The #10188 LEGO Star Wars Death Star has been one of the best-selling LEGO sets of all time, originally released in 2008, and finally retired after seven years at the end of 2015. However this wasn’t a true retirement, just a bit of time taken off to get some updates and improvements, and now the Death Star is back! The #75159 LEGO Star Wars Death Star includes over 200 extra pieces as well as three new minifigures. Below is the full press-release with pictures and details. Here is the official description of the #75159 LEGO Star Wars Death Star: Win the battle for the Empire with the awesome Death Star! Reenact amazing scenes from the Star Wars saga with the Empire’s ultimate planet-zapping weapon—the Death Star! With over 4,000 pieces, this fantastic model has a galaxy of intricate and authentic environments, including a superlaser control room, Imperial conference chamber, hangar bay with moving launch rack and Lord Vader’s TIE Advanced with space for Vader inside, Emperor Palpatine’s throne room, Droid maintenance room, detention block, trash compactor, tractor beam, cargo area, turbo laser with spring-loaded shooters and seats for the 2 Death Star Gunners,
and 2 movable turbo laser towers. This fantastic set also includes 23 iconic minifigures and 2 Droids to ensure hours of Star Wars battle fun. Includes 23 minifigures and 2 droids: Grand Moff Tarkin, Darth Vader, Emperor Palpatine, Imperial Navy Officer, Imperial Officer, 2 Stormtroopers, 2 Death Star Troopers, 2 Emperor’s Royal Guards, 2 Death Star Gunners, Death Star Droid, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Chewbacca, Princess Leia, C-3PO, Han Solo, Han Solo (disguise), Luke Skywalker (Tatooine), Luke Skywalker (disguise) and Luke Skywalker (final duel), plus R2-D2, an Imperial Astromech and a Dianoga trash compactor monster. Features a superlaser control room, Imperial conference chamber, hangar bay with moving launch rack and detachable TIE Advanced with space for Lord Vader inside, Emperor Palpatine’s throne room, Droid maintenance room, detention block, trash compactor, tractor beam, cargo area, turbo laser with spring-loaded shooters and seats for the 2 Death Star gunners, and 2 movable turbo laser towers.
LEGO VIP members will get early access to the #75159 LEGO Star Wars Death Star on September 15th, followed by general release on September 30th. Prices are as follows: US $499.99 – CA $599.99 – DE 499.99€ – UK £399.99 – DK 4499.00 DKK (Euro pricing varies by country). The set will be available at official LEGO stores and under the LEGO Star Wars section of the Online LEGO Shop. Rumors started circulating even before the #10188 LEGO Star Wars Death Star was retired that LEGO was going to release a new Death Star. Some people thought it will be related to the new Star Wars film, others speculated that it would be like the old #10143 LEGO Star Wars Death Star II display-model from 2005, and some LEGO fans reasoned that it will probably be just an updated re-release with new minifigures and improved building techniques. And this third group pretty much had it right; the #75159 LEGO Star Wars Death Star is basically the same thing as the original set, with updated minifigures.
It is clear that LEGO felt that there was no need to change the original set, besides freshening up the minifigures and adding a couple of other small changes. On the box image the Death Star is even oriented almost exactly the same way as on the original set, to emphasize that it is the same thing. Nobody was expecting that the sets will be this similar. In fact, when the first images of the new set leaked in mid-August, most LEGO fans thought it was a prank. Even with a re-release people expected that LEGO will at least update some of the more unsightly features of the original model, like the stepped curves. Personally, I would have loved if the outside would be covered with opening panels! The collection of minifigures is nice, but I don’t think it justifies a $100 increase in price. Just to give you some comparison here is some data. The #10188 LEGO Star Wars Death Star was released in 2008 with 3,803 pieces and 24 minifigs/droids for a price of $400 (10.5 cents a piece). T
he #75159 LEGO Star Wars Death Star comes with 4,016 pieces (213 more pieces) and 25 minifigs/droids for a price of $500 (12.4 cents a piece). The #71040 LEGO Disney Castle is 4,080 pieces (so 64 pieces more than the new Death Star) for a price of $350 (8.6 cents a piece). From this perspective, it might make more sense to just buy the old Death Star (which still sells for around $400 on the secondary market and prices will likely drop once the new one is out), and maybe add a few updated minifigs. Or if you just want to get a big display set, the LEGO Disney Castle is a much better deal. Below are a few more comparison pictures of the two sets (old on the left, new on the right). What do you think? How do you like the new LEGO Star Wars Death Star? Do you think it is worth getting it? What interesting changes and updates you notice between the two sets? And how do you like the minifigures? Do you have the previous version of the set? Feel free to share your thoughts and discuss in the comment section below! 😉
And you might also like to check out the following related posts:LEGO 75159 STAR WARS DEATH STAR. Built once never played with.If you’ve got the time, lack of willpower when it comes to buying shiny things, space to house a giant plastic sphere, and the money, you actually might want to build it anyway. Given how much I’ve written about Lego on io9, it’d be safe to assume that I’ve built a lot of it in my time. So when the company recently retired its old Death Star collector’s set (a set popular enough to have been continuously sold since 2008) to make way for shiny new version that was basically the same, with a few upgrades and new minifigures, I saw it as an opportunity to stretch my usual Lego habits: get a set I’d long been wanting to own, and build something considerably larger than any other Lego set I’d built before. When Lego released all of its new Star Wars products at the end of September to mark Rogue One’s “Force Friday,” I threw down a considerable chunk of money—$500, to be precise, making this both one of the biggest and most expensive Lego sets available—and eagerly awaited its arrival.
A few weekends ago, massive box in hand, I made way to my kitchen table and set to work. Then I opened the Death Star box, and suddenly started worrying.Then I started sorting out bag after bag of Lego bricks out on the table, and started worrying even more.The thing is, you don’t really think about the fact that four thousand pieces of Lego—4,016, to be precise—is a humongous amount of Legos until you see them splayed out on your kitchen table in an endless sea of studded bricks, threatening to consume everything in sight. Had I bitten off way more than I could chew? Was I actually going to finish it in a day, or even a weekend? Was I beginning to have a really bad feeling about all this? I did the only thing an idiotic blogger who’d gleefully told his colleagues about buying something extremely dumb thinking it would make a great blog the week before could do: I sat down and started sorting Lego bricks like my life depended on it. Or, at least, my free time. The first section of the Death Star you build is, unsurprisingly, the base.
It looks big here, but it’s actually tiny compared to the rest of the superstructure you go on to build on it. By the end of that first weekend, I mostly felt like I hated myself (for buying the Death Star), Lego (for making it), and the Empire itself (for designing everything in the exact two same shades of grey). The process of building a modern Lego set, unlike the sets of your childhood where you spent just as much time rooting around the box for the one piece you needed, is highly regimented—section by section, it’s divided and split into sets of bags, easily numbered so you know which exact amounts you need to build each specific piece. It tightens your focus into the moment-to-moment building of a set, rather than the bigger picture, regardless of how big that bigger picture actually is—in this case, the bigger picture is a daunting, 16" by 16" diameter sphere.Sometimes that process is mundane—like repeating the pattern of building the same structure for a piece of flooring that you’ll end up doing another three times in a row to create each of the four layers of the Death Star, or the curved walls that will give the final playset its spheroid shape.
Its in those moments you’ll hate building the Death Star the most, as your raw fingers, slowly being shredded by pressing down on pointy plastic bricks, get dragged into doing the same pattern over and over again. But sometimes, that process is taking you through some truly clever and ingenious bits of design work that makes you appreciate the effort that goes into creating sets as lavish as these. The Death Star in particular is filled with “aha!” moments like this, because instead of just being a model of a spaceship or a vehicle, it’s a full-on play set. There’s even a little dianoga you can slot through the floor of the trash compactor, like its peering through the trashy depths! The Death Star set isn’t really an accurate recreation of the infamous battle station—it’d be impossible, if not a little boring, to try and achieve that. Instead, it’s a series of vignettes of things you remember happening on the Death Star in A New Hope—and, for one section, slightly awkwardly, Return of the Jedi.
So you get a bit that’s the trash compactor. A bit that’s the detention block Han and Luke break Leia out of. You get the bit where Obi-Wan disables the tractor beam. The aforementioned Return of the Jedi bit is actually the Emperor’s throne room, complete with highly unsafe giant chasms and falling gangways. These little scenes are complete and engaging builds on their own, before you consider the place they take in the overall look of the final Death Star. They’re filled with play features that might seem simple when built, but while you’re putting them together, it will make you feel like the greatest engineer on the planet. Even something as simple as a winch-operated lift.The fact that it took me over 20 hours to make the Death Star, all in all—spread out over two weekends—might seem like it’s far too much effort for a Lego set. But it was these moments of cleverness, how the thing you had no idea what you were building was meant to be until finally slots into a larger whole, that made that time feel well spent.
The other bit that made it worth it, unsurprisingly, was the cavalcade of delightful Star Wars characters you got to populate the Death Star with once you’d finally put it together. Witness the firepower, etc. etc. No Lego Star Wars set is really complete without minifigures, and the Death Star doesn’t skimp on them, either. Aside from little brick-built bonuses like a mouse droid or the dianoga, it comes with 25 figures. You get your heroes... Look at that fabulous head of hair on Han Solo. A whole swathe of figures specific to Return of the Jedi for the Emperor’s throne room... I swear that’s Grand Moff Tarkin in the middle, not a very confused Lego Twelfth Doctor. Stormtroopers—two of which are Han and Luke in disguise, which have spare helmets to turn into normal troopers... Sterner face, same majestic Han Solo hair. And, perhaps coolest of all, some extra Death Star personnel—Gunners and officers you can flesh out the generic areas of the playset with, whether its preparing to fire the superlaser, or standing around a briefing room: