Ninjago

Micro NINJAGO City Markets

A tiny slice of Ninjago City that was never meant to stand alone.

Brick Rated Score

3.8/5

Set 40706 · 2024

Pieces365

Minifigsn/a

Year2024

Set number40706

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The verdict

This one snuck up on me.

It's a gift with purchase, so nobody bought it expecting a showpiece, and then you open the bag and there's a little canal boat, a lifting bridge, and a market building all crammed into 365 pieces at a scale where every brick is doing three jobs at once. I love that LEGO keeps building out this micro Ninjago City skyline piece by piece instead of just selling one more giant modular. It is not a set to hunt down on the secondary market on its own merits, but if you already have the docks set from the year before, this is the one that makes the display click into place.

Best for: Ninjago City collectors who already own the earlier micro GWP sets and want the skyline to keep growing

The full review

What it is

I'll be honest about what this is before I get into what I liked. Micro NINJAGO City Markets is a LEGO Insiders reward, not a retail set, and it showed up as a threshold gift with certain Ninjago purchases in mid 2024. That context matters, because it changes what you should expect walking in. What you get for 365 pieces is a compact chunk of the Ninjago City waterfront: a little canal boat, a lifting bridge, and a market and restaurant building, all rendered at the same micro scale LEGO used for the earlier Ninjago City Docks GWP. The bridge is the piece that got me. It doesn't actually move, but the way it's built makes it read as a drawbridge mid-lift, and that kind of visual trick at this tiny scale takes real design discipline.

The catch

The honest caveats are about access and scope, not build quality. This was never sold as a standalone set, so if you didn't hit the spending threshold during its promotional window, you are now shopping resale listings, and those prices can run well past what the piece count would normally justify. There are no minifigures here either, which is standard for these micro city pieces but still worth knowing going in if you're expecting little ninjas to pose around the docks. And because it's designed to slot into a bigger skyline, a single copy on its own can feel like a nice but slight afternoon build rather than a statement set.

Who it's for

Get this one if you already have the earlier Micro Ninjago City pieces and you're building out the full waterfront display, or if you just love clever micro-scale engineering and don't mind paying a premium for something that was free once upon a time. Skip it if you want a set with minifigures to play with, or if you're not already invested in the Ninjago City collection, because on its own it's a nice little add-on rather than a must-have.

The parts story

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

Building this is a lesson in restraint. At micro scale there's no room for filler, so every section, the boat hull, the bridge towers, the market stalls, has to read clearly from a few studs away, and the instructions lean on stacking small plates and tiles in ways that force you to slow down and actually look at what you're making rather than just following steps on autopilot. It's a shorter build than the piece count might suggest simply because so much of it is fine detail work rather than big structural sections.

The standout for me is the bridge assembly, which uses angled plates and a hinge-adjacent technique to suggest a lifting span without any actual moving parts, a classic bit of LEGO sleight of hand. The little market awning uses recolored slope pieces that give it real texture against the flatter dockside sections, and the canal boat's hull shape is tighter and more convincing than you'd expect from this few bricks. Since it's a promotional set rather than a retail one, there's no traditional value math to run here, part for part it's simple but purposeful, and the real value is in how it completes the wider micro city display.

Fun facts

01Micro NINJAGO City Markets was distributed as a LEGO Insiders gift with qualifying Ninjago purchases starting in mid 2024, not sold as a standalone retail set
02It was designed by LEGO designer Chi Wing Lee
03The set continues LEGO's ongoing Micro Ninjago City collection, following Micro NINJAGO City Docks from the prior year, with each release adding another slice of the same miniature skyline
04Brickset's community rated it 4.0 out of 5 stars across 50 ratings despite it never being a purchasable set in its own right