"And the Gimme LEGO Readers' Choice Award for Best Set of 2013 goes to...."

.....Set 10236 Ewok Village !

Man, that was close - I guessed that there probably wouldn't be a runaway winner this time round, but never dreamed how tight voting would turn out to be. The competition developed into a two-horse race from early on, with Set 10236 Ewok Village slugging it out with Set 10237 Tower of Orthanc for the lead and everything else left behind eating their dust. In the end it was the Ewok Village which prevailed by 16 votes, but only after a hell of a fight. Voting was open for 10 days, and until the final day the Tower of Orthanc was in pole position. With about 12 hours to go the two sets were literally neck and neck having polled exactly the same number of votes, and the lead then swapped between the two sets on multiple occasions until the last hour or so when the Ewok Village finally got its nose in front and held on to the lead, finally pipping Orthanc to the post. Competition was fueled by a couple of front page postings on Brickset by Huw (most recently here) together with some decent banter in the comments which followed.

Final standings are shown below. Both the Ewok Village and the Tower of Orthanc polled around a third of the total votes each, leaving the rest of the nominees to squabble over the remaining third of the votes between them. My non-licenced set of the year, Set 10232 Palace Cinema, came a respectable third in the rankings but only actually got 8% of the vote, and everything else got less than 5%. I was pleased to see Set 70500 Kai's Fire Mech and Set 70709 Galactic Titan get a few votes each - both are relatively unheralded sets which I really liked and can highly recommend. Most people who voted seemed content with the choice of sets on offer, with only 20 votes (less than 2% of the total) nominating an alternative; there were a couple of impassioned arguments for Set 10234 Sydney Opera House, and a few others such as Set 21103 DeLorean Time Machine and Set 70008 Gorzan's Gorilla Striker got a mention, but none attracted enough support to gatecrash the party.

Thanks in no small part to the generous publicity provided by Brickset, well over 1,000 people voted this time. That's a very respectable turnout IMHO, and in fact the total of 1,076 votes placed was almost double the number placed in last year's readers' poll. Despite the decent turnout, however, it's worth noting that only around 14% of visitors to Gimme LEGO during the period that the poll was live actually voted; that's an increased percentage compared to last year, but still a modest proportion of visitors to the site.

As well as taking home the Gimme LEGO Readers' award, the Ewok Village was also the winner of the Best Licenced Set award in the 2013 Gimme LEGO Awards, and if you need a gushing reminder of why it's such a great set then check out my awards posting here where I wax lyrical about it.... The designer of the set was LEGO employee Marcos Bessa, and you can see him talking about his wonderful creation in the video clip below; if the clip isn't showing on your device then you can check out the video on YouTube by clicking here. Congratulations for designing the winning set, Marcos, and thanks !

So farewell to 2013, then, and welcome to 2014. The year has already started with a bang, not least thanks to the imperious Set 10243 Parisian Restaurant, and I can't wait to see what else LEGO have in store for us....

Thanks for reading, and sincere thanks also to those who took the time to vote in the Readers' Award poll.