Five things you didn’t know about the LEGO NINJAGO summer 2023 sets

From problematic packaging to prioritising display over play, here are five things you didn’t know about the upcoming LEGO NINJAGO summer 2023 sets.

A whopping 14 new LEGO NINJAGO sets will debut on shelves both real and virtual on June 1, headlined by the massive 71799 NINJAGO City Markets. Kick-starting the new era of NINJAGO, subtitled Dragons Rising, these models are a mostly familiar mix of mechs, dragons, bikes, cars and temples – but within those conventional frameworks comes fresh ideas, designs and approaches.

From mechs that can combine to other mechs that can transform, there are still new concepts to be found within NINJAGO. And for Dragons Rising, there are plenty of new characters, too. Here, LEGO designer Niek van Slagmaat shares insights into the process of bringing those sets to life – and the difficulties faced along the way…

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5 – The team mechs presented a problem for the packaging team

71794 Lloyd and Arin’s Ninja Team Mechs sits in the middle of the pack in size and cost, but Slagmaat says it needed to sum up the new Dragons Rising TV show – and that makes it one of the most important sets in the entire wave. It wasn’t just challenging from a pure design perspective (as we’ll come to), but for the packaging team, too.

“The difficulty with this model’s packaging is whether you show them [separately], which would present more value to the average consumer, or combined, which is the way in which it was designed,” the designer tells Brick Fanatics. “We had a lot of back and forth about that specifically.” In the end, the team chose to display them separately on the front of the box, but together on the back.

“Also, posing a mech can be quite challenging when you’re not super familiar with the model itself, so we needed to really make sure that the mech looked as cool and as imposing as possible on the front of the box,” Slagmaat adds. “That’s what people are going to be seeing for the first time, and that first impression is super important.”

4 – The bad guys ‘had a different name’ for a while

The new NINJAGO Dragons Rising baddies are named after the Imperium realm, which is ruled by Empress Beatrix (who pops up in a couple of the new sets). Known as the Imperium Dragon Hunters, they’re named things like ‘Imperium Claw General’ and ‘Imperium Guard Commander’. But according to Slagmaat, they didn’t carry those monikers until the last moment.

“The name Imperium was actually added very late, the designs were long done,” he tweeted. “They had a different name. We started with a sci-fi dragon hunting people – that’s why they have such a hi-tech yet aggressive and rugged design.”

3 – Lloyd’s mech was driven by looks as much as playability…

Where some LEGO sets prioritise aesthetic over play features, others put the play experience front and centre. Others still seek to strike a fine balance between the two, and it would be fair to file the majority of LEGO NINJAGO sets in that category.

71794 Lloyd and Arin’s Ninja Team Mechs sits somewhere between them all, still packing in plenty of play features – but never at the expense of its very particular aesthetic, which (between its ‘hat, cloak and sandals’) speaks to Lloyd’s role as a mentor in the Dragons Rising era. As you might imagine, that wasn’t easy to pull off.

“Making the cloak stable enough to hold on, but not impede movement or play, was one of the hardest parts about this model,” Slagmaat explains to Brick Fanatics. “It was very much an aesthetic-driven model, as opposed to a play-driven model, and that’s always a challenge to make those things work.”

2 – …and took a long time to get right

While some sets are ‘nailed on the first or second pass’, says Slagmaat, 71794 Lloyd and Arin’s Ninja Team Mechs took much longer to finalise – and for most of its development looked nothing like the finished product.

“This model was very much all over the place with its aesthetics until very late in the process, because it was an important model to get right,” he says. “We had a lot of different people trying to have a stab at it, and this is the final one we ended up with. [But] two months before the model was locked, it looked completely different.

“It was super short and squat and had a much more industrial vibe to it, until I realised that it wasn’t really working and people were gradually trying to make it into something else. I decided to just start from scratch and think about it from a completely unbiased point of view: what if I tried to solve this problem now in a different direction? And I took it into this and it worked out, thankfully.”

1 – Sora was designed in ‘every conceivable colour’

One of two new human hero characters joining the LEGO NINJAGO theme for Dragons Rising, Sora is a tinkerer who deserted the Imperium to forge her own creative path. Her personality is baked into 71792 Sora’s Transforming Mech Bike Racer, which bears a bold dark blue, white and coral colour scheme, and stickers that Slagmaat says represent a mix of racing sponsors and punk graffiti.

Arriving at Sora’s vivid colour scheme was apparently a tricky task in itself, which isn’t so surprising given it’s such a huge departure from the classic NINJAGO palette.

“It was a long process to get to what we have here,” Slagmaat explains. “We’ve had her in basically every conceivable colour at some point, but this is the colour that we ended up settling on. We have a lot of people in the building with a lot of opinions on colour, so we’ve had many, many meetings about this. And it was also about making sure we have enough variety within our products in our portfolio that we attract a lot of different people.”

You’ll be able to get your hands on all the new LEGO NINJAGO sets from June 1. Click here to take a closer look at all 14 new sets, or head here to read more from Slagmaat on designing 71794 Lloyd and Arin’s Ninja Team Mechs.

Every LEGO NINJAGO set confirmed for summer 2023

LEGO set	Price	Pieces	Release date
71777 Kai’s Dragon Power Spinjitzu Flip	£8.99 / $10.99 / €9.99	72	June 1, 2023
71778 Nya’s Dragon Power Spinjitzu Drift	£8.99 / $10.99 / €9.99	57	June 1, 2023
71779 Lloyd’s Dragon Power Spinjitzu Spin	£8.99 / $10.99 / €9.99	56	June 1, 2023
71789 Kai and Ras’s Car and Bike Battle	£18.99 / $19.99 / €20.99	103	June 1, 2023
71790 Imperium Dragon Hunter Hound	£18.99 / $19.99 / €20.99	198	June 1, 2023
71791 Zane’s Dragon Power Spinjitzu Race Car	£29.99 / $34.99 / €34.99	307	June 1, 2023
71792 Sora’s Transforming Mech Bike Racer	£42.99 / $47.99 / €47.99	384	June 1, 2023
71793 Heatwave Transforming Lava Dragon	£46.99 / $54.99 / €52.99	479	June 1, 2023
71794 Lloyd and Arin’s Ninja Team Mechs	£74.99 / $79.99 / €84.99	764	June 1, 2023
71795 Temple of the Dragon Energy Cores	£84.99 / $94.99 / €94.99	1,029	June 1, 2023
71796 Elemental Dragon vs. The Empress Mech	£94.99 / $129.99 / €104.99	1,038	June 1, 2023
71797 Destiny’s Bounty – race against time	£129.99 / $159.99 / €149.99	1,739	June 1, 2023
71798 Nya and Arin’s Baby Dragon Battle	£26.99 / $34.99 / €31.99	157	June 1, 2023
71799 NINJAGO City Markets	£319.99 / $369.99 / €369.99	6,163	June 1, 2023

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