LEGO 80118 Fortune Firecracker arrives not with a bang, but a whimper

2026’s wall-mounted LEGO Lunar New Year set is ornate and detailed, but lacks a lot of the ingenuity and playability that was present in offerings from previous years.

The LEGO Group has cemented Lunar New Year as a crucial sales holiday in many parts of the world, with sets specialising in bright colours, eye-catching detail and a certain amount of charm and whimsy that fit the festive season well. Unfortunately, while LEGO 80118 Fortune Firecracker looks the part, its minifigures feel vestigial as the set is really only designed to be a mildly amusing display piece.

80118 Fortune Firecracker

Release: Jan 1, 2026

Retiring: Dec 31, 2026

Price: £69.99 / $89.99 / €79.99

Pieces: 1,039

Minifigures: 6

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The LEGO Group’s internal logic is difficult to parse sometimes to the casual observer. The company is famously opposed to any kind of LEGO set that depicts a brick-built firearm – but apparently, brick-built explosives are absolutely fine.

But, then, perhaps this is the LEGO Group simply being unusually sensitive to local customs, traditions, and religious practices. 80118 Fortune Firecracker is, as the name suggests, intended to represent firecrackers, which hold a sacred relevance in the celebration of Lunar New Year in various parts of Southeast Asia. These miniature fireworks are a common sight over the festive period, as people light them near their homes and places of business to ward off monsters and evil spirits.

As a concept, this sounds like a fantastic source material for a LEGO set, and indeed, a previous set (80106 Story of Nian) has adapted the ancient folk story that plays a large part in these annual celebrations. Unfortunately, for a LEGO set about fireworks designed to protect against evil, 80118 Fortune Firecracker feels a bit lacklustre.

The design of the build is impressive – there’s the same level of detail, paired with the eye-catching red and gold colour scheme, that has become the hallmark of the LEGO Group’s Lunar New Year offering. As a LEGO set that is built, attached to the wall, and forgotten about, this certainly doesn’t disappoint.

Unfortunately, 80118 Fortune Firecracker doesn’t have anything going for it beyond this. There are no play features beyond a button that can be pressed to eject a small tableau from the inside of the build, and the loud explosive firecracker noise is achieved with a couple of studs that are added, loose, into each of the firecrackers. This leads to more of a rattle than a bang.

It might seem odd to expect a set like this to have anything more than a kitsch display value, but bizarrely, 80118 Fortune Firecracker also includes most (but not all) of a family of minifigures, and their inclusion, counterintuitively, makes the set feel less impressive than it would do without them.

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It’s become tradition that every year, a Lunar New Year set includes a family of minifigures – the same family every year, having new adventures but all recognisable with each new set. Typically, they’ve been included in minifigure-scale scenes – a family dinner, a walk in the park, ice skating, watching a parade.

This time around (most of) the family is here, but they feel like an afterthought. They can be placed on two small baseplates, one of which can be inserted into the interior of the build at any given time, but the other must be left awkwardly off to the side. It goes without saying that when the set is mounted to a wall, it’s not easy to leave part of the build off to the side while still making it feel like part of the display.

All of the minifigures are found in the first bag of the set, and it almost feels like their inclusion is obligatory, vestigial, rather than being organic to the set. Quite aside from anything else, including six unnecessary minifigures has the effect of raising the set’s price dramatically – it would be a lot easier to recommend 80118 Fortune Firecracker if it were a bit cheaper.

If the minifigures had not been included, the build might have felt stronger. As it is, this feels like a set that’s trying to do too much, rather than focused on its explosive main feature.

Our honest opinion: 80118 Fortune Firecracker is a perfectly nice LEGO set that unfortunately suffers from unnecessary expectations thanks to included minifigures that serve no purpose, and a gimmick that fizzles out rather than providing the wow factor seen in sets from previous years.

This set was provided for review by the LEGO Group.

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