Seasonal

Friends Advent Calendar 2018

The year the Friends calendar quietly became a box of tiny ornaments.

Brick Rated Score

3.4/5

Set 41353 · 2018

Pieces500

Minifigsn/a

Year2018

Set number41353

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The verdict

This is the odd one out in the Friends advent lineup, and I have complicated feelings about it.

Instead of a scattering of little scenes and a mini-doll, every one of the 24 doors here opens onto a buildable Christmas tree ornament, which is why the piece count jumped to 500, more than double the year before. The builds are genuinely charming and the ornaments are keepable in a way most calendar minis never are. But there is no mini-doll and no animal anywhere in the box, and if that is the moment a kid looks forward to, this one is going to land flat.

Best for: A LEGO-loving household that wants ornaments they will actually hang on the tree, not another mini-doll

The full review

What it is

The thing that makes this calendar interesting is also the thing that gets it in trouble. Somebody at LEGO decided the 2018 Friends calendar should be 24 Christmas tree ornaments, one per door, and honestly the results are lovely. You get a red heart, a guitar painted up in Andrea's colours, a little camera in Emma's palette, bright yellow bells, a snowman, a reindeer, a candy cane, a gingerbread man, a fireplace with a stocking and a tiny nutcracker, and a candle centerpiece. Each one is a proper miniature that earns its place on a real tree, which is more than I can say for the disposable little sleds and coffee cups you usually find behind these doors. The build got me by around day five, when I realised I actually wanted to keep everything.

The catch

Here is where I have to be straight with you. There is no mini-doll in this box. There is no animal either. For a lot of families, opening a Friend or a little pet on day one is the whole ritual, and this is the only Friends calendar that skips it entirely. LEGO even listed a Santa mini-doll and four animals in the early September description, then shipped it without any of them, which stung people who pre-ordered. At 30 dollars it was priced the same as calendars that gave you a figure, so you are paying ornament money and getting ornament value, no more. A handful of the daily builds also have instructions that are fussier than they should be for small hands, and by the third week the ornament format does start to feel same-y.

Who it's for

So who is this for. If you want ornaments you will actually reach for every December, and you care more about keepable little builds than about a doll, this is a quietly great buy, especially now that it sits around its original price on the secondary market. If there is a child in the picture who lives for that day-one figure reveal, skip it and grab a different Friends year, because no amount of clever ornament design makes up for the missing friend. It is a good set with one very specific hole in the middle of it.

The parts story

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

Building this is a slower, tidier affair than most advent calendars, because each door is a self-contained ornament rather than a five-piece throwaway. Some days you get eight or ten pieces and a genuinely satisfying little sequence, which is a nice change from the usual snap-two-bricks-together routine. The trade-off is that a few builds lean on small clip and bar connections that younger kids found tricky, and the printed instructions for a couple of days were vague enough to cause a pause. Nothing a grown-up cannot sort out in a minute, but worth knowing if this is meant to be a solo morning activity.

For parts, 500 pieces at this price is the real story, more than double the 2017 calendar in the same footprint. You get a satisfying spread of small decorative elements, plenty of round tiles and cheese slopes in festive reds, greens and golds, and a lot of the little clips and bars that ornament builds live on. Nothing here is a rare grail piece, but the sheer variety of small colourful parts makes it a quietly useful pot for anyone who builds their own micro-scale or does custom ornaments, and the yellow bells and lantern in particular pack away some genuinely clever parts geometry.

Fun facts

01This is the first and only LEGO Friends advent calendar to ship with no mini-doll and no animal figure at all.
02At 500 pieces it packed more than twice as many parts as the 2017 Friends calendar, thanks to the switch to full buildable ornaments.
03LEGO's early September product description promised a Santa mini-doll plus four animal figures, none of which made it into the final box.
04Every one of the 24 ornaments is themed around Christmas or the five Heartlake City Friends, including builds in Andrea's and Emma's signature colours.