I was quite excited when I saw the announcement of season 4 of LEGO Dreamzzz (as in: the 5 sets that are to be released in January 2026); they are all animals, reminding me much of Legends of Chima! And then it struck me; these are all LARGE sets!
When I was fortunate enough to visit LEGO during the LEGO inside tour in 2016, I distinctly remember LEGO designers explaining to me that in these ‘story’ themes they aim to have a set for every budget, from something tiny, to pocket-money sized all the way to saving-for-quite-some-time-and-hoping-santa-thinks-I-was-nice large. But this batch felt different, the smallest one, 71513 Nightmare Scorpion Digger comes in at a respectable 505 pieces, followed by 71508 Fox Guardian Mech with 883 pieces and the rest all over 1000 pieces! These all represent quite a significant investment.
I think these sets are all really great in different ways, read the reviews coming soon. But in today we are not discussing the quality of the sets, just the size.
Follow me as I investigate if this is a fluke, or a significant trend; have the sets for these story-based themes gotten larger over time? Do sets in story themes always get larger towards the end of their shelf life? Can we expect to see more from Dreamzzz?
Caveat
During our exploration I will try to be as open and clear as possible. Be warned, I will be digging into numbers (generously provided by Brickset.com) and there may even be some mathematical terms used. A basic assumption for all the following analysis is that the data from Brickset is complete and accurate. This seems a fair and reasonable assumption, but I did not verify.
I will be investigating ‘story’ themes from LEGO, these are unlicensed themes that LEGO developed themselves through the years. We will be focusing on the sets released since 2010, roughly the period that Ninjago has been around, but that is a coincidence.
What are story themes?
Historically, LEGO has developed a new themed series of sets roughly every 3 years. These series are typically released alongside stories released in some other media, such as videos or magazines. Some of the most successful examples are Ninjago and Friends, but more typical examples are Legends of Chima, Hidden side, Elves and the current one is Dreamzzz. These series usually target at least once set in each price-bracket; so that fans can get on board regardless of their budget. In this article we will be looking into the piece count, rather than price, but there is a pretty strong correlation between those two.
Ninjago, Friends and Monkie Kid are a little unusual in the company of these sets, which will be clear when we look at the charts later.
Typically (again), sets are released in two batches per year. For this reason I will be grouping the sets by release date in first half or second half of the year. If no release data is available the set will be grouped into the first half.
Explanation of a box plot
To view the large amount of data I will be using box plots. If you are unfamiliar with such plots look below an explanation of one of these box plots for Ninjago:
On the vertical axis we have the ‘size of set’ as expressed in number of pieces, with a distribution in buckets shows by the horizontal bars. The longer the bar, the more sets in that size have been released, relative to other sizes.
Consider the thin red dotted lines, the bottom one (at 58 pieces) indicates that 25% of all Ninjago sets are smaller that 58pieces. The middle one (the median, or middle) indicates that half of all Ninjago sets have fewer than 210 pieces, and therefore half have more than that. The top red line indicates the 75% mark; 75% of Ninjago sets have fewer than 528 pieces.
You can see there are quite a few shorter blue bars above the top red line, which encompass 25% off the Ninjago sets. There have been sets with much more than 528 pieces, exactly as many of them as sets with less than 58 pieces. These three red lines define the shape of the box, of the box plot, as shown in the figure.
In addition to the main box, a box plot typically has whiskers at the top and bottom and any data beyond these whiskers are outliers; data points that are so far away from most of the other data that they can be considered anomalies. These points are indicated by the circles.
In the case of Ninjago there have been a few very large sets, but only a handful, which is insignificant compared to the vast quantity of sets overall. You can confirm this by seeing how short the matching blue bars are for the red circles.
Graph of all story themes
Let’s look at the themes included since 2010. In the figure above we see box plot representing how much variation in size there is for a given theme. This is not a representation of how many sets have been released, just how many pieces there have been in the sets for these themes. As explained above the dots indicate outliers which you can mostly ignore.
Immediately the biggest (by number of pieces) theme jumps out: Monkie Kid. This is a bit of an unusual theme because it has not been available in stores in Australia after the first wave so it is an online LEGO exclusive theme only. I wonder if this has had an effect on LEGO’s decision to focus primarily on larger sets for Monkie Kid.
Also note that Dreamzzz, our focus of today’s question, is the second largest theme in the list. Is it a coincidence that these themes are also the most recent ones in the list?
It is worth mentioning that Ninjago and Friends are the largest themes by sheer quantity and years of service, which is not represented in this plot at all, but we will get back to that. For the next section we will remove these two themes from the plots because they would completely dominate the charts and muddle the figures. We will revisit these themes individually a bit later.
Themes through time
Do not look to closely at the figure below, just note it is really busy and hard to read. We will clear up what’s hidden in there later, piece by piece. The figure below shows, for each half-year, the box plot of the set sizes per theme, and because themes have been on the shelves at the same time, their boxes cover the same space on the plot.
The main thing to notice in this plot is the gap in early 2019, there is just a white space in the middle, as if LEGO stopped briefly. What happened that there were no story sets released then? This occurred as Elves and Nexo Knights came to an end when Unikitty blipped into existence for a single batch. They were followed by Hidden side with about 6 months break in the release schedule. It is a bit unclear what caused this gap. Monkie Kid seems quite dominant in this figure, the light blue blob covering most of the top right of the figure (again: Friends and Ninjago are missing).
The only sensible takeaway from this figure is to note that the figure covers just the bottom part on the left and a lot more towards the top on the right. This seems to suggest that story sets are bigger now (right side of the plot) than they were in the past (left side of the plot).
There are also a lot more colours overlapping on the left (a lot of different themes) than on the right side of the figure, where there are only a few themes. This seems to indicate that there are fewer story themes now.
Dreamzzz
At the start of this article I was wondering of Dreamzzz sets have become bigger and squinting at the busy plot above this does indeed seem to confirm. Let’s investigate.
In the figure above we see only Dreamzzz displayed and we can see a clear upward trend in the size of each wave that has been released in Dreamzzz. Notice though, that each larger wave is followed by a smaller wave for the first four waves except for this 6th wave; which we then would expect to be smaller but is by far the largest so far!
This leaves me wondering: is this a normal pattern for a story theme? They often last for about 3 years, suggesting that this could very well be the last Dreamzzz batch. Perhaps these series always end with a bang? If that is the case, did the designers have some really great ideas they desperately wanted to get out before the doors closed? It’s too early to tell.
Or is it as simple as keeping last years smaller sets on the shelves, and only developing larger playsets?
A few ‘typical’ stories
Over the course of several of these story themes being released by LEGO we have found a pattern and also a few themes that break that pattern.
One of my all-time favourites, Legends of Chima exhibits pretty much all the ‘typical’ traits of a story theme. It lasted for about 3 years with 5 released waves. The point of interest here is that the last wave consist of larger sets than the earlier waves, but it still contained smaller sets too. That is: the height of the bar increases towards to top end, but the lower end stays much the same.
Nexo Knight and Elves both followed right after Legends of Chima, which was a bit unusual in itself, which can be explained that Elves contained mini-dolls while Nexo Knights containing minifigs. These two themes both show the small-wave-followed-by-a-larger-wave pattern we saw with Dreamzzz (a low bar followed by a higher bar followed by a lower bar). Both of these themes also show an upward trend in the size of the series over time.
I want to address Hidden Side because it mostly went unnoticed by me and the chart seems to explain why; it wasn’t around for very long. Only 3 waves over 1.5 years. This suggests that it wasn’t very successful and LEGO stopped it early. Vidyo came after that and seemed to have fared even worse. Both these themes relied heavily on app tie-ins requiring an expensive phone to unlock functionality, and it seems LEGO’s customers were not ready for it (yet?). While Hidden side was storybased – with an associated web series – Vidiyo had a different media tie-in., but the app placed such demands on hardware that it became untenable. Also; there was nothing else at that time… except (see below).
An unusual beast; the Monkie Kid might have contributed to the short life of Vidyo and Hidden Side:
Monkie Kid launched while Hidden side was still on the shelves, and it offered far larger (and dare we say, cooler) sets. The Monkie Kid stories are directly based on ancient Chinese mythology, so not entirely an original IP like others themes considered, but in the end all stories are based on something that was around before.
Particularly unusual, this theme just kept going and going! The theme was/is primarily aimed at the Chinese market (explaining why it wasn’t on the shelves in around the world, restricted in most other markets to LEGO.com). It has kept going for 5 years, before (apparently) coming to an end in 2025. [There has been no official notice regarding Monkie Kid, but no new sets have been revealed since the two released early in 2025.] Notice how there are hardly any small sets in the theme (the bottom end of all the boxers is quite high). The sets are so large that the box plots even go off the top of the graph in 2022.
Dreamzzz was launched while Monkie Kid was still going. Thinking back to Figure 4, it appears that this theme contains fewer small sets than its predecessors (apart from Monkie Kid), and also contains significantly larger sets within the theme. I assume LEGO figured out that people have bigger budgets for these themes than previously. I can personally attest that I collected a large proportion of the themed sets prior to Hidden Side, I certainly cannot keep up with them any more.
Ninjago, the little engine that could
(oh, and there’s Friends off course)
Ninjago and Friends have been notably absent in the graphs above for good reason. Ninjago launched just like other story themes and it was earmarked to end after about 3 years, just like others. You can see this by the gap at the end of 2013 when no new Ninjago sets were released.
This cancellation caused a bit of a disturbance in the Force and in response LEGO continued/restarted Ninjago which will be celebrating it’s 15th anniversary in 2026! You can imagine if the plot above was added to figure 3, it would cover nearly the entire plot making it even more messy than it already is!
Friends is an odd theme in this list because it was always intended to be a long lasting theme like ‘city’, unlike most other themes discussed so far. I still wanted to show the chart below, because Friends does also link to other story-based media.
It’s interesting to see how Friends sets have grown over time, the smallest sets have gotten a little bit bigger (the bottom end of the boxes have moved up), and the bigger sets have becomes significantly bigger (the top of the boxes moved up quite a lot) after 2021. After that the range seems to have stabilized. I applaud the larger Friends sets, that (I feel) are catering to a slightly older audience who have grown up with Friends. The same can also be seen with Ninjago where pretty advanced models are becoming available that far exceed the original target for a play theme.
So; where does that leave us?
The bottom line of all these plots and bars and lines an graphs, is this:
- Sets for story themes have become bigger over the years
- Sets for story themes become bigger towards the end of their shelf-life
This leads to a few conclusions some solid, and some circumstantial:
- If you want to complete your Dreamzzz collection, the next batch will stretch your budget
- Could it be that Dreamzzz is nearing the end of it’s era?
- Should we look forward to a new theme by early 2027? Or will Dreamzz continue to surprise us, going forward?
Look for our reviews of these new Dreamzzz sets soon (spoiler: I think they are really good!).
Sets have been provided by the LEGO Group for review purposes. All opinions are our own. Any conclusions arrived at is this article are the result of analyzing the size of LEGO Sets across themes, and across years. It’s by no means guaranteed to play out this way.
If you have enjoyed this post, please feel free to share it with your friends, families and communities. You can also keep up to date with us by following The Rambling Brick on our socials: Facebook, Threads, Bluesky, Tumblr (or just sign up for our mailing list) and find some extra content on Instagram and TikTok.
We really value your feedback: please let us know what you think about the sets we review, and the articles we post. And if you wish to support the Rambling Brick, consider clicking on our affiliate links before going shopping at LEGO.com. The Rambling Brick receives a small commission, and it costs you nothing extra.
Until Next Time,
Play Well!