Ship in a Bottle

The build splits into three moods and they're weirdly different from each other. First you make the ship, and this is the good part. That tiny Leviathan is stuffed with SNOT technique (studs pointing sideways and down) to cram masts, three sets of sails, rigging, gun ports and a taffrail into a hull barely longer than your hand. It's fiddly in the fun way, the kind where you keep muttering 'oh, clever' under your breath. Then comes the sea, which is the opposite mood entirely, a long patient pour of 284 identical trans-light-blue 1x1 round plates into the bottle base. Then the bottle and cork close it up, and the stand with its printed nameplate and spinning compass gives you a satisfying finish. The bottle panels are the quiet star, angled so the seams nearly vanish.

For parts people, this set was a proper little event in early 2018. It debuted the reddish-brown 1x1 plate with a hollow stud (the so-called Apollo stud), which the masts are built around, plus reddish-brown and metallic-gold versions of the 1x1 curved plate with shaft used for the gun ports and taffrail. The 4x4 modified plate with curved cutout showed up in reddish brown too, and there's a new buildable wax-seal element on the cork. As for value, 962 pieces for 69.99 works out fine on paper, but remember nearly a third of that count is one repeated water tile, so the part-count-to-price story is a little kinder than the part-variety story. You're paying for the illusion, not the parts bin.