Lego Mos Eisley Cantina review: "The kind of playset you dreamed of when you were small"

The Lego Mos Eisley Cantina will likely go down as the biggest playset-style kits the company has ever produced. Typically, Lego Star Wars sets are split into the high-end ship models which are very “look, but don’t touch,” and the smaller playsets which tend to forgo details and huge builds for more play features. However, the Cantina is something special. 

Sporting a huge number of minifigures and a giant, fully enclosed building (another rarity for Lego Star Wars and Lego in general outside of the City line,) the Lego Star Wars Mos Eisley Cantina is a dream set for many. However, that juxtaposition of a playset tied with the high price means that although you’ll get to relive the Cantina scene until your heart is content, displaying the model itself isn’t the easiest.

Lego Mos Eisley Cantina - features

The Lego Star Wars Mos Eisley Cantina is essentially a circular playset that opens up so that you can access all the small details. When closed up, and with the detachable roof on-top, there’s really not much you can see inside, but just like in the films, once you get through that door, there’s a huge amount to peer at. 

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Much like how the original Cantina was largely created using bits and pieces of old scrap metal found laying around Pinewood studios in the '70s, the Lego Mos Eisley Cantina uses a huge number of strange pieces in interesting colors to recreate that thrown-together look. 

If anything, there’s probably a bit of excess to the sheer amount of details they included, including some parts of the Cantina that were only ever shown in concept art books. How about a land speeder that’s literally on screen for about 4 seconds in the original film? Sure, let’s include it. Honestly, I'm surprised Lego didn’t include a pre-CGI Jabba the Hutt purely for the sake of it.

Lego Mos Eisley Cantina - what's it like to build?

The Lego Star Wars Mos Eisley Cantina is a fairly straightforward project, even if there are a few awkward sections in the middle of it. As with any set which features a lot of small builds to convey detail, there’s going to be plenty of room for mistakes, but the instructions are clear enough.

Interestingly, I found myself with a higher-than-normal amount of extra bricks after the build, but they could actually be very well incorporated into it, just to add a bit of texture. If you’re of the bigger-handed variety, you might struggle to fit some of the figures in the smaller booths, but thankfully, the roof sections are mostly held on by single studs, so they can be removed for more possibility for your figures. 

Lego Mos Eisley Cantina - design

The Lego Star Wars Mos Eisley Cantina looks fantastic and is incredibly detailed, it’s just a bit tricky to show off how good it looks. When all closed up, the Cantina looks very authentic - however, that’s hiding so much of the good stuff that I really implore anyone who gets the set to display it somewhere that they can open it up more freely. 

The two main walls of the Lego Star Wars Mos Eisley Cantina open up around the bar meaning that it can be displayed on a long shelf, which gives a nice cross-section of the Cantina itself. This does hide some of the outer builds and the extra little details, like the landspeeder that was only in a few frames of the original film, or the action features like Han & Greedo’s chairs being able to topple backward to recreate the world’s most tiresome nerdy debate.

Should you buy the Lego Mos Eisley Cantina?

Yes. We’re unlikely to see another playset of this size from Lego Star Wars any time soon, and as it’s set to retire before long, it’s definitely worth picking up before it finds itself alongside the UCS Cloud City set as an incredibly hard-to-find, out of print set.

It’s the kind of playset you dreamed of when you were small, and even if it is a bit difficult to display, the build itself and the reverence packed into the obscene amount of references makes it a wonderful build.

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How we tested the Lego Mos Eisley Cantina

I built the UCS Star Wars Mos Eisley Cantina over a weekend, with both Saturday and Sunday consisting of pretty much solid Lego building all day. It takes up quite a bit of table real estate, so if you’ve not got a dining room table you can leave it on to come back to, you’re probably going to want to section off a few days of solid building work.

I purchased this set from a Lego retail store in 2021.