The winner of the Best LEGO Set of 2023 reader vote tournament is..

January 8, 2024 | 6

After 4 rounds of intense voting, it’s time to reveal the winner of the best LEGO Set of 2023 Reader Vote Tournament! It won’t be a surprise at all, but 10316 Lord of the Rings: Rivendell has been crowned Best LEGO Set of 2023 by your votes!

In the Final Round, 10316 Lord of the Rings: Rivendell bested 21338 A-Frame Cabin handily, winning by 2466 votes to 1005, capping one of the most dominant runs yet!

Note: apologies I took some time with sharing the results. I fell sick over New Year’s and am currently catching up on end of year content!

Here’s a look at Rivendell’s unstoppable run to be crowned Best LEGO Set of 2023, easily conquering its side of the bracket.

On the other side, the semi-finalists were both LEGO Ideas sets, which both took down some heavy hitters like the UCS Venator and Avengers Tower, before the A-Frame Cabin squeaked out a win, only to inevitably fall to LEGO Lord of the Ring’s triumphant return.

Here’s the full breakdown of the votes from  Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. This year we added Twitter to the mix, but in many of these matchups, the sheer number of Instagram votes were most of the time instrumental in tipping certain sets over the line.

In total, 46,267 votes were cast this year, close to double the votes cast in the 2022 Tournament, making this the biggest one yet, and a huge success!

I will have to say, that this year’s bracket felt incredibly lopsided, nearly everyone willing Rivendell to win, which was demonstrated in the Seeding Vote round, which determined the makeup of the bracket.

1. The Lord of the Rings: Rivendell (10316)
2. A-Frame Cabin (21338)
3. Avengers Tower (76269)
4. Eldorado Fortress (10320)
5. Gringotts Wizarding Bank – Collectors’ Edition (76417)
6. Viking Village (21343)
7. UCS Venator-class Republic Attack Cruiser (75367)
8. PAC-MAN Arcade (10323)
9. Botanical Garden (41757)
10. Himeji Castle (21060)
11. NINJAGO City Markets (71799)
12. Concorde (10318)
13. Hokusai – The Great Wave (31208)
14. The Insect Collection (21342)
15. Modular Natural History Museum (10326)
16. Temple of the Golden Idol (77015)
17. Modular Jazz Club (10312)

Some data irregularities & bot entries

This is a little funny, but took me by a bit of surprise – I had to clean up quite a bit of data before the Vote started, hence the small delay. As I left the Google Form open for as many people to join, it also opened up vulnerabilities to automated entries and bots, which I had to filter out.

Thankfully, they were reasonably easy to spot, and I had to knock off hundreds of fake votes for 10317 Land Rover Defender, Yamaha MT-10 (42159) and Tales of the Space Age (21340) which I thought were some choices.

They were quite easy to tell as the other entries were blank, and there was a common interval of time between entries.

I might have to use logged in Google Accounts only in future, but I’m afraid that it might be a barrier of entry for people to nominate their sets during the seeding phase!

In many ways, Rivendell winning was all but guaranteed. 2023 was another banner year for LEGO with more sets than ever before and also a huge variety of very competent designs, but Rivendell just outclassed every other set, and set the bar incredibly high for the return of a highly beloved license that’s armed with LEGO’s confidence in catering for the deep-pocketed adults market.

I gave the set an incredibly glowing writeup in my review of 10316 The Lord of the Rings: Rivendell, and still stand by it that it’s a truly special set that’s simply perfect in every way, and defies all expectations of what can be possible from a LEGO set.

Now let’s check out some of the other categories:

Favourite LEGO Minifigure of 2023 Vote

The favourite LEGO Minifigure of 2023 is always a fun one, as nominations were open, but one clear winner emerged – Moon Knight from LEGO Marvel Minifigures Series 2, which is truly well deserved!

Rounding out the Top 5 was Captain Rex from 75367 UCS Venator, Falconer and Brown Astronaut & Spacebaby combo from LEGO Minifigures Series 24 and a tie between the 1992 Batman minifigure and Indiana Jones.

Best LEGO Theme of 2023

For the Best Theme vote, same like last year, LEGO Icons took the top spot, however, this year, LEGO Ideas was just 4 votes short of knocking Icons off!

This one always feels a little unfair as LEGO Icons is so broad and all-encompassing, and isn’t quite fair to be lumped as its own theme. Still a great showing from LEGO Ideas, and I also loved seeing Disney and Friends in the Top 5.

Interestingly, plenty of you voted for Icons Botanicals, Modulars and Lord of the Rings as its own “theme” as technically they all fall under Icons.

In future, I think I’ll set this as a multiple choice question option, and split Icons up into its own respective Icons sub-themes.

A new category I included this year is the Most Improved Theme, and safe to say, LEGO Friends topped the vote with over 300 votes, beating Icons and Ideas!

The 2023 LEGO Friends reboot introduced the next generations of LEGO Friends, bold new designs, and spectacular sets like 41757 Botanical Garden, proudly declaring its intention to appeal to more than just girls.

Also happy to see LEGO City come in at number 4 as it too, undergone a bit of a refresh with its designs, with less emphasis on Police and Fire, and more liveable city aspects.

And last but not least, the spending question! It looks like LEGO has done another great job in 2023, with 75% of you stating that you’ve spent more on LEGO in 2023 compared to 2022!

Looking at my credit card statements and piles of boxes I’ve amassed in 2023, you can be sure that I voted Yes to this one too!

GIVEAWAY WINNERS

And last but not least, here are the winners of the giveaway – where one lucky reader who voted in any of the rounds will score an exclusive 40504 A Minifigure Tribute, plus the rest will score $50 in LEGO.com/Amazon gift cards.

• 40504 A Minifigure Tribute  – Dawn Wade (drawn from Facebook)
• $50 gift card – @itsrobthebuilder (drawn from Instagram)
• $50 gift card – Ely Tanaka (drawn from Facebook)
• $50 gift card – @meetmeinthemultiverse (drawn from Instagram)
• $50 gift card – @juli.alexander (drawn from Instagram)

I’ll be in contact with the winners soon, so congratulations to the winners and thanks so much to everyone for participating and voting and making this year’s the biggest Reader Vote yet!

Congratulations to 10316 Lord of the Rings: Rivendell for taking out the best LEGO Set of 2023!

What did you think of this year’s bracket, and the matchups? Were there any rounds that surprised you?

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