In New York City, Halloween is one of the biggest holidays of the year with parades — including a nationally recognized Dog Parade in the East Village — parties, candy, and costumes galore. Whereas in suburbs, children are the main trick or treaters, people of all ages get into the act here.
I typically put Halloween-themed Lego pieces — snakes, bats, spiders and their webs — on my door and greet the little ghouls and goblins in my building with candy. But this year I have a new addition to my Halloween apartment decor, a full fledged Lego castle!
The castle is the flagship build of Series 5 in Lego’s Bricklink Designer Program, Adventure in Transylvania. For those unfamiliar with the program and who want a brief summary rather than clicking the above link, fan designers can enter their creations in a BDP competition every four months in the hope that The LEGO Group will make them into a limited edition set. Out of 200-500 entries, only five are chosen in each series or wave, so the odds aren’t great and the winners are pretty amazing. Unlike Lego’s releases through the Ideas program, the BDP sets undergo very little revision before they’re sold. No set has sold more than 50,000 and most sell in quantities of 20,000 to 30,000. They also don’t come with printed instructions, so you either have to print the PDF instructions yourself or view them on a laptop or tablet. Because they’re designed for more experienced builders, the BDP sets tend to be both more creative and more challenging to build.
One of the most popular and successful BDP designers is “Sleepless Night” from Poland. (I know his real name but will not reveal it.) He specializes in castles — the realistic kind like the Mountain Fortress in Series 1 or the Series 4 Siege Encampment, and the contemporary/fantasy mashup that is Adventure in Transylvania. In fact, Adventure in Transylvania is currently the bestselling BDP set of all time, and it turned its creator, who receives 5% of the sets gross sales, into a millionaire. Sleepless Nights’s creation is visually stunning and contains lots of surprises within, including a crank that allows a vampire to rise from his crypt and a trapdoor dropping an unsuspecting visitor into a dungeon already inhabited by a skeleton.
Okay, I added the skeleton to the dungeon.
One of the attractions of Sleepless Nights’s work is his introduction of narrative into the build, something that Lego itself does with its sets geared to children. To promote the Siege Encampment he made a video of the Mountain Fortress residents who rise up against the Lion Knights for endlessly raising their taxes and who besiege the Lion Knights Castle. While the video promoting Adventure in Transylvania emphasized the architectural detains and mechanical features, the mixture of haunted house figures alongside normal people (a choice criticized by many adult Lego fans) lends itself to storytelling.
The castle is a tourist trap in every sense of the word. An unsuspecting Polish family — mom, dad, two daughters — decides to vacation in Romania to see the castle upon which the classic Bram Stoker novel Dracula is based. Some of the tombstones mention characters in Stoker’s work. Unfortunately, the tourists’ visit — where you can see the parking lot that I’ve added — turns life-threatening when the littlest sister is falsely accused of stealing an enchanted gold coin. She leaves the castle, hands empty of the coin, but a vengeful eighteenth century security guard trains his pistol on her. Her older sister is distracted, examining the detaining of a tower. Big sister never really liked her anyway, having decided that her life took a downhill turn when she ceased to be an only child and the sole object of her parents’ attention. That is, what little of her parents’ attention there is. Mom is behind her, engrossed in her cellphone. And Dad is hitting on the cute Romanian health and safety inspector who has been dispatched to the castle because of previous injuries and complaints, as well as a fire due to open flames in the chandelier and elsewhere.
The coin has been purloined not by the innocent little girl but by a ghost living in the rafters of the ballroom. Now ghosts have very little use for coins, but many of them like to instigate trouble for their own amusement. (I added the ghost as well, cannibalized from another haunted house.)
In the meantime, a plumber has been called to the castle, perhaps to install a sprinkler system, but a banshee has frightened him away from doing his work. The whole scenario makes me think of the notorious Action Park, aka Traction Park or Class Action Park, but if the dangerous tourist destination were evil instead of merely foolish.
If you’re a fan of Lego and a confident builder, I suggest you check out the BDP program for unique and inventive sets like this one. Although Adventure in Transylvania is no longer in production, you can find unopened sets on the secondary market. Although they’re almost twice as expensive as the one I bought during the one-week window that it was on sale, I feel the build is worth it even at the higher price. After all, Lego just brought out an official Venice Neighborhood set for a similar price that I feel makes too many compromises to make it worth the price. In fact, for Venice fans, there’s a Venetian Houses set with fewer pieces but a similar size and better interiors that came out in a Bricklink limited edition in 2022, one year before the official BDP waves were released.
If you have any BDP sets that you’d like to recommend, please add them to the comments. The next order period, for Series 10, begins in February 2027, with orders for the five winning Series 11 sets, which have also been announced, available in June.
