suns

If he's really enjoying his lego and is beyond his age in terms of lego construction you could jointly get an awful lot out of selling the item and buying a mindstorms set - I'm saying this as I recently sold a few sets and did exactly this for the upcoming Christmas. Can't wait! This way it shows to your parents and your wife that he's getting something much greater in return... and you get to play too!

bagged a mindstorms for £168 from asda - personal use this time!

Hmm, that doesn't look too good - I'm taking it that 'welded' just means assembled, but the 'compatible' should ring plenty of alarm bells. I've already stocked up on the item... however, amazon's own price of £44.99 isn't too bad!

Don't know the date yet. However, the superheroes and ninjago are discounted already by 20% (and I bet they won't be as soon as the 20% discount throughout the store arrives) so I went for the BatCave and Temple of A with the extra discount. Incidentally, if you use the printed coupons in store, they may get shirty if you're buying more that one lot of items over the price limit (£20, £50 and £100) as it does say only one coupon per person/household per day. However, if you make the orders in separate lots online, even for click and collect, you can just keep going as many times as you want. I also did this for a few small sets to take it up to three lots just over £20. It say's free delivery over £29, but even though each of my batches came in under £20 with the discount they didn't charge me delivery. Just spent £300 I wasn't expecting to do! Oops!

Well for me it will always be the Master Wu Dragon - I know, more brickish than the others you may say, but I think he's a beaut!

Zilch on the UK store... as usual.

That's just fantastic - looks like it'll work a treat with the fairground mixer. There are a few other sets there - can you tell us what they are too?

Yep - but I love the excavator for the sheer unapologetic meat-headed way that it looks. Brutal! My christmas present to myself last year was the MK2 Crane. I suspect that's this year's christmas sorted.

Thumbs up from me for the Porsche, excavator and even the little (in comparison) vovlo above - love the pneumatics. Looks like 2016 might be a good year for technic.

Cheers Yellowtot, will make a visit tomorrow to see what I can get. Got the general grievous wheelbike for £10 a few months ago which was a happy surprise. You're right about ASDA - random and confusing - especially when the label name bears no resemblance to what is being sold. Had several deals over the past week. Bought several spider droid mini pack things - asda were £5.20, then popped over to Sainsbury's and they were under a fiver each. Also Ant Man is down to £15. One bit of advice for Asda - they very often get prices wrong. If they do, and the price you've been charged is higher, let it go through the till anyway, then trot over to customer services to get your refund. Asda have a policy that states that if they charge you too much they will give you a £2 gift card per receipt. Now, I know this isn't much, but it's something!

Oh, couriers... something else to add. Having being at the depot trying to collect various work-related packages over christmas - I can say that they don't handle your packages with kid gloves. Now, that doesn't mean that they kick them around the factory, but every time your package gets moved from one vehicle to a depot, to another vehicle, to another depot and finally to the van that will deliver is a time when it's going to get damaged, possibly. ALL packages get dropped/rolled from one conveyor belt onto another. Not far, and let's be fair here, it's not in the interest of the courier company to intentionally damage anything, but if it's not in a decent box and padded well you're asking for trouble. Delivery vans here tend to be not very full - more often than not, all the packages are lined up on the floor of the van with few stacked. However, the drivers do tend to let's say, energetically lob the packages from the front to the back of the vans when they're sorting them into an order. I'm going to end on an optimistic note though. We're dealing with an item that's not inherently fragile. The contents won't break or crack and the worst that can happen is a bashed box. At least you're not selling framed pictures or crockery!

Completely agree with this. I've found myself getting into the habit of perusing shops, but then ordering online (from the same retailer) if there's no difference in cost as you've effectively got the packaging for free and by and large things don't go wrong - and if they do you can just send it back. Once I've done a check, I just put it back in the box ready for storing, but also add extra packing that often comes with the smaller boxes. I ordered a parisian restaurant online from eBay not too long ago. Came from Germany. It was wrapped in a supermarket bag and packed into a too-big single walled flimsy box. No padding whatsoever. Suffice to say the outer box had holes in it on all four corners and the box was mashed in on one side. It went straight back, at the seller's expense. So like TheGallows says - if you're not sure it's packed well, spend a few quid making sure it is.

I wish you the best of luck. If I costed out the time I spent on this site at a penny per minute then I'd owe you hundreds of dollars for very helpful information, advice and opinion. I'm seeing this as a small thank you; nothing more, nothing less. I don't know why you've not had as much interest as you'd have expected - here in the UK there is some fundraising for schools but it's often low key and more to do with getting maybe £2K for a computer suite, sports equipment or something specific. There may be an issue with it being a catholic school (I dunno, not an issue for me - I'm a hindu/christian/not much of anything... long story) or it may be simply that people are just that bit grippy. So, I'm going to add my two pennies... come on people, $10 for a ticket! Have a punt. Do some good. Say thank you.

I concur - it looks lovely... but is overpriced. Should have been on sale here in the UK for £20... but I can imagine the discussion. If you compare it to the space needle, or even the purchase price of one of the TRU bricktober modulars (either free with a purchase of over £45 I think, or £15 on it's own), it just looks more substantial than it actually is. At the moment there seems to be very little discount here on ANY Lego set worth looking at, but in the months to come I would expect these to drop from their RRP. Nevertheless, it's a good move by Lego - produce three cityscape sets (at the moment), and there's a big likelihood that you're going to want to get them all. I've always seen the Architecture series as somewhat niche (which is why I'm attracted to them)... this looks like Lego widening the appeal of the series.

cheers from me also - managed to bag two to collect from the local store - that brings me up to 5 which is my limit

just bought the last one in the area (scotland - Aberdeen) for £110 at local store. Very very happy. Box was damaged slightly, but this is a build for me, so utterly delighted. Now I have one to build and one to save. Just had a look at the bags... what an immense set and great value for money!

I envy you guys. Here in the UK we seem to have the paltry sum of 10 items on sale (including a book), and that's it! We do get an extra 5% off when we spend £100 or more, but all in this is a pretty poor show. Discounts are between 5 and 10% which is pretty rubbish.

Any data for other countries (I'm GB, but would be good to know the rest also just to compare)?

That's interesting. I know this is all speculation, but I have a feeling Pet Shop is on it's way out (bought 4, one to build, which as a modest investor is my limit). Do you think the PC will be the next to go? I like the look of it, but not everybody does.

What a great bunch of people you are - genuinely glad of your advice. Many thanks.

Thanks Jersey Crewmax - both those sets look pretty good - think I may hold out for a potential discount for black friday. I seem to remember that the AROCS was discounted previously - should've gone for it then. What the consensus on Remote-Controlled VOLVO L350F Wheel Loader (42030)? I'm drawn to that primarily because of the many motors and remote control but has anyone had hands on experience of the build? Downside I can see is it's all yellow and black bricks.

Can anyone recommend a good large set to buy? When I was young, the technic tractor / truck set was my favourite and I still have fond memories of it... well, actually, I dug it out and built the truck only 3 weeks ago! I've been buying several sets (mainly modulars etc.) to sell in the future, but this one would be (a) to build and then (b) possibly to sell as used so looking primarily for something which is an interesting build first and foremost followed by something which has enough unusual and interesting parts that it would have a reasonable value on the secondary market.

Excellent - thanks for letting me know, and keep up the good work Jeff!

Hi, maybe I'm doing something wrong, but since the site update all I can see in the value guide graph is a flat line as the date is set to 1970. I'm assuming that I can set the range of this to look at new and no-so-new sets and their performances over specified time frames, but I can's see how to. Here's what I'm seeing:

Parisian restaurant for £107 inc. delivery. Not too shabby. Almost - really almost - got detective's office but by the time the payment process was underway it had gone. Still, happy with the saving I made.