Natural History Museum (10326) Review

NOTE: I purchased the Natural History Museum (10326) myself, and this review is not sponsored in any way. I strive to always provide my honest opinion on LEGO® products. If you are curious about how I generate scores in this review, I invite you to read about the True North Bricks rating system.

INTRODUCTION

Every year, the LEGO® Group releases a new set in the modular buildings collection. Typically, that set arrives on the first of January. However, 2023 saw the release of two modulars. We got the Jazz Club (10312) on January 1, and the Natural History Museum (10326) on December 1. Breaking with tradition, the LEGO® Group released the latest modular a month earlier than fans anticipated. I appreciate the move because I always thought a January release for a big-ticket set was a poor choice. Releasing the new modular in December opens it up as a Holiday gift for many. Additionally, people tend to slow their spending in January once the Holidays are over. Consequently, I always felt a twinge of guilt spending that much money on a set right after Christmas.

The December 1 release also allowed me to buy the Natural History Museum during the double points event the LEGO® Group often offers in December. Incidentally, that also earned me this year’s Christmas GWPs (click here for more on that). So, despite this set costing an arm and leg, I felt better about the purchase because I got $20 worth of points to spend in the future, and about $50 worth of free LEGO® in the form of two GWPs. That made me feel even better after building the set, because the Natural History Museum (10326) did not end up being my favourite modular. Don’t get me wrong, it is nice, and I would have bought it anyway to complete my modular collection. But I don’t love it.

NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUM SPECIFICS

QUICK REVIEW

NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUM REVIEW

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Value Score Breakdown:

The Natural History Museum is the largest LEGO® modular building to date. Its closest competition arises from 2017’s Assembly Square (4002 bricks). Despite the close brick counts (12 bricks difference), the Natural History Museum costs $50 CAD more than its predecessor did at release. That is an unfortunate sign of the times. Assembly Square hit store shelves prior to the infamous LEGO® price hikes of 2022. It’s a set from a bygone era. Where Assembly Square cost $0.085/brick, the Natural History Museum costs $0.097/brick. However, despite being a poorer value than Assembly Square, the Natural History Museum is none-the-less still an excellent value compared to LEGO® sets in general. Based on almost eight years of collecting, my average cost/brick is currently $0.142. The Natural History Museum still provides a lot of bricks for the price.

Build time represents another area where Assembly Square and the Natural History Museum differ a bit despite similar brick counts. In 2017, Assembly Square took me ten and a half hours to build. In 2023, the Natural History Museum took me seven hours and 50 minutes. Granted, I’m a better builder than six years ago. However, I don’t think that is the reason for the discrepancy in build time. We’ll chat about this more in the build section of the review, but the Natural History Museum is not a very complex build. That is especially true when compared to the detailing of Assembly Square. For an Icons set, I did not get as much build time as I am accustomed to for a set this large. In fact, the cost/minute of build time for the Natural History Museum was identical to the much smaller Jazz Club from earlier this year.

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Build Score Breakdown:

The Natural History Museum represents the 15th anniversary of the Modular Collection. Consequently, The LEGO® Group went big. Similar to the 10th anniversary Assembly Square, the Natural History Museum comes with two baseplates. You assemble the set on 32 x 32 and 16 x 32 dark blueish grey plates. Until now, Assembly Square was the only modular with that configuration. The extra 16 studs threw off many modular-based city blocks. Five years later, the remedy has arrived. Placing the museum and Assembly Square on opposing sides of a city block brings symmetry to your layout. While I doubt this was a major issue for anyone, it’s still a nice development.

In terms of parts, the set comes with 33 bags, one un-numbered bag of plates, and one instruction manual. Additionally, the banners hanging in front of the building arrive attached together as part of a plastic sheet. You can easily punch them out with your fingers. Of the 4014 bricks included, there are 713 unique elements. Of those, 44 are new according to my count using Bricklink. However, each one represents an existing piece in a new colour, and not a brand new mould. If you’re looking for an olive green brick box, your day has come. A number of the first-time, re-coloured elements are olive green.

Improved accessibility… but not in the traditional sense of the term.

Something I really appreciate about the Natural History Museum is its accessibility. I’m not talking about Minifigure scale here though. This museum is anything but accessible for disabled Minifigures with its steep stairs and lack of elevator. But it is accessible for large, adult hands. One of my complaints with the Jazz Club was the tiny interior spaces. The bathroom sticks out like a sore thumb in my memory. You build the Jazz club bathroom under the stairs leading to the second level. As you add to the build, the bathroom becomes completely inaccessible for photos, placing Minifigures, and even viewing. You know its there if you built the set, but pretty much not otherwise.

Conversely, the Natural History Museum makes a couple of tiny spaces more accessible by employing removable walls. The bathroom and rear lab space are too small for my hands to easily place Minifigures. However, you can remove the wall behind the reception desk, allowing easy access to both spaces. The same is true of the office on the roof. The entire back wall comes off there. Given the LEGO® Group targets adults with the Modular Collection, I appreciate the effort towards chunky finger accessibility.

A generally bland step backwards for the Modular Collection.

Now for the ugly. The Natural History Museum is a generally bland build. The overall structure is exceptionally straight forward, to the point of boredom. Now, keep in mind, I am talking from a fairly experienced standpoint. Newcomers to the AFOL community might get a good introduction to basic build techniques with this set. However, longtime builders who have worked through a number of modulars in the past will not get anything new here. I look to modulars for new build techniques. They should inspire me, and I greatly appreciate the moments when I get to marvel at how clever a technique is. I didn’t really get that with this build.

There are a couple of moments that I enjoyed. The columns are a neat build… but I’ve seen others use similar techniques in MOCs. The roof is also interesting. In fact, that is the only section of the build that sticks out in my memory as offering anything advanced builders might consider neat. The office space features clever brick use, and the decor around the roof is pretty nice too. The rest of the museum is pretty standard LEGO® building fare… and the interior is not that ornate either. I was reminded of building the Grand Emporium or Palace Cinema years ago with their wide open floors and a few small builds thrown in to occupy the space. Overall, the Natural History Museum feels like a step backwards in terms of detail and build techniques.

Let’s talk about the dinosaur in the room.

One of the most advertised features of the Natural History Museum was the Brachiosaurus skeleton. I was skeptical about the model based on the press kit images. My initial impression was that the build was not large enough and lacked realistic details. I am happy to note that I enjoyed physically building the model a lot more than I thought I would. While I would not go so far as to say the design features clever brick use, it does employ bricks effectively to achieve an aesthetically pleasing product. For its size, the Brachiosaurus is nice. However, I maintain that it is too small. Making it the same size as the recent Jurassic Park Brachiosaurus figurine would have made me love this build while also allowing more detail. Interestingly, the Brachiosaurus fossil is very representative of the whole set. Nice, but lacking a sense of grandeur.

In the end, the building still looks nice when complete. If you bought two of these and expanded the museum backwards, you would have something even nicer with more room for displays and a larger Brachiosaurus. I don’t hate this modular. In fact, I like it for what it is. The exterior looks good too, despite the odd choice of olive green. But, the execution of the concept, and the simplistic general build leave much to be desired. This is a good introductory modular for someone getting back into LEGO®, or someone new to the hobby. But for me? It’s merely satisfactory. I rate the build at 70%.

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Minifigure Score Breakdown:

The Natural History Museum comes with nine Minifigures. Seven of those are characters, two are statues. In a 4014-piece kit, you’re getting 446 bricks/Minifigure. Comparatively, all the LEGO® sets I’ve reviewed currently average 198 bricks/minifig. So, you are not getting many characters in this set. In fact, the average LEGO® set provides more than twice as many Minifigures. Of course, Icons sets and modulars in particular are notorious for low Minifigure counts. You typically get around 428 bricks/Minifigure with Icons. By that comparison, the Natural History Museum provides a close-to-average character count. However, my beef with the minifig count in this particular set runs a little deeper. This is a museum, a tourist attraction. Why aren’t more Minifigures visiting? If Ninjago City sets can offer around 20 minifigs a set, a Modular Collection building can at least come close to that. I rate the Minifigure count at 54%.

By jove… is that Dr. Kilroy?

All nine of the Minifigures included are listed as “new” on Bricklink. However, the majority of them are only new in that they consist of new combinations of parts that already exist in other sets. With that said, four have at least one actually new element. Firstly, the museum employees wear blue pullover prints on their torsos. Secondly, one of the statues has grey long hair, a piece not available in this colour before. Finally, there’s the museum curator. This character made waves on the internet for his uncanny resemblance to Dr. Kilroy from the historic LEGO® Adventurers theme of old. This character has both a new torso print and new face printing on both sides of his head.

Otherwise, only one character does not have a double-sided face. Additionally, one does not have full-sized, moveable legs. The rest have all the standard parts, double-sided faces, and printing on both sides of their torsos. However, none of them have any leg printing. With that said, one of the characters comes with the prosthetic leg piece. The characters come across quite generic. But that is not a bad thing in this case. They are meant to be normal people perusing/working in a museum. The shoutout to Adventurers is also a lot of fun. The would-be Dr. Kilroy goes great with the would-be Johnny Thunder from Minifigures Series 19. The Natural History Museum also includes a lot of accessories to supplement the Minifigures. I counted 44, though I might have missed one or two.

44 accessories included:

The statues are also worth noting. The official LEGO® website does not count them as Minifigures in this set. It lists the Minifigure count at seven. However, despite limited printing, both statues feature standard Minifigure parts. And in terms of the printing, both have the same torso print seen on the statues in Rivendell. There’s no question, the Natural History Museum comes with too few Minifigures. But the ones you get are nice enough. If it wasn’t for the huge number of accessories, I’d probably rate the character designs a bit lower. However, as it stands, they earn 100%. Averaging this with the bricks/fig score gives the Natural History Museum an overall Minifigure grade of 77%.

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Entertainment Score Breakdown:

There are a couple of issues that I have with the Natural History Museum that took away from my enjoyment of the overall set. First and foremost, the name. This is not a Natural History Museum. Some might say I’m being a little harsh. But, most of the second floor has nothing to do with natural history. All the nods to past LEGO® themes are Minifigure history, not natural history. Natural History is the scientific study of organisms in their natural environments, not the history of Minifigures. Additionally, I’m a little tired of nods to the yellow castle. Yes, it was a historic moment in the LEGO® Group’s history. But that has become their go-to micro-build when attempting to pull on AFOL castles nostalgia. Hate to say it, but many AFOLs were not even alive when that set came out… I know I wasn’t.

This set should have simply been called “Museum”.

An easy way to get more Minifigures in this set would have been to make a caveman exhibit. You could have even brought back the mammoth or sabre-tooth cat figurines. Those would have made great natural history exhibits and nice tie-ins to past City sets. It would have added a little more excitement to the Minifigures too. While some of the included characters are novel and nice, a lot of them are quite generic. A couple of cavemen would have added a little more spice. Kind of like in the Capital City set from 2018. Alternatively, Jurassic World is an ongoing theme. LEGO® has dinosaur moulds galore to help fill exhibits. If the baby raptor can appear in the Sesame Street set, then dinosaurs can appear here too.

My second issue is the lack of story. There was a time when modulars had imaginative tales woven into the build. I’m thinking about the cookie smuggling operation in the Detective’s Office, and the money laundering in the Brick Bank. Speaking of the Brick Bank, where are the neat features? Robbers could slide down the chimney of the Brick Bank. You could insert bank notes into the safe from the laundromat. Heck, even the safe door locked. The Natural History Museum has nothing like that. You build some bones into the ground underneath the main floor… woo hoo. There is no way to access them, so unless you built the set, you won’t know they are there and there’s no way to show people.

This set has attention to detail, but no imagination.

I don’t doubt a lot of thought went into designing the Natural History Museum. A lot of time probably went into the exhibits we did get. There is applaudable attention to detail all around the building. But there’s no imagination. This is a cookie cutter modular that checks off the basic boxes of what a modular should be. It doesn’t go above and beyond. I loved the Boutique Hotel two years ago. Last year, I noted the Jazz Club was not my favourite modular, but it did not disappoint at all as an entry in the collection. The Natural History Museum disappoints on a few fronts. As I said before, I don’t hate it. But I’ve also never felt so “meh” about an entry in the Modular Collection before either. It deserves more than a mere pass, but not by much. I rate my entertainment with this set at 65%.

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This is the lowest score I have ever given to a LEGO® modular building. If you’re not a modular completionist, this might be a model to skip. However, I’m curious to know what others think of the Natural History Museum (10326). Leave a comment below or let me know on social media. What this set a hit or miss in your books?

Until next time,

-Tom

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