Day: November 18, 2012

Today’s set is LEGO Friends 3184 Adventure Camper.

This set features a motorhome, trailer, two bicycles (including one in dark teal, a new color for bikes), and some campsite details. Our old friend Olivia is back, and a new friend Nicole joins her.

Unlike some of the other models in this wave of Friends, this is not a recolor of an existing LEGO model. It’s pretty much a complete redesign. It bears a passing resemblance to the motorhome in LEGO City Camper (7639) but if you look closer you’ll see that aside from the windscreen and the curved piece above the front seats, there’s not much similarity at all. Like that other motorhome it hinges open in a way that real motorhomes don’t, but the mechanism here is quite different – in camper 7639 both sides of the back portion of the vehicle swing open to the sides; here only one side opens, and it is hinged in the back, not the front. Also here, the roof hinges open. Like all the Friends sets the build is pretty easy, and it contains a lot of new part/color combinations. The RV includes two 1×10 pink bricks, which is a nice addition to the range of parts available in pink, and the 1×4 curved parts in the roof are nice to have in pink as well. There are also three light orange 2×4 tiles, which I haven’t seen before in that color. But the finished model is kind of funny looking, and I don’t like the asymmetry of the roof – the left side is curved pink pieces which is really nice, but the right side is lime green tiles and hinges. They should have at least used pink tiles so the color is symmetrical if nothing else!

The inclusion of bicycles is a nice touch, and I experimented with how to best have a minidoll ride them. Since they’re designed for minifigs, the dolls don’t quite fit perfectly, but I found two good ways to pose them: one with straight legs, similar to a minfig, and one with the hips bent and the feet forward. In both cases the hands can touch the handlebars, but lacking rotatable wrists the dolls can’t grasp the handlebars. That’s better at least than the RV, where their hands don’t go anywhere near the steering wheel – well, the one in the passenger seat can come fairly close! When you sit the two dolls in the front of the RV their arms overlap quite a bit due to the wide position they are in.

Like many of the Friends sets, this one comes with a large assortment of accessory parts – this time, the cooking set in red. The meal that the dolls are preparing to eat is a little strange – two cupcakes (one chocolate, one vanilla) and a carton of orange juice. Meanwhile while they eat dessert a turkey leg is cooking over the fire. I guess when two teenagers go camping without adult supervision, this is the kind of dietary hijinks one should expect.