LEGO Icons 10362 French Café doesn't scale with minifigures well, but the other current kind of LEGO figure surprisingly performs much better.
As part of the new Restaurants of the World collection, 10362 French Café launches on March 1 as a new kind of display-centric model – one with a design that doesn't benefit from the addition of characters such as minifigures.
It's designed to be entirely standalone, as we discovered when attempting to make minifigures work with 10362 French Café. Unfortunately, we found that minifigures are too vertically-challenge to work with the set. Even adding the long-limbed Avatar minifigures didn't help with proportions overall seeming off compared to the new LEGO Icons model.
Thankfully, there's one other kind of LEGO figure we can try and fit into 10362 French Café, and though opinions on them are more mixed compared to minifigures, mini-dolls might just work with the LEGO Icons set.
Unlike a standard LEGO minifigure, mini-dolls are unlikely to have any trouble getting onto the chairs outside the café, just as they don't have any problem reaching over the counter inside.
The furnishings are at a scale which mini-dolls are much more accustomed to. Even the sign outside is a more realistic size, no longer measuring as height as a person, but coming up to their shoulder instead. That's still quite big of that, there is no doubt – but it's much better than it was with minifigures.
The stylised and rounded nature of mini-dolls tends to work better with the architectural details of 10362 French Café, with plenty of rounded elements that blend better with the realistic proportions and appearance of mini-dolls, making for a smoother experience with them on display.
Mini-dolls fit better than minifigures in 10362 French Café, and though they're far from the perfect fit, there's only one real downside to using mini-dolls instead of minifigures should you wish to populate the LEGO Icons set. The fact is that mini-dolls are simply not nearly as iconic or as popular as minifigures with the community. From Wicked to Wednesday and the long-running Friends range, they're here to stay, and opinions are slowly but surely changing on the more realistic figures.
They'll never be quite at the level minifigures are, but it might be worth picking up a LEGO Friends, Wicked, Wednesday set or digging into your collection ahead of 10362 French Café for a satisfying method of populating the first Restaurants of the World model.
Whether with mini-dolls or alone as intended, 10362 French Café is an interesting upcoming release with some masterful techniques to admire, as you can see in our review.
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