LEGO Harry Potter 76441 Hogwarts Castle: The Dueling Club review

LEGO Harry Potter 76441 Hogwarts Castle: The Dueling Club offers some hands-on fun and four minifigures for a decent price.

Coming in at the lower end of prices for January 2025 LEGO Harry Potter sets, 76441 Hogwarts Castle: The Dueling Club offers a simple but enjoyable interpretation of a well-known scene from one of the earlier films, complete with four minifigures.

Release: January 1, 2025 Price: £19.99 / $24.99 / €24.99 Pieces: 158 Minifigures: 4 LEGO: Order now

‘Let me introduce my assistant… Professor Snape.’

At face value it’s the minifigures that do a lot of the heavy lifting for 76441 Hogwarts Castle: The Dueling Club, given that the ‘build’ is primarily just a long brown table, representative of where students gathered around to watch Draco Malfoy and Harry Potter battle it out early on in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets after an able demonstration from Professors Snape and Lockhart.

The build is simple because the challenge of putting it into LEGO is simple – the purple drape across the top is nicely represented with good detail, while the room that it takes place in is partially represented by a little side build of a fireplace.

‘…if I had wanted to stop you it would have been only too easy…’

However, there is more to the long brown table than just bricks, and so more to 76441 Hogwarts Castle: The Dueling Club too, with a clever play mechanism built into it to mimic the battle between two duelling wizards or witches – and how the advantage in casting spells can sometimes be based on how quick you are (again, as ably demonstrated by Snape and Lockhart).

Essentially, two of you can take an end to the table each and quick-draw-style press the steps leading up to the table. Whoever is first can launch the other’s minifigure off the table just as if they’d been successfully struck by a spell. It’s a cute idea that takes simply putting a scene into LEGO form and transforms it into fully recreating that scene and its action points into a LEGO experience.

‘Scared, Potter?’

Working such clever play into 76441 Hogwarts Castle: The Dueling Club immediately transforms the value and prospect of coming back to this set more often, when compared with a static version of the same scene, regardless of the minifigures included or not.

That being said, the line-up is perfectly selected, with Harry and Draco obligatory (and probably multiple in many collections by now). Severus Snape has been recently redesigned and this is a welcome opportunity to pick him up, whilst a new outfit and new sand green version of the rubber cape make Gilderoy Lockhart the snazziest character of the set (naturally, and he’d have it no other way).

76441 Hogwarts Castle: The Dueling Club is only a small set and not the most eye-catching of the collection launching at the start of 2025, but it does what it can to inject some magic into the set in a way that will reward those of you who pick it up.

Our honest opinion: Credit to the theme’s design team for finding a way to make this more than just a LEGO Harry Potter battle pack.

This set was provided for review by the LEGO Group.

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