Creator

Iconic Pirate Ship

A charming 3-in-1 pirate ship with two female pirates and real swashbuckle.

Brick Rated Score

4.0/5

Set 31387 · 2026

Pieces1,074

Minifigs5

Year2026

Set number31387

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The verdict

This one won me over slowly.

It's smaller than the pirate ships you might remember, and it leans on regular bricks instead of the big pre-molded hull pieces, so at first I missed the drama. Then the little octopus with its life-preserver eyes and the two proper female pirates got me, and I stopped comparing it to the past. If you want a playable pirate ship with three builds in one box and you're okay with it being cheerful rather than enormous, it's a lovely time.

Best for: Pirate-loving families who want three builds and real play value from one box

The full review

What it is

The Iconic Pirate Ship (31387) is the latest LEGO® set to fly the skull and crossbones, a 1,074-piece Creator 3-in-1 that landed in June 2026 for 109.99 US dollars. It's a follow-up to the much-loved 31109 Pirate Ship from 2020, and it arrives with a mission: give you a proper swashbuckling ship, plus two alternate builds, plus enough crew to actually play. The headline ship has an elegant tapering hull, a captain's cabin with walls that open up so you can reach inside, and a brick-built octopus lurking alongside. It's designed by Gregoire Germain, and you can feel the care in how the three hull sections click together and how much personality got packed into a fairly modest footprint.

The catch

Here's where I'll be straight with you. If you grew up with the big pirate ships, this one is smaller. The hull runs 13 studs wide and 43 studs long, which is a real step down from the older Pirates-theme giants, and the ship is even a touch smaller than the 31109 it replaces. LEGO also swapped a lot of the specialized parts you might expect. The masts are brick-built around Technic axles instead of dedicated mast pieces, the sails are plate-built mosaics with a skull design rather than cloth sails with rigging, and the colours are softer and more muted than the punchy older sets. There's no government crew to fight against either, so the conflict-play angle is gone. And because it's a 3-in-1, only one model exists at a time. When you want to rebuild into the lair or the twin ships, you'll spend a while digging for the right pieces, which is the usual Creator trade-off but worth knowing.

Who it's for

So who is this really for? If you love pirates and you want play value more than a display centerpiece, grab it without hesitation. Three builds from one box is genuinely good value, the five minifigures are the best part (two female pirates finally, a moustachioed captain with a peg leg, and a skeleton), and the mix-and-match printed torsos and faces mean kids can invent their own crew. If you were hoping for a massive, cloth-sailed, shelf-dominating galleon like the classics, this isn't that, and you might feel the shrink. But taken on its own terms as a cheerful, hands-on, rebuild-friendly pirate set, it's very good. The octopus alone, with those little life-preserver rings around trans-green dome eyes, made me grin. Come for the ship, stay for the crew, and don't compare it too hard to the ghosts of pirate ships past.

The parts story

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

Building it is a friendly, logical experience that starts with the octopus, which comes together from red elephant-trunk elements wrapped around a violet round frame, a sweet little warm-up before the ship. The hull arrives in three modular sections that come together smoothly, built mostly from standard bricks rather than any special ship mold, so nothing about it feels fussy or fragile. From there you build the masts around Technic axles, add the plate-built sails with their skull-and-crossbones mosaic, and finish the captain's cabin, which has walls that swing open for play access. It's rated 9 and up, and the pacing is gentle throughout, more relaxing than technical, which suits a set that's really about play at the end.

For parts, the fun is in the details rather than a big shiny new mold. The octopus eyes use trans-bright-green domes ringed by red life preservers, which is a genuinely clever bit of parts usage, and there's a medium nougat flexi-tube doing rigging duty plus a Technic connector standing in as the ship's wheel. The five minifigures carry a lot of the value, with the two female pirates, the peg-leg captain and the skeleton all sharing interchangeable printed torsos, legs and faces (the reviewer at Rambling Brick counted well over 200 crew combinations if you swap parts around). At 1,074 pieces for 109.99 US dollars you're paying right around ten cents a piece, which is fair for a licensed-feeling theme, and the three-in-one nature stretches that further since you're really getting three sets of instructions from one pile of bricks.

Fun facts

01The set is a direct successor to the popular 31109 Pirate Ship from 2020, and it's actually slightly smaller than that model despite arriving six years later.
02It was designed by LEGO designer Gregoire Germain and released on June 1, 2026.
03Instead of a single pre-molded sea creature, the octopus is entirely brick-built, using red elephant-trunk pieces for tentacles and trans-green domes ringed by life preservers for eyes.
04The three alternate builds from the same 1,074 bricks are the main pirate ship, a buccaneer's lair with a tower, pier and palm tree, and a pair of smaller twin ships.