City

Capital City

A whole downtown in one box, with thirteen minifigures and real variety.

Brick Rated Score

3.8/5

Set 60200 · 2018

Pieces1,211

Minifigs13

Year2018

Set number60200

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The verdict

This is the closest LEGO City has come to handing you an instant downtown, and the thirteen minifigures alone make it hard to walk past.

It's nine little builds rather than one showstopper, so if you want a single detailed landmark you'll feel the trade. But for populating a city floor with people, vehicles, and businesses in one go, few sets do more. I came around to it the moment I had the whole street laid out together.

Best for: City-layout builders who want a populated downtown in a single box

The full review

What it is

Capital City is LEGO City doing the thing it does best, which is handing you a lot of stuff at once. This LEGO® set is 1,211 pieces split across nine separate builds, so instead of one big landmark you get a whole slice of downtown that you can spread across a table and rearrange however you like. There's a two-story boutique hotel with a rooftop terrace and a revolving door, a double-decker sightseeing bus with a removable top level, a museum, a fast-food kiosk, an electric car charging station, a skate ramp with a basketball hoop and climbing wall, a sports car, an ice cream tuk-tuk, and a construction crane with a moving arm. And then there are the people. Thirteen minifigures, every single one exclusive to this box, which for a City set is genuinely generous.

The catch

Here's the honest part, and it's the same note nearly every reviewer landed on. The buildings are shallow. The hotel and the kiosk have open, unfinished backs, and the museum is essentially a frame around a single caveman display with a lot of empty air inside it. City has always favored width over depth, and this set leans hard that way. You're getting nine builds, but none of them is going to floor you the way a modular or a bigger single structure would. The ice cream tuk-tuk also has a couple of loose studs that like to fall out, which is a small thing but an annoying one on an otherwise fun little vehicle. The original price of 149.99 felt steep to some people for what amounts to a pile of medium builds, though the per-piece math actually works out fine.

Who it's for

So who should grab this one. If you already run a LEGO City on a shelf or a play table and you want to fill it fast with businesses, vehicles, and a crowd of people, this is close to the most efficient way to do it. The minifigure variety alone (a bellhop, a street musician with a guitar, a traffic cop, construction workers, a caveman, a tourist with a camera) gives you a real cast to work with. If you're after one carefully detailed centerpiece to build slowly and display, this isn't that, and you'd be happier elsewhere. But taken for what it is, a populated downtown in a single box, it does the job with room to spare. It won me over slowly, once everything was standing together as one street.

The parts story

What the build is actually like, and the pieces worth knowing about.

Building this is less a single journey and more nine short ones, which is either a plus or a minus depending on your mood. The bags break the set into digestible chunks, so you finish the sports car, then the tuk-tuk, then the crane, and each one gives you a little hit of completion. Reviewers clocked it around four hours total. The construction crane with its moving arm is the standout build and genuinely satisfying to put together. The double-decker bus is clever too, with a lift-off upper deck so you can pose figures inside, though the interior gets cramped fast. The hotel is the tallest piece at over nine inches, and its revolving door lobby is the one bit of architecture here that feels a step above basic City fare. Nothing in the box is technically demanding, which tracks with the 6-plus age rating, but the sheer number of separate models keeps the pacing lively rather than repetitive.

On the parts front, the real story is the minifigures and their accessories. Thirteen figures, all exclusive, with two genuinely unique prints: the museum caveman torso and the hotel bellhop uniform. Between them the figures bring a spear, a jackhammer, a crowbar, a wheelbarrow, a guitar, a microphone, a camera, a skateboard, hotdogs, a pizza, and more, so the accessory haul is a small treasure chest on its own. The printed signage scattered through the builds is a favorite among custom builders who raid this set for city-scene detailing. As a parts pack the value holds up well, roughly 15 cents a brick and a 93-to-1 brick-to-minifig ratio, which is why plenty of people buy it as much for the figures and small parts as for the buildings themselves.

Fun facts

01Every one of the thirteen minifigures is exclusive to this set, an unusually generous figure count for a standard LEGO City box.
02The museum's caveman exhibit is a quiet nod to the Arctic exploration City sets released around the same time, where a frozen caveman was a running storyline.
03It retired in December 2019 after about 18 months on shelves, and sealed copies have since climbed above their 149.99 launch price, trading around 180 to 200 dollars.
04The set is really nine separate builds in one box, from a working-armed crane to a double-decker tour bus with a removable upper deck, rather than a single connected cityscape.