Creator

Pirate Roller Coaster

A proper working coaster with a skull archway, a shark car, and a splash of pirate silliness.

Brick Rated Score

4.2/5

Set 31084 · 2018

Pieces923

Minifigs4

Year2018

Set number31084

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The verdict

This one won me over faster than I expected.

It is a real working roller coaster with those clacky track pieces LEGO only started making in 2017, dressed up with a sunken galleon, a swinging skull, an octopus and a shark-shaped car. The catch is that it is not motorized, so you push the car up the first hill yourself, and the actual whooshing section is over quicker than you want. If you love theme-park builds and playable features, though, it earns its keep and then some.

Best for: theme-park fans who want a real working coaster with pirate flavor

The full review

What it is

The first time I clicked that last piece of track into place and let the shark car go, I actually grinned. This is a Creator 3-in-1 from 2018 built around the roller coaster track system LEGO had only introduced the year before, and it puts that track to genuinely fun use. The main model is a pirate-themed coaster loaded with atmosphere: a sunken galleon leaning out of the base, a skull archway, a palm tree, a little octopus, and a shark-shaped car that carries your minifigures through the whole circuit. There is a water splash feature at the bottom of the drop and a cannon that fires a water element, and honestly it is the sort of set that makes you want to run the car around a few dozen times before you even start photographing it. It measures about 25 inches wide once assembled, so it has real presence on a shelf or a play table.

The catch

I will be straight with you about the two things that hold it back. First, it is not motorized. You lift the car and push it up the first hill by hand every time, and after a while your inner nine-year-old wishes there was a crank or a motor doing that job for you. Second, the genuinely fast part of the ride, the bit you build the whole thing for, is short. The car gets its satisfying whoosh and then it is basically done, and for a lot of the loop you are nudging it along yourself. There is also a swinging skull decoration that likes to smack riding minifigures right in the face, which is either a bug or the funniest feature in the box depending on your mood. At its original 84.99 dollar price the piece count felt fair rather than generous, and now that it is retired you are looking at closer to 130 dollars on the secondary market.

Who it's for

So who is this actually for. If you are drawn to fairground and theme-park builds, or you have a kid in that 9 to 14 range who wants a toy they can play with rather than just display, this is a joy and the manual push barely registers next to how good the finished coaster looks and feels. The three-in-one nature helps too, because the Ship Ride and the tilting Skull Ride give you something new to build when the coaster loses its shine. If you are strictly an adult display collector chasing sleek engineering and hands-off automation, this is not that set, and the short fast section may leave you a little cold. For everyone else, it is one of the more purely fun Creator sets of its era.

The parts story

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

Building this takes a little under four hours at an unhurried pace, and it never feels like a slog because the sections are so varied. You build the sturdy base and the galleon and the scenery, then you lay the track, and there is a real satisfaction to snapping those long curved and straight coaster rails together and testing the run as you go. Reviewers consistently mention how solid the finished thing is; you can pick the whole coaster up and carry it around and it holds together, which matters for a set this playable. The instructions move you through it cleanly and the payoff at the end, sending the car down for the first time, is one of the better finishes in the Creator line.

The stars here are the roller coaster track elements themselves, which were still new and exciting in 2018 and are the reason to buy this set for parts. You get a healthy stack of the curved and straight rails plus the coaster car chassis, all reusable in your own custom rides. Beyond the track you get pirate-flavored bits worth having: the shark-shaped car body, a skull piece for the archway, sail and rigging elements from the galleon, a palm tree, and an octopus, along with the four minifigures and a skeleton. For roughly a dollar less than ten cents a piece at RRP it sat right around the Creator average, but the specialty track pushes the real-world value up, since those parts are pricey to source individually.

Fun facts

01The roller coaster track system this set uses was brand new at the time, having debuted in late 2017 with the Joker Manor set before rolling out to a small handful of 2018 builds like this one.
02It is a Creator 3-in-1, so the same bricks rebuild into a back-and-forth Ship Ride or a spinning, tilting Skull Ride.
03The set includes four minifigures plus a skeleton, and packs in a sunken galleon, a skull archway, a palm tree and an octopus.
04Retired now, it launched at 84.99 dollars in 2018 and typically sells well above that on the secondary market.