Harry Potter

Hogwarts Magical Trunk

A pile of mix-and-match minifig parts hiding inside a school trunk.

Brick Rated Score

3.6/5

Set 76399 · 2022

Pieces602

Minifigs6

Year2022

Set number76399

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The verdict

This one surprised me, because the trunk itself is the least interesting thing in the box.

What got me was the little bag of torsos, heads, legs and hairpieces you spill out and remix into your own Hogwarts students, including a brand new medium brown skin tone that LEGO debuted right here. If you want a display piece it will let you down, and the price stings for what you get. But for a kid who wants to invent characters and act out the Sorting, it is a small joy.

Best for: younger Harry Potter fans who love inventing their own characters and playing out scenes

The full review

What it is

The Hogwarts Magical Trunk is a play set pretending to be a display set, and it is much happier once you stop expecting the second thing. You build a chunky purple school trunk with a working key and a Hogwarts crest keychain, and it folds open to reveal three swappable rooms: the Sorting Ceremony with the Sorting Hat, a Great Hall feast, and a cozy Common Room. The accessories are the fun kind, potions, a cauldron, the Marauder's Map, Bertie Bott's beans, The Quibbler, goblets and an owl. The whole build runs about an hour and it keeps handing you techniques you did not expect from a set aimed at kids.

The catch

I have to be straight with you about the value, though, because it is the thing most reviewers flagged and they were right. Six hundred pieces for a $64.99 launch price is not a lot of brick for the money, and a big chunk of those pieces are minifigure parts rather than structure. The trunk itself is also only about three quarters finished by design, so the back edge just stops when you close it, which looks a bit awkward from every angle. Then there are the 37 stickers, some repeated, some dotted onto plain tiles more or less wherever you fancy. If applying random stickers to loose tiles makes your eye twitch, this build will test you.

Who it's for

So who should actually get this. If you are chasing detailed Hogwarts architecture, spend your money on one of the bigger castle sets and skip this entirely, because it will disappoint you as a shelf piece. But if there is a young Harry Potter fan in your life who lights up at the idea of building their own witch or wizard, mixing skin tones and hair and house colours into characters that are theirs, this is quietly wonderful. It is a toy first and proud of it. Go in wanting play, not a centrepiece, and you will be glad you did.

The parts story

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

Building the trunk is more clever than it looks. It is a hinged shell that unfolds into three room settings, so a lot of the assembly is about connections and reconfiguration rather than stacking walls, and that makes for a genuinely engaging hour. The stickering is the drag, with a fair number of tiles to decorate by hand, but the folding mechanism and the little furnished scenes inside are the payoff. The real event, though, is tipping out the minifigure parts and realising you are not following instructions, you are casting characters.

That parts bin is the reason to own this. You get Harry Potter and Professor McGonagall as fixed figures, plus enough torsos, double sided heads and hairpieces to assemble four more students and remix them endlessly, five torsos, eleven heads and seventeen hairpieces in the mix, many of them brand new moulds and prints. The headline part is the medium brown skin tone, which made its very first LEGO appearance in this set as part of the widest spread of skin tones LEGO had put in a box up to then. For customisers and minifig collectors, that alone can justify the purchase.

Fun facts

01This set was the debut of LEGO's medium brown skin tone colour, which at launch appeared only on a couple of minifigure heads here.
02You can only build six minifigures at once, but the box gives you five torsos, eleven heads and seventeen hairpieces to remix into different Hogwarts students.
03The trunk opens up with an actual key on a Hogwarts crest keychain and folds open into three separate room scenes.
04It launched on 1 March 2022 and retired in December 2023 after a shelf life of roughly one year and nine months.