As you know, our thing here is building winter village. Which is why we were so excited to be asked to review the LEGO Gingerbread House Light Kit from Game of Bricks!
I think I may have literally squealed out loud.
And Mr. Family Brick? Equally as excited, because adding lights to our build has always interested us. We purchased a few singular light kits at various shows. Time has never been on our side, though. Making time to integrate them has been difficult.
There were also some things we needed to do to our display to prep it for lights. Addressing how to hide all of the cables that came with lighting up the display was a top concern. We also were considering a switch up of the display layout. New sets and mini scenes were starting to make our display appear crowded. Adding lights might just add to that feeling.
As you can see, there’s a lot that goes into deciding “to light or not to light” with large displays. You can see how easily we just kept postponing the project.
Since we picked up the LEGO Gingerbread House this year and we had yet to add it to our display.
About the LEGO Gingerbread House
Haven’t seen the new LEGO Gingerbread House winter village build from LEGO? You are truly missing out on a treat!
I would normally post the description of the set here, but it is rather long. Instead, I’ll link you to the LEGO website product page directly. There you can see all the amazing details of this lovely build. Definitely worth the purchase, if just for the new roof technique demonstrated.
Once built, it was the perfect time to test out a light kit. In comes Game of Bricks.
About Game of Bricks
Here is the background on Game of Bricks:
Game of Bricks was created by people who love LEGO. The dream began just in one day, with the founder of the company. The creator of Game of Bricks was looking down during Christmas time on the London Tower Bridge and thought to himself “this building is wonderful with lights on”. At the same time he thought about same LEGO on the 10214 Tower Bridge set. He decided to copy these lights from the real Tower Bridge to a LEGO one. This is how Game of Bricks Company started.
About Their LEGO Gingerbread House Light Kit
The LEGO Gingerbread House Light Kit from Game of Bricks comes with:
- LEGO Lights with Original Game of Bricks Box
- AAA Battery Box (Batteries Not Included)
- PDF Instructions
The price for the “Standard” kit is $41.99 USD and $55.99 USD for the “Advanced” kit.
Adding the LEGO Gingerbread House Light Kit
Being this was our first time ever doing this, adding the light kit was not without its hiccups. We had already built the set, so we prepped as the instructions asked us, by making sure we tested out all components first.
The instructions don’t tell you how to do that, so I was lucky this was not Mr. Family Brick’s first time at the rodeo. Being an Electronics Engineering major, this was old hat to him. He knew what to snap where and once tested, we were off to the races!
For those of you who aren’t familiar, you would take the white plastic piece at the end of the light string and snap it into the bar above. You can then connect your light box to a power source to test. All your lights should come on if the connectors are seated correctly.
The Little Brick, of course, decided she wanted in on the action. (It’s been a while since I’ve photographed her for the blog, but she’s not so little anymore, is she?) *sniff, sniff*
And don’t judge me on her hair. It was a lazy Saturday and we all stayed in so… um… yea…
You’ll definitely need the walk-through in the instructions, in addition to the pictures provided to figure out what is being suggested as far as placement of the light bricks and wires. It’s a little more complicated than you probably anticipated, so don’t expect to be done in an hour (like foolish ol’ me).
For the record, it took us 3 hours over the course of two days to integrate the lights. That probably had a lot to do with the fact this was our first light kit integration, this is a more complex build, and we had a shearing accident… More on that later…
While it was definitely satisfying to see the results of adding the first set of lights (there are 5 strings total), we found it challenging to easily follow the instructions. We feel they are missing a few more images to clarify some of the steps, but we eventually figured them out.
And Then We Sheared A Wire…Or Something Like That…
As we were getting ready to finish strong with adding the last set of lights, we ended up shearing the wire for the set we just finished adding. Remember Mr. Family Brick, the engineer? It appears he cut a wire between two of the chimney bricks. Ever the hero, he came to the rescue with some minor soldering and we were back up and running!
We thought we were in the clear until he later somehow snapped the connector off for one of the sets of lights. He blames his big fingers. ;) At this point, all the wires were in place. We decided to cut our losses and leave the set as is, with 4 of the 5 light strings working.
This is why, when looking at our photo above, you’ll notice our front porch lights and some of the interior lights are not lit up.
Even with our mess up, we like the added light on the build. Check out this quick video I grabbed of our finished build:
Pretty neat, right? We definitely love the end result.
Our Thoughts
Being our first light kit, there was so much to say. But realistically, we have no other experience with which to compare it. I know I had unrealistic expectations as to the ease of integration. Mr. Family Brick? Not so much. He seemed to know this was going to take a minute to complete. I chalk that up to his background with electronics.
So for now, I’m going to hold off on a full opinion.
We do have two other light kits from Game of Bricks we plan to try out during Christmas break. Once we’ve done those, we may revisit this review for a more educated assessment of the kit.