LEGO Tree House (21318)

The build breaks down into three clear stages and it's nicely paced for the most part. You start with a landscape base that hides a few Easter eggs (there's a buried gem and a treasure map for a little treasure-hunt game), then you move up into the trunk, which uses a satisfying stacked-and-textured technique to get that gnarled bark look. After that you build the three cabins one at a time, each with its own furniture and gadgets, including a working wind-up crane on the bedroom balcony. The only real drag is the canopy: assembling all the branches and clipping on well over 180 leaf elements is where the repetition sets in, so I'd put a podcast on for that part.

On the parts front, this set is a bit of a goldmine for the reddish-brown and green sorting trays. You get a huge haul of brown bricks, plates and the leaf and plant elements, which are the star pieces here, and they're the sustainable sugarcane-based polyethylene parts, so they feel slightly different in the hand. At 3,036 pieces for its launch price, the value works out to roughly 6-8 cents per part, well under LEGO's usual 10 cents average, so even setting the model aside the brick value is strong. The four minifig torsos and outdoorsy prints are pulled from earlier City People Packs, so nothing rare there, but the sheer volume of useful natural-coloured elements makes this a favourite for MOC builders raiding it for parts.