Another fan-made LEGO Ideas submission has been given the nod to become an official LEGO set, but while the company’s designers will often make small changes before these sets go into production, the new Table Football got a major facelift and a massive reduction in size.
The design is loosely based on 16-year-old Donát Fehérvári’s LEGO Ideas Foosball Table submission, which was created as part of the “We Love Sports!” building challenge. Fehérvári’s creation was announced as the contest’s winning entry at LEGO Con last year, although we’re only just now getting our first look at the final design.
The official set is now called “Table Football” instead of “Foosball Table,” but the more obvious difference is the scale of the final design, which is dramatically smaller than what Fehérvári had submitted. Instead of featuring eight rods with 22 LEGO minifigures and a relatively large playing field, the 2,339-piece set shrinks that to just four rods, two for each player, and a total of 10 LEGO minifigures on the tiny field.
The game is still fully playable, and includes colour-coded sliding knobs over each goal for keeping track of the score. Despite the field’s limited capacity for minifig players, the set actually comes with 22 of them in total, with lots of customisation options and a grandstand for fans with built-in storage beneath the seats for the various parts.
Given the price increases LEGO has seen around the world as a result of the fallout from the ongoing pandemic and supply chain woes, it’s understandable that the company didn’t try to create a full-sized Foosball table out of plastic bricks. As it stands, even at this scale, the official Table Football set will come with a $AU379.99 price tag when it’s available starting on November 1. Convincing LEGO fans to spend even more than that without a pop culture tie-in would be a tough sell.