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Lion Knights' Castle

The dream Castle set old-school fans spent decades waiting for.

4.7/5

Set 10305 · 2022

Pieces4,515

Minifigs22

Year2022

Set number10305

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The verdict

If you grew up with grey-and-yellow castles and lion crests, this is basically your childhood upsized and done properly.

It's a genuinely brilliant build with 22 minifigs, zero stickers, and clever techniques packed into every wall. The catch is the price and the sheer size, so it's really for committed Castle fans and display collectors rather than someone after a casual weekend build. If that's you though, it's about as good as licensed-free LEGO castles get.

Best for: Nostalgic Castle-era fans who want the definitive grey fortress on display

The full review

Let me set the scene. This LEGO® set is the castle old-timers had been begging LEGO to make for years, dropped in 2022 to mark the company's 90th birthday and voted for by more than 55,000 fans on the LEGO Ideas platform. It's a love letter to the classic grey-and-yellow Castle era, and it wears that heart on its sleeve, right down to a Lion Knights' Queen leading the charge instead of a king. At 4,514 pieces it's the biggest Castle set LEGO has ever made, and it doesn't just sit there looking pretty. It splits into two halves you can clip together or pull apart, and the whole thing folds open like a dollhouse so you can poke around inside.

And there's a lot inside. You get hidden passages, movable walls, a working drawbridge and portcullis, a mill with a turning waterwheel, an armory, living quarters, and a cheeky underground cave that only reveals its Forestmen when you separate the two castle sections. It's stuffed with the kind of details that reward you for actually playing with it rather than just parking it on a shelf. The 22 minifigs cover Lion Knights, a small band of Black Falcons, Forestmen, peasants, a skeleton and a wizard, plus five animals including horses and a cow.

Now the honest bit. That price is a lot to swallow, and it's the single thing every reviewer keeps circling back to. The build is huge, so if you want a quick evening's fun this isn't it, expect several sessions or a full week if you savour it. The minifigs, while plentiful, only get one torso-and-leg design per faction, so line them up and they look a bit samey. There's no proper throne hall, which feels like a miss for a castle this grand, and poor Majisto the wizard got landed with completely unprinted robes.

So who should grab it? If you're a Castle-era romantic who wants the definitive grey fortress on display, or a builder who loves clever old-school brick techniques, this is an easy yes and you'll grin the whole way through. If you're more of a casual builder, or you bounce off big repetitive-ish sections and a steep price, you'll probably be happier elsewhere. It retired at the end of 2025, so prices on the secondary market have already climbed above RRP, which makes it more of a collector's grab now than a casual pickup. For the right person though, it's one of the most satisfying non-licensed sets LEGO has put out.

The parts story

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

Building this is a proper old-school job in the best sense: bricks stacked on bricks, barely any Technic beyond a few gears, and a steady stream of clever techniques to pull off all those castle angles and textures. You work through it in modular chunks, the two big castle halves plus the outer structures like the mill and the gatehouse, so it never feels like an endless slog of the same wall over and over. Reviewers describe the techniques as a step up even for a set this size, with sneaky angled sections and sideways building giving the stonework real character rather than flat grey slabs. It's the kind of build where you keep stopping to work out how they did something.

On the parts front, the headline is that there isn't a single sticker in all 4,514 pieces, so every printed detail is factory-crisp, which is rare and lovely at this scale. You're swimming in useful grey and dark-grey masonry elements, arches, and slopes that castle MOC builders would happily buy the set just to harvest. Queen Lionne is the standout fig with an exclusive printed torso, printed legs, a crown and a fabric cape bearing the Lion Knights' sigil. Add 22 minifigs, five animal figures and that mountain of neutral parts, and even at the high price the piece-count value genuinely stacks up for anyone who builds beyond the instructions.

Fun facts

01The set was chosen by a poll of over 55,000 fans and released to celebrate LEGO's 90th anniversary in 2022.
02Its packaging nods to the past with references to 1978's set 375 Castle, 1987's 6066 Camouflaged Outpost, and 2009's 10193 Medieval Market Village, and reuses three of the four logos from the original 375 Castle sticker sheet.
03It's the largest LEGO Castle set ever made, and designers have said the original concept was even bigger before it got scaled back.
04The manual's trivia jokingly notes wizard Majisto has finally returned in a body after 28 years without one, and there's a tiny brick-built micro version of the castle with a working door hidden in the child's room.