Revealed : Kingdoms Set 10223 Royal Joust

This weekend (October 1st-2nd 2011) marks the return of the Great Western LEGO Show (GWLS). This is a collaboration between the Brickish Association (BA) and STEAM, the Museum of the Great Western Railway. It's BA's biggest LEGO exhibition of the year.

At last year's GWLS, Set 10217 Diagon Alley was unveiled to the public, and this year the LEGO group have been kind enough to provide BA with another upcoming set which can be seen right now for the very first time "in the flesh" at GWLS ! Rumours of Kingdoms Set 10223 Royal Joust began to circulate a few weeks ago, but until now I'd not seen any photographs of the set.

BA member Martin Long had the pleasure of building this set for the show and he was kind enough to snap some photographs as he was setting up which you can see below (click on the pictures to enlarge). LEGO has previously produced 5 jousting sets, but as you can see, this new one seriously trumps them all with respect to sheer size and splendour.....

The set is clearly a pre-production version, arriving unboxed and with a handful of photocopied instructions. For me this just adds to the excitement of knowing that this really is an early sneak peek of what's to come in 2012 ! The pieces arrived in 8 bags, 4 of which contained the pieces for the towers and the bridge in between. This structure is in fact modular, with the bridge and tower turrets designed to lift off if desired.

Nine minifigures, a couple of beautifully decorated horses, and 1575 pieces - lovely ! The light bley brickwork and bright red roofs mean that this set should look great next to last year's Kingdoms Set 7946 King's Castle. You can see the King and Queen below in the Royal Box :

The first picture below shows three more minifigures - 2 guards and a maiden (or maybe even the Princess...) - occupying the ornate towers . To the left of the towers and archway (second picture below) is a rather suspicious-looking character, maybe the Prince, decked out in red, although why he seems to be guarding a baguette is anyone's guess..... Above his head appears to be a concentration of sand blue pieces, no doubt escapees from Set 10218 Pet Shop. To the right of the archway (third picture below) a peasant watches the jousting from a wooden platform.

There are some rudimentary furnishings in the towers as you can see below. I'm rather partial to the stained glass effect, and you've got to love the use of brown frogs as table legs !

If you look closely at the photograph above you'll see 4 black Technic 1 x 1 bricks, two at the tower base and two in the roof; these suggest that the set has been designed to be expanded. Perhaps the intention is for people to buy two of the sets and join these sections back to back ?

Overall, this is a rather splendid looking set, I must say. I have to confess that I'd been holding off buying Set 7946 King Castle as I'm not generally a Castle guy, but the urge to buy both the Castle and this Kingdoms Royal Joust set for display together may prove irresistible.... Because this is a pre-production model some details may change prior to launch, but here's hoping they don't change too much as it looks pretty good to me as it is. We reckon that this set will probably launch in January 2012, although that's just a guess. No official word on pricing at the time of writing, however.

Thanks again to Martin for the pictures, and speaking as a BA member, thanks to LEGO for providing us with this lovely unreleased set for the show. GWLS runs for the whole weekend of 1st-2nd October and there's a huge amount going on including large LEGO train layouts, a big display of homebrew Star Wars UCS-style models, a Harry Potter Hogwarts diorama and literally hundreds of other MOCs covering every possible theme. There will also be an official LEGO store and a number of independent LEGO traders on site. Location and directions can be found here - hope you can make it down !