Super Mario

Prince Florian & Castle Bowser

A floating spherical Bowser castle that swooshes, shoots, and springs a prison cell.

Brick Rated Score

4.0/5

Set 72042 · 2025

Pieces1,251

Minifigs4

Year2025

Set number72042

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The verdict

This is LEGO's first proper crack at Super Mario Bros.

Wonder, and it's a wonderfully odd thing to have on a shelf. You're building a fat spherical castle with Bowser's snarling face baked into the front, and the whole thing lifts off its smoke-plume stand so it can fly. If you love the weirder corners of the Mario universe and want play features over pure display polish, this one's a genuine charmer. If you only care about clean scale models, the cartoon lumpiness might not be your thing.

Best for: Mario fans who want a playable flying castle, not a static shelf piece

The full review

What it is

Let's set the scene, because this set comes from a corner of Mario most people haven't built before. Super Mario Bros. Wonder came out in 2023 and did something gloriously strange with the formula, and LEGO waited until 2025 to bring it into brick form. In the game, Bowser grabs a Wonder Flower and its power fuses him with Prince Florian's castle, and the result is this bulbous flying fortress with Bowser's face glowering out the front. That's what you're building here. A 1,251 piece LEGO® set that turns into a floating spherical castle you can genuinely pick up and swoosh around the room. It's playful and a bit ridiculous and I mean that as the highest compliment.

The catch

Now for the honest bits. At $99.99 for 1,251 pieces, the value isn't the bargain LEGO sometimes hands you. You're paying a little extra for the play engineering and the licensed theme, which is fair enough, but budget-minded builders will notice. The other thing to know going in is that this is a toy first and a display piece second. The 9+ age rating tells you a lot. It's designed to be handled, flown, and battled, so the surface has that soft cartoon lumpiness rather than the crisp lines of a pure model. Some folks adore that Mario-game look and some find it a touch messy up close. And those four figures are LEGO Super Mario character figures, the chunky sculpted kind, not the classic posable minifigures with printed faces and swappable bits. If minifigures are your love language, that's worth knowing before you buy.

Who it's for

So who's this really for. If you're a Super Mario fan, especially if Wonder hooked you, this is one of the most characterful sets in the whole line and it looks great on a shelf even before you touch the play features. It also caps off the interactive LEGO Mario course beautifully if you already have the electronic Mario, Luigi, or Peach figures, since the castle works as a proper boss-battle finale. If you're chasing a sleek scale replica or squeezing maximum bricks per dollar, you'll want to look elsewhere in the lineup. But for the swoosh factor, the surprise mechanisms, and that unmistakable spherical Bowser grin, this one won me over. It's silly in exactly the right way.

The parts story

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

The build is a steady, surprise-filled ride rather than a marathon. You start with the smoke-plume stand and the core, then layer the spherical shell around it, and the fun part is that the play features reveal themselves as you go. There's a shooting function, a swiping action, and a gravity-driven mechanism that lifts Prince Florian's prison cell up into view the moment you set the castle down on a flat surface. Lift it off its stand and the flames tuck away inside the hollow core. It's clever, satisfying stuff, and the 9+ rating reflects the mechanisms more than the difficulty. Bowser's big curved hands are shaped from the large macaroni tube pieces now standard on big Mario models, with Technic pins at the wrists so they sway when you fly him around.

On the pieces themselves, the headline is that swirling black and neon green graphic on the curved dish up top, which represents Wonder Bowser's striped hair. LEGO went with a printed dish instead of a sticker there, and anyone who has fought a wrinkled sticker knows why that matters. In fact there are no stickers in the box at all, which is a genuine win at this price. You get a strong pile of curved and dish elements for the spherical shell, the sculpted macaroni tubes for the hands, and four character figures (Pink Yoshi, Fiery Note Piranha, Prince Florian, Wonder Bowser Jr.). The per-piece value sits a hair above LEGO's usual, but the printed parts and the mechanisms are where your money actually goes.

Fun facts

01This is LEGO's first set inspired by Super Mario Bros. Wonder, the 2023 game that broke from the classic Mario formula with reality-bending Wonder Flowers.
02In the game the castle exists because Bowser swipes a Wonder Flower and its power fuses him with Prince Florian's castle, which is exactly the transformation this set recreates.
03The whole model lifts off its smoke-plume stand and setting it back down triggers a gravity mechanism that raises Prince Florian's prison cell into view.
04There isn't a single sticker in the box. Even the swirling neon-green hair on the top dish is printed, which is unusual generosity at this price.