Rogue Viking Pictures
15 pictures

Set #7018

"Viking Ship Challenges the Midgard Serpent"


Here's the box it came in from the UK. Looks just like the US boxes.

Open of box flap

I am sure when my Viking anscestors were roaming the seas, they often thought in in one century, one of their descendants would be building a model of it.

Upon opening the box

You know, they really could have had a 50% smaller box, don't you think? When I was a kid, they had plastic trays you could keep, and stuff wasn't in chintzy bags. This would set the mood for this project: I felt like Lego was cutting corners.

The pieces arranged

Here are the pieces I satrted with. The placemat-like thing is a plasti-cloth sail. At the center bottom, there are two small stickers. When I was a kid, I HATED Lego stickers, because my huge chubby fingers never got them centered straight on the piece, they stuck like super-glue, and the edges got ragged over time. Luckily, this set only had 2 stickers, and they weren't too fussy.

The beginning

For some reason, the gravity well around this table was more dense than elsewhere, because pieces constantly fell on the floor, and then I had to scramble for them before the dogs thought they were edible scraps. Finally, I set the masts and coffee stirrers (the sail mainstays) ot the right to prevent the teeny pieces (and there were a lot of them), from rolling away.

My minifig army

Lego minifigs now have expressions. I had to match them all up, and found out one of the WORST problems with this set: colors. See, Lego colors have changed since "the day," and instead of basic red, blue, yellow, white, black, clear, and one shade of gray... this set had many of their newer colors, which included dark gray, light gray, dark red, dark brown, and with basic black, ALL of them looked like dark gray in the manual, unless they were next to each other in the picture. I went nuts trying to find a dark gray piece that turned out to be dark red, for instance.

Most of the serpent

The camera was running low on batteries, and I didn't have any new batteries, so some of the pictures came out a shade bit blurred or not at all. None of the finsihed serpent ones came out, for instance (oh, pooh!). This is about 2/3rds of Midgard. The serpent, for being the smaller of the two basic builds, surprisingly took more than half the pieces. Those little red horns? Kept falling out. I was not happy with the teeny horns used in great number in this set.

Latte the Meezer vs the Vikings

Latte couldn't understand why I kept putting her on the floor. And you know cats, if they are walking on some piles of stuff you don't want them to, the second you pick them up, their legs slpay everywhere, scattering things around. On top of all this, my cell phone kept ringing with some drunk guy who kept calling the wrong number.

The mast goes up

It is tradtion when a mast goes up to put a coin under the mast for good luck, but I didn't have one, so this ship is unlucky in a storm. The area under the awning has a roasting pit with turkey legs (no lie!). The cage has an ingenious racheting device (IMHO). Some of how this ship was designed felt like 2-3 designers worked on the model, one of whom never tested the finished model, I am sure, and none of whom ever considered a kid might want to play with it. I mean, this ship would fall apart if tilted too far to one side.

My minifigs kept getting in the way.

Taboo vs Midgard

Midgard didn't stand a chance. As the serpent's poorly-implemented little red spikes kept falling out, I had to keep Taboo from chewing on him. Then a minifig got in his mouth, and that kept his teeth in.

Taboo was with me the rest of the build. I put him on the floor when he started to paw and swat the bricks, and he'd jump back up and be good for a while... then it would start all over again.

Taboo vs. the Ship

There's an extremely historically inaccurate auto-loading plunger-firing device on board this ship. The mechanism that does the auto-loading is something I would have created back in my legendary building days as a teen, or at least would have appreciated its genius. Again, the buidler of the mechanism was probably one dude with an engineering degree, but then the person who attached it to the ship probably flunked geometry. If you tug on this too hard, it snaps right off.

The plungers reminded me of Micronauts, another building toy I had as a kid. Then some dumbass kid removed the plunger, sharpended the stick, and then stabbed his eye out. Several Micronaut sets were pulled off the shelves, and the guns had the springs removed. Because of this, I have since hated sue-happy people.

Taboo loved being fired at. He tried to swat away the plungers. The dark left half is not Taboo casting a shadow, the camera's batteries died halfway in taking the picture.

Finished ship

Midgard attacks!

Lego's extra parts

A sail stay, one 1x3 red flat, two 1x2 light-sand colored flats, 3 white horns, 2 red horns, a technic half-peg, a 1x1 round flat, a red swim fin (the other is Midgard's tongue), and a black technic peg. Lego always has extra pieces, which is because they determine if the bag has the right amount of pieces by weight, and err on the side of caution with overage (or so they say on their site). I have NEVER had a missing piece from a Lego set, which speaks well of that process. I always have a few extras.

Closeup of Midgard

RUN AWAY!!! RUN AWAY!!!

More Midgard vs Ship

Ship's jail

I am sure the Kingston Trio has a song about this?