Just in time for "spooky season," I've got a review of one of LEGO Mario's ghost-themed sets! Clocking in at 431 pieces, the King Boo and the Haunted Yard LEGO Mario set is one of the larger sets in the theme that we've built to date. The set is fairly large in terms of piece count as well as being fairly large in terms of the set's footprint on the table.
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I ended up buying this set off of eBay (used, without the box) since I missed it during it's release run. My son and I have been playing the old Mario 64 game and he's been obsessed with the ghost level in that game. Once I learned that, I knew that this set was one that I had to track down for him!
Let's start with the main feature of the set: the boss King Boo himself!
I love the LEGO recreation of the iconic Mario baddie. The best part is that his face is a printed piece, no stickers that we have to apply anywhere in the set (the bar codes are stickers but they all come preapplied). In addition to King Boo, we also get a pair of Goombas (note, in my set the seller seemed to give me one Goomba with the wrong face - both Goombas should have the "frowning" expression but frankly I kind of like having two slightly different Goombas instead). Turning back to King Boo, that weird white ribbed thing coming out of the bottom of King Boo is actually for the main play mechanism of the set.
Here, the idea is for Mario to spin the Swoops enemies over and over to turn a system of gears that will eventually make King Boo pop out of his spot and onto his back (and then Mario can grab the invincibility star and stomp on King Boo). I've seen some comments online that the actual mechanism didn't work particularly well for some people but my son and I had no issues with it whatsoever. In fact, we both rather enjoyed the play feature!
In total, this set comes with 4 Swoops, 2 Goombas, and King Boo which means you do get a lot of enemies for your layout. Of course, the 4 Swoops are attached to the base of King Boo's haunted mansion so you can't (easily) move them around, but still, lots of baddies in this set!
In addition to the all the bad guys and the play feature to defeat King Boo, there are a few other surprises in the set. First, there's a spider web that you can flip over out of the way to reveal a bar code.
There's also a tree trunk that you can knock over to reveal another bar code.
While neither of the above to action mechanisms are amazing on their own, it does serve as a bit of a "level" prior to getting to the main boss King Boo.
As I mentioned near the top of the review, this set has a nice, large footprint and it's one of the better "display pieces" from the first wave of LEGO Mario sets. The LEGO designers made sure of that by really leaning into the whole "haunted house" motif. The even added a pair of cast iron gates for Mario to walk through as he enters this portion of the level.
Little touches like that mean something and it definitely makes this set stronger overall.
Taken as a whole, you can see that Mario enters the main gate (which is flanked by a pair of Goombas), then there are a couple of paths around the outside of the haunted house. Finally, a few quick spins of the Swoops to knock King Boo out and then the level is beat! The colors work well here, I love the small touches like the gold grates for the windows as well as the spider webs on each of the two towers which helps to make the set look a lot larger than it actually is.
All things considered, this set was much better than I was expecting! The initial images that I saw of the set didn't interest me at all (and the price tag seemed too high for my liking). In fact, I thought so little of this set at it's release that I didn't bother to pick up and had no plans to ever buy it. However, as I said before, my son loved the Haunted House level in Mario 64 (including King Boo in that game) so grabbing a used copy of the set off of eBay was something that I ended up feeling compelled to do. I'm glad I did though as this is definitely a set that I'd put towards that top tier of LEGO Mario sets to date! It's not quite as good as some of the very best Mario sets that I've built (Reznor Knockdown and Desert Pokey, for example) but it's up there near the top of the rankings. If you have interest in the set, I'd firmly recommend grabbing it now as it's already out-of-print (as of the time of this posting, Amazon still had the set for sale for a decent price).
Best LEGO Super Mario Expansions:
- Desert Pokey (review link, 10/10)
- Reznor Knockdown (review link, 9/10)
- Whomp's Lava Trouble (review link, 9/10)
- King Boo and the Haunted Yard (8/10)
- Boomer Bill Barrage (review link, 3/10)
- Chain Chomp Jungle Encounter (review link, 2/10)
- Frog Mario (review link, 4/10)
- Fire Mario (review link, 3/10)
- Adventures with Mario (review link, 9/10)
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