuch between tiles, but I have had no problems with that so far because I made sure to press down hard on each tile that I placed (and built the maze on a hard surface, not a carpet.)
One problem that I did find, however, was that the maze is really hard to complete. I haven't personally been able to complete the standard maze without cheating. Also, the balls are manufactured with a very slight flatspot on one side, which means that if the ball gets stuck on that flatspot, it is hard to move get it moving again.

The whole idea of this maze was that you can build your own mazes. The maze insert comes out, and you can build different designs. One design that is included in the set is a castle themed maze.

The advance Castle themed maze

I haven't actually got around to building the castle maze, but when I do, I will review it. Some say that although the castle maze is supposedly the 'advanced' maze, it isn't necessarily harder than the standard maze.

JK Brickworks has been busy making his own maze inserts which are not included in the official set, but can be built with parts out of your own collection. Here are some of his ideas:

Space themed maze by JK Brickworks

Ocean themed maze by JK Brickworks

 Motorised mini golf maze by JK Brickworks

So there is really a lot of options with this Lego set. In my own opinion, this set is by far the best that has ever been released. 

Judging by all the re-enforcement bars added to this maze, I think JK Brickworks probably got a bit frustrated with it!!!

The whole build looks flimsy, but really, it's quite sturdy. A travel lock is also included in the design, which makes the maze a lot stronger when not being used.

All in all, this set gets a total of 8/10 because the thought and care put into designing the set is really great. It is worth every bit of the price, because they really don't skimp with the parts or anything. 

Here, I have another good review video (Property of JANGBRICKS)

 

 

Be sure to check out JK Brickworks's channel, because he has many videos about this set.

I hope you enjoyed this review,

Please leave a comment, and don't forget to reshare!