NINJAGO City Gardens puts a decade of adventure beside the noodle shop

An anniversary built as a neighborhood

NINJAGO City Gardens, set 71741, celebrates a fictional world by giving its inhabitants places to spend an ordinary day. LEGO’s product description puts Chen’s noodle house, an ice cream shop, a museum and a ninja control room within the same tall model. It is a dense collection of destinations rather than a single battle frozen in bricks.

The set includes 19 minifigures and removable building tiers. In the official press photograph, its different colors and rooflines give the tower the appearance of several buildings that have grown together. The small garden at its base supplies a quieter counterpart to the vertical stack of rooms.

A milestone that outgrew its original plan

LEGO introduced City Gardens as part of NINJAGO’s tenth-anniversary celebrations in 2021. The January announcement also recorded an instructive piece of the theme’s history: according to co-creator Tommy Andreasen, the television story was originally expected to end after its second season, but continued success kept both the series and products going.

The anniversary program included fan-created work and a LEGO House exhibition. City Gardens therefore sat within a wider celebration of the audience as well as the characters. Its golden Wu minifigure marked the milestone explicitly; the surrounding city offered a less ceremonial way to remember the world that had accumulated around him.

Why the small destinations matter

Our interpretation is that the model works as a tribute because it does not make every room heroic. A museum gives the past a formal home, while a meal or an ice cream suggests what happens between adventures. Those uses make the imaginary city easier to inhabit in the mind. Characters have reasons to remain there after the immediate crisis has passed.

The vertical arrangement also changes how a collection of references reads. Spread across a shelf, the same rooms might resemble separate souvenirs. Stacked into one structure, they share a skyline and become neighbors. The visual density can reward familiarity with NINJAGO without requiring every viewer to recognize every reference before enjoying the architecture.

There is a practical tradeoff in that ambition. A tall, layered model offers many individual interiors, but the complete exterior cannot show all of them at once. Removable tiers help reconcile the display with access to its smaller scenes.

This is a retrospective assessment from official descriptions and photographs, with no claim of hands-on testing. The 2021 anniversary is history, not an upcoming event. What remains distinctive is the decision to commemorate an action series through a place where its people can also eat, collect memories and go about their day.