LEGO 11386 Bikini Bottom Lands at 1,794 Pieces, Right in the Icons Middle

Bikini Bottom Joins the Icons Range With 1,794 Pieces and the Whole Main Cast

Set 11386, SpongeBob SquarePants: Bikini Bottom, has just gone up on LEGO.com's new arrivals list. It sits inside Icons, the theme that has spent six years building everything from the Eiffel Tower to the Titanic for adult collectors who want a shelf piece rather than a playset. This one drops the marble and steel for pineapple houses, and it does it with 1,794 pieces.

Four minifigures ship in the box: SpongeBob SquarePants, Patrick Star, Squidward Tentacles and Gary the snail. That's the entire core cast of the show in a single set, no secondary characters held back for a hypothetical second wave. For a licensed Icons release, getting all four leads at once is not something we take for granted, plenty of pop culture sets in this theme ship with two figures and a promise.

In Our Database, This Build Ranks 34th Out of 86 Icons Sets by Part Count

We track 86 sets under the Icons banner, and 11386 comes in 34th by piece count. That puts it comfortably in the upper half of the theme, ahead of more than half of everything Icons has ever released. It sounds respectable, and it is, but the theme's own average tells a slightly different story: Icons sets average 2,085 pieces, and Bikini Bottom falls about 300 pieces short of that number.

The gap is easy to explain once you look at what sits at the top of the theme. The five biggest Icons sets ever are the 10,001 piece Eiffel Tower, the 9,092 piece Titanic, the 9,036 piece Colosseum, the 8,278 piece Lord of the Rings: Minas Tirith and the 6,181 piece Rivendell. Those five alone drag the average up well past what a typical Icons release actually looks like. Strip out the mega builds and 1,794 pieces reads as a normal, middle weight entry, not a small one.

2026 Has Been the Busiest Year the Theme Has Ever Had

Nineteen Icons sets have come out this year alone, which is close to a quarter of every Icons set our database has recorded since the theme started in 2020. That is an aggressive release pace for a line built around big, slow, expensive builds, and 11386 is one piece of that wave rather than a standalone event.

Line it up against its 2026 siblings and the range spreads wide. Stranger Things: The Creel House came in at 2,593 pieces, the Arcade Pinball Machine at 2,274, the Douglas DC-3 PAN AM Airliner at 1,903, just ahead of Bikini Bottom. Below it sit the Ford Model T at 1,060, the Autumn Cottage Garden at 1,102, Sauron's Helmet at 538 and the Ferrari F2004 & Michael Schumacher at 735. And then there is Minas Tirith, at 8,278 pieces, the single biggest thing the theme has produced this year by a wide margin.

So Bikini Bottom lands squarely in the middle of its own release year: bigger than half of what came out alongside it, smaller than the other half, and nowhere near the year's flagship. That's a fair description of the set's ambition too. It's not trying to be this year's showpiece.

Four Minifigures Is Generous for a Theme Built Around Static Models

Icons has always leaned toward architecture and vehicle replicas, the kind of build where a minifigure would just get in the way of the display. A lot of this year's slate, from car tributes to building recreations, is designed to be looked at, not played with, and figures are often an afterthought in that context.

Bikini Bottom flips that. It's built around characters first, and it gives you all four of them: SpongeBob, Patrick, Squidward and Gary. For collectors who care about minifigure completeness as much as part count, that's the strongest single argument for this set inside the current wave. You're not buying a building with a token figure taped on, you're buying the cast.

What 1,794 Pieces Actually Means on a Weekend and a Shelf

A set in this range typically clears in a couple of focused sessions rather than a single afternoon, without demanding the multi weekend commitment that an 8,278 piece Minas Tirith asks for. It's a build you can finish and still have a free Sunday, which matters if you're not treating this as your one big project of the season.

On display, expect something that reads as a proper diorama rather than a shelf trinket. It won't dominate a room the way the Eiffel Tower or the Titanic do, but it also won't disappear next to your other builds. That middle ground, noticeable without needing its own wall, is exactly what the part count promised.

Who Should Buy This, and Who Should Wait

This is for people who actually watch the show, or grew up on it, and want a display piece that says so without committing to a giant build. If your shelf space and your build time are both limited, 1,794 pieces is a set you can actually finish and enjoy rather than one that sits half built for months.

Skip it if you're chasing scale. Anyone shopping Icons for the spectacle of a five figure part count should be looking at Minas Tirith or the older mega builds, not this one. And if you don't care about the license, the part count alone isn't the theme's most interesting number this year, plenty of 2026 releases undercut it and plenty beat it comfortably.

There's No Direct Predecessor in the Range for This to Replace

Bikini Bottom isn't stepping into a gap left by an older set, our database doesn't show a prior Icons entry built around this setting. It's a first for the theme rather than a refresh, which means there's no obvious older box to compare it against piece for piece the way you could with, say, a second version of a car or a landmark.

The closer comparison is with this year's other licensed entries, Stranger Things: The Creel House being the clearest one, since both are TV properties translated into a display build. The Creel House asks for 800 more pieces and gives you a haunted house rather than a cast of characters. Which one earns its place depends entirely on whether you're buying the setting or the people in it.

Our Reservations

Our database doesn't have a 3D model of 11386 up yet, which is standard for a set this freshly listed and usually resolves itself within weeks, but it does mean we're going on the official part and minifigure counts rather than our own render for some of the finer detail.

The bigger reservation is positioning. Sitting 34th out of 86 by size is a fine result, but it also means this isn't a set that redefines anything in the theme. It's a solid, mid table release in a year that already gave us an 8,278 piece flagship. Judge it on the cast and the setting, not on the part count, and it holds up. Judge it purely as a numbers play and it's just another Tuesday for Icons in 2026.

• LEGO Icons
• SpongeBob SquarePants
• LEGO 11386
• new sets 2026
• LEGO minifigures
• set comparison