The LEGO Tropical Aquarium is beautiful. It might not be $480 beautiful, but for the right person with the right amount of disposable income, the price might not matter. The person who owns a set like this one might be older or might have been gifted it. They might be part of the emerging LEGO-as-lifestyle audience, the same audience that would buy LEGO wall art or LEGO flowers that integrate into the living space. The LEGO Tropical Aquarium has a trendy pop art appeal that LEGO’s more play-intensive sets lack.
LEGO Tropical Aquarium
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Available November 13 for LEGO Insiders, and November 16 for all.
The tank’s dimensions are 14 inches high, 20.5 inches wide, and 11 inches deep; were this a real tank, it would hold approximately 13-and-a-half gallons of water. You build the black framed edges of the tank, the floor of the tank (which is designed to look like sand), and the background scenery of the tank (a blue, aquatic backdrop decked with little waves and bubbles). You’re not building the glass that forms the tank itself. But when you look at the aquarium from a small distance, the scenery does some heavy lifting, and your brain concludes that all the negative space is water. It’s a cool optical illusion that enhances the set’s attractiveness; I can easily imagine people doing double takes when walking past it.
Building the tank itself is straightforward – you layer bricks to establish tactile strength and build notches to “fit” and strengthen the connection points. But the most fun parts of the build are the tank’s inhabitants: the fish, crustacean, rocks, coral, seaweed, anemones, and thematic elements that the LEGO designers thoughtfully arranged into a colorful pastiche.
The closest equivalent to building the LEGO Tropical Aquarium scenery is building one of the LEGO Botanical sets. Like the flowers in a bouquet, the coral is also composed of numerous colorful pieces, which are arranged in symmetrical, circular patterns. It is a redundant process, admittedly. But the variety of coral means you’re never building one formation for too long before you’re moving on to the next one. My favorite part of the scenery are the sea anemones, which sprout from the rock facade like a bouquet of poisonous flowers.
The animals do not have real-life equivalents. They bear strong resemblance to actual species, but LEGO is content to refer to them as “brickfish” in their promotional materials. A fanciful approach allows the LEGO designers to play with size and scale. Looking at this aquarium feels like looking at one through a magnifying glass; everything is larger than life. The entire tank seems a little more crowded than it ought to; there’s no way that a fish of such large proportions could navigate a tank this small.. But the variety and aesthetic impact overrides practical quibbles.
Each animal and type of corral gets its own plastic bag, which makes it easy to divide the work among multiple friends or family members. You build an element, install it into the tank, and then build the next element; there is no sequential necessity to any of it. This is the sort of set that, owing to its diverse yet isolated elements, lends itself to collaboration.
There are several mechanical functions built into the tank. The rocks hide built-in gearboxes, rods, and pins, which allow you to animate four different elements by turning a crank or dial. A crab emerges from its cave. A massive fish waves its tail and torso. A cluster of orange coral sways in the waves. And a treasure chest, half buried in the sand, opens and closes. Inside the chest are gold bars and a note in a corked bottle.
As an 11th grade high school English teacher, I read a lot of college essays, and one of my students wrote a particularly memorable one this year. He detailed his efforts to incorporate a freshwater fish tank into his bedroom. For him, it was a lesson in patience, consistency, and long-term planning – of realizing there is a league’s difference between creating something wonderful and maintaining that thing for an extended length of time.
The LEGO Tropical Aquarium is a stress-free alternative to the real thing – for people who want the ambience but not the ongoing costs and labor that go into establishing a nitrogen cycle and minimizing algae growth, not to mention cleaning the tank itself.
LEGO Tropical Aquarium, Set #10366, retails for $479.99, and it is composed of 4154 pieces. It is available exclusively at the LEGO Store.
Kevin Wong is a contributing freelancer for IGN, specializing in LEGO. He’s also been published in Complex, Engadget, Gamespot, Kotaku, and more. Follow him on Twitter at @kevinjameswong.
