Ninjago

Skull Sorcerer's Dungeons

A gloomy skull fortress with real castle bones and a spinner that's pure Saturday-afternoon fun.

Brick Rated Score

4.3/5

Set 71722 · 2020

Pieces1,181

Minifigs8

Year2020

Set number71722

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The verdict

This is the Ninjago set that quietly won me over.

Underneath the branding it's basically a small LEGO® Castle with a giant carved skull glaring off the front, and that carved stonework got me before anything else did. The dice-spinner board game bolted on top is the weak link, but the actual model is dark, dramatic and packed with clever one-dial mechanics. If you love castles or gothic play sets more than you love the show, you'll be pleasantly surprised.

Best for: Castle-at-heart fans who want a dark fortress with play features and a strong minifig lineup

The full review

What it is

The first thing that pulls you in here isn't a ninja, it's the fortress itself. Peel away the Ninjago logo and Skull Sorcerer's Dungeons is really a compact gothic castle, all dark stone, twisting approach paths and a huge carved skull glowering over the entrance. That entrance detailing is where the design team clearly had fun, and it's the bit that turns this from a kids' play set into something you'd happily leave built on a shelf. Set in the Master of the Mountain storyline, it leans into a dungeon-crawl, tabletop-adventure feeling, with lava pits, a caged prisoner over the flames, moving bridges and traps scattered along the winding route to the top. It measures around 43cm wide, so it has real presence once it's together.

The catch

The honest snag is the board game. LEGO built the whole marketing around a dice spinner: you drop a minifig in the middle, spin it like a top, and read a number plus a skull or heart symbol to move through the dungeon avoiding traps. It's a cute idea, but almost every reviewer landed in the same place, which is that it feels underbaked and a little confusing, like the rules needed one more pass before release. Treat it as a bonus rather than the main event and you'll be fine, because the model underneath doesn't need a game to justify itself. The other thing to weigh is value. At the 99.99 dollar launch price the 1,181 pieces are reasonable rather than a steal, and a few areas prioritise play gimmicks over solid walls, so it's very much a front-facing build.

Who it's for

So who should grab this one. If you came to LEGO through castles and gothic builds, or you've been waiting for the old Castle line to come back in spirit, this is an easy yes, because it scratches that itch better than most sets wearing a ninja badge. Kids in the Ninjago age range get a loaded play set with genuinely fun mechanics and eight figures to fight over. The people I'd steer away are hardcore Ninjago collectors chasing screen accuracy and anyone who buys purely on part-count value, since neither is the strong suit here. Everyone else, especially the castle-hearted, will get far more joy out of it than the box art suggests. It retired in late 2021 and prices have climbed well past retail since, so a sealed one is no longer the bargain it once was.

The parts story

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

The build is a proper journey rather than a slog. You work from the ground up, laying in the winding approach paths and landscaping first, then the lava area with its caged prisoner mechanism, and finally the tall skull tower that crowns the whole thing. The clever heart of it is a single dial that, when you turn it, drives three separate features at once, including the rotating tower and the string-hung cage that raises and lowers the prisoners over the lava. It's a simple internal mechanism doing a lot of visible work, which is exactly the kind of thing that makes a play set feel alive without frustrating a younger builder. The carved skull entrance is the showpiece section and the most rewarding to assemble.

On parts, the standouts are the minifigs. You get eight, including brand new Hero versions of Cole, Lloyd and Zane with fresh cowls, shoulder armour, dual-sided torsos and printed legs, plus two figures exclusive to this set at the time, the Skull Sorcerer himself and Princess Vania. The villain bench rounds out with an Awaken Warrior, the little purple Ginkle and Murt. For parts monkeys, the appeal is all that dark grey and gothic castle stonework, arches and rockwork that raid beautifully for your own medieval or fantasy builds. The 1,181 pieces at 99.99 dollars work out to solid but not remarkable value, so this is a set you buy for the figures and the castle parts palette rather than raw brick-per-dollar maths.

Fun facts

01The set belongs to the 2020 Master of the Mountain storyline, which leans hard into a tabletop dungeon-crawl feeling, dice, traps and all, as a nod to classic role-playing adventures.
02Underneath the Ninjago branding it plays like a spiritual successor to the classic LEGO Castle theme, which is why so many castle fans quietly adopted it.
03Two of the eight minifigs, the Skull Sorcerer and Princess Vania, were exclusive to this set when it launched.
04It retired around December 2021 and its value has climbed well over 50 percent above the original 99.99 dollar price on the aftermarket.