City

Ski and Climbing Center

The rare City set that packs a proper winter resort into one clever tower.

Brick Rated Score

4.2/5

Set 60366 · 2023

Pieces1,045

Minifigs8

Year2023

Set number60366

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The verdict

This one won me over slowly.

I went in expecting the usual City filler and got a mini modular with a working elevator, a real climbing wall, and eight figures I actually wanted to keep. It leans more play-set than display piece, so if you want a pristine shelf model this isn't it, but for a City fan who loves a building that does things, it's a genuinely fun 1,045 pieces.

Best for: City fans who want a play-heavy winter build with real functions

The full review

What it is

Every so often City puts out something that isn't a fire truck or a police chase, and this is one of those. The Ski and Climbing Center is a three-level winter resort squeezed into a mini modular tower, and the amount they crammed in is what got me. There's a winter sports shop, a little café, a medical bay, an outdoor snow area, a half-pipe ramp, and around the back a full climbing wall. The designer, Robert Heim, called it a mini modular and that's exactly the right description, because it borrows the layered, detail-in-every-corner approach you usually see over in Friends and applies it to a City set. It's 1,045 pieces across six sections and three instruction booklets, and it stands about 45 cm tall when it's done, so it has real presence on a shelf even if it's built to be played with rather than admired from a distance.

The catch

I'll be straight with you about the price, because it's the thing people bring up first. At $119.99 it's asking a lot for a City set of this piece count, and if you're the sort who counts cents per part you'll feel it. What you're really paying for is the eight minifigures and the functions rather than raw brick. The mini-modular format also comes with a small catch: the sections connect to each other beautifully but they don't slot into other City buildings the way a proper modular street would, so this is more of a self-contained resort than the start of a town you keep expanding. And because it's so busy, with gear and figures and little animals tucked into every gap, some builders find the finished thing reads as cluttered rather than tidy. None of that is a dealbreaker, but it's worth knowing going in that this is a play set at heart.

Who it's for

So who's this really for. If you love City and you want a building that does something, grab it without much hesitation, because the working elevator and the climbing wall winch turn it from a static model into a thing kids and grown-ups actually fiddle with. Winter-theme collectors and anyone building a ski scene will get a lot of mileage out of the figures and accessories alone. If you're after a clean architectural display piece, or you build mostly to admire the finished shelf, you'll probably find this too fiddly and too play-focused for the money. It landed a 4.1 community rating on Brickset from folks who mostly agreed it's charming and dense with detail, and having gone through it I think that's fair. It retired at the end of 2024, so it's already climbing on the secondary market, and if the theme speaks to you it's worth chasing down before the price runs off any further.

The parts story

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

The build runs across six sections in three booklets, and it paces itself nicely. You start low with the half-pipe ramp and the outdoor snow area, move up through the medical bay and the reception and café levels, and finish with the tower that carries the climbing wall on its back. The standout function is the elevator: rotate a tyre mounted on the roof and a gear pole turns to lift a platform up the shaft, so skiers ride to the top of the piste under their own little mechanism. The climbing wall is the other clever bit, built from rock panels and grey elements with coloured studs standing in as hand grips, and a bright yellow string rigged as a working winch so figures can be raised and lowered on their back plates. It's the kind of interactive detail City doesn't usually bother with, and it makes the whole thing feel alive.

On the parts front, the headline is a set of worm gears that had only turned up before in the Police Academy set, driving that elevator mechanism. You also get a healthy pile of the textured rock panels (the BURPs, big ugly rock pieces) doing real work on the climbing surface instead of just sitting as scenery. The accessory haul is genuinely deep for a City box: 4 skis, 2 snowboards, 4 snow poles, 2 hockey sticks, 4 ice skates, 4 snowshoes, 2 ice picks, a bicycle, backpacks, a camera and a medic pack, plus a snowman, an owl and squirrels. Add eight minifigures that are all exclusive to this set, most on new torsos with swappable hair and helmets, and the value story becomes clear: you're not buying it for cheap bricks, you're buying it for functions, figures and a small mountain of winter gear you'll be raiding for other builds for years.

Fun facts

01The set was designed by LEGO's Robert Heim, who built it as a mini modular, borrowing the dense, detail-packed style usually reserved for the Friends and modular building lines.
02The elevator is driven by worm gears that had previously appeared only in the City Police Academy set, an unusually mechanical touch for a standard City release.
03The climbing wall uses BURPs (big ugly rock pieces) with coloured studs as hand grips and a working yellow winch rope, so minifigures can actually be raised and lowered on their back plates.
04It supports the LEGO Builder app's Build Together mode, splitting the six sections so more than one person can build it at the same time.