Great thing about classic LEGO castles was the generous number of minifigures that accompanied them. In 1984 the 6080 King’s Castle shipped with twelve Lion Knights and four horses. That is a lot for me to try and recreate. (Compare this to the modern 7946 King’s Castle, which includes only five defenders, three attackers and one horse.) I finally managed to dig into my LEGO boxes and look for suitable minifigure parts and accessories, mostly originating from 6073 Knight’s Castle and 6061 Siege Tower, plus some smaller sets I have forgotten about – perhaps the 6055 Prisoner Convoy.

It could be worse, I think I can readily furnish almost half of the minifigures and all horses, plus parts of all the rest. But compared to the requirements at least five items seem to be in significant short supply in my existing collection: red legs with black hips, blue capes, red breastplate torsos, lion shields and red/yellow flags. While I will try to complete the castle proper, I don’t think I am going to acquire all minifigure parts. I will make do without some, but hopefully a few more will be completed along the way. There may still be suitable parts in my LEGO boxes as well, especially if I venture into some minifig surgery.

The incomplete minifigures:

And the completed ones:

Note: You can click the images for larger versions.

The black battleaxes I had to borrow from my son’s 7946 King’s Castle for this photo-shoot, the same minifigures are also missing yellow lion shields, which I will source later. As a photography experiment I placed a beige and a yellow cardboard behind the minifigures for that faux-authentic 1980s LEGO Castle feel (I also added a bit of orange gradient in post-processing), although my scene is missing the setting sun and the orange hills that accompanied original LEGO photographs of the era. Also note/ignore my 1980s LEGO Castle keyring (plus spear) on the left, it is not part of the 6080 King’s Castle.