LEGO Ideas 21343 Viking Village pairs better than you’d expect with 31132 Viking Ship

See how well the newly-revealed LEGO Ideas 21343 Viking Village pairs with last year’s 31132 Viking Ship and the Midgard Serpent – and whether it’s worth grabbing the Creator set while you can.

The latest LEGO Ideas set is based on two different projects by fan designer BrickHammer, and is available to pre-order right now at LEGO.com (with a shipping date of October 1, 2023). While you wait for your copy to turn up, though, the question to ask yourself is whether it’s also worth picking up 31132 Viking Ship and the Midgard Serpent if you don’t own it already.

Released last summer, the ode to 2005’s 7018 Viking Ship challenges the Midgard Serpent is the third example of a retro line resurrected under the Creator 3-in-1 banner, following 31109 Pirate Ship and 31120 Medieval Castle. While neither of those sets are going anywhere anytime soon, the LEGO Vikings tribute is currently scheduled to retire by the end of 2023, only a couple of months after 21343 Viking Village arrives.

If you’ve had your eye on 31132 Viking Ship and the Midgard Serpent, will the launch of 21343 Viking Village be the catalyst to finally grab it before it’s gone? To answer that question, we’ve paired our review copy of the new LEGO Ideas set with its Creator 3-in-1 sibling – and the results are actually better than you might have expected.

That’s partly because the LEGO Group has moved away from the anticipated dark browns and greys of BrickHammer’s original Viking Village design in favour of the more saturated colours of his later version, which reached 10,000 votes just before his first submission topped a Target poll to give a rejected LEGO Ideas project a second chance.

The result is a colour scheme that better matches the brighter hues of the longship, from the reddish browns that comprise the base of both sets to the village’s red and white banner colours that mirror the boat’s sails. It’s not quite perfect – the flame-yellowish figurehead and tail would look better in warm gold, for example – but what was a very real possibility of an extreme aesthetic clash has been softened to a degree.

21343 Viking Village is obviously still substantially more sophisticated in its execution (by virtue of both its increased piece count and its 18+ label), but the difference in detail isn’t as jarring as it could have been, and means that these sets do actually sit pretty nicely on a shelf together. It helps too that the village is still presented as an island surrounded by water, so a boat seems like a logical addition.

Perhaps the biggest sticking point between the two sets is their size – the longship is massive next to the village, and while it does look cool from certain viewpoints when docked alongside it, you need to get up close to appreciate that effect. Zoom further out, and the disparity in size (though not scale) becomes more apparent. Still, there’s a relatively easy (if not inexpensive) solution to that: combine multiple copies of the Ideas set and build a bigger village.

The Midgard Serpent works surprisingly well with 21343 Viking Village too, if only because the blend of historical fact and fiction in the Ideas set lends itself to the format of the original mid-‘00s LEGO Vikings theme, which saw Viking warriors face off against mythological beasts. The village, ship and serpent all together make for a display geared more towards Norse mythology than historical accuracy, but if you have any kind of nostalgia for the classic Vikings sets, that’s probably what you’re after anyway.

And if not, you can always leave the serpent behind. Either way, the result is that 21343 Viking Village and 31132 Viking Ship and the Midgard Serpent actually come together very nicely for a dramatic Viking display, so if you’re planning to pick up the Ideas set when it launches on October 1 – or have already pre-ordered – make sure you don’t miss out on its Creator 3-in-1 counterpart. It could feasibly sell out anytime between now and December 31, so the clock is (unfortunately) ticking.

Click here to check out our complete review of 21343 Viking Village, or head here to read our review of 31132 Viking Ship and the Midgard Serpent. The 51st LEGO Ideas set launches October 1 for £124.99 / $129.99 / €139.99, and is available to pre-order now.

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