LEGO's First-Ever Dragon Ball Set Lands November 1 With 1,764 Pieces

Toei Animation and the LEGO Group just ended years of fan speculation with one press release.

On 29 September 2026, the LEGO Group and Toei Animation confirmed what fans had circled on their calendars since a teaser leaked the week before: Dragon Ball is becoming an official building set line. The first result is 11390 Dragon Ball: Shenron & Goku, slotted into the LEGO Icons range, the shelf reserved for display-first sets aimed at adult builders rather than kids stacking bricks on a rug.

The set goes on sale from 1 November, sold through LEGO.com as the opening chapter of a partnership both companies describe as ongoing. Seven fan sites across three languages picked up the story within hours of each other on the same day, which tells you how closely this particular announcement was being watched. Dragon Ball has been near the top of wish lists for licenses fans wanted LEGO to sign for years, and now it has actually happened.

What matters for this article is not the announcement itself, already covered everywhere, but what the set actually is once you strip away the press release: a 1,764 piece model, one minifigure, and a very specific scene from the story.

Shenron takes the centrepiece, and the seven Dragon Balls do the storytelling.

The build itself is a diorama, not a vehicle or a building. At its centre stands Shenron, the eternal dragon summoned by gathering the seven Dragon Balls, modelled fully unfurled on a dedicated display stand. The seven Dragon Balls themselves are built into that base, arranged the way they appear in the anime and manga when the wish is finally about to be granted.

The human element of the scene is Kid Goku, the only minifigure confirmed for the set, positioned riding the Kintoun, better known to Western audiences as the Flying Nimbus cloud. There is no supporting cast in this first release, no Bulma, no Master Roshi, no Piccolo. It is a single frozen moment, Goku arriving as Shenron rises, and the model is built to be looked at from the front rather than played with from every angle.

That staging choice lines up with the 18+ rating carried by the set, as stated in the official press materials. Sets in that bracket are consistently built as finished display pieces first and construction toys a distant second, and 11390 follows that pattern precisely.

At 1,764 pieces, this is a weekend build, not an afternoon one.

1,764 pieces sits in a range where you should expect a proper multi-session build rather than an evening project. Sets of this size typically come with more than one numbered bag and enough sub-assemblies that you will want a clear table and a free weekend rather than a quick sprint. The dragon's serpentine body alone, built to be posed rising off a base, is the kind of section that eats up parts count fast without adding much footprint until the final pose comes together.

Display footprint is the other half of the equation. A stand carrying both the dragon and the seven Dragon Balls, with a minifigure vignette attached, is not something you tuck onto a narrow shelf. Anyone planning to add this to an existing collection should measure the space before ordering, not after the box arrives.

We can't rank 11390 against comparable sets in our own database the way we normally would, and that is itself worth flagging. There is no existing Dragon Ball theme to measure it against, no sibling set with a higher or lower part count to use as a yardstick. This is a theme with exactly one entry, a genuinely rare situation for us to write about.

The number 1,764 already exists in our database, just attached to a completely different set.

One quirk our database turned up, purely by coincidence: set number 1764 already exists in our records, and it has nothing to do with Shenron. It is the Birthday Building Set, a 100 piece Duplo set from 1995, ranked 83rd by part count among the 522 Duplo Basic Set entries we track. Two completely unrelated sets, three decades apart, sharing a four digit number for no reason other than how LEGO numbers its catalogue. We mention it because we noticed it, not because it means anything, but that is the kind of detail you only spot when you sit on top of a full parts database.

It is also a reminder that a brand new theme starts from zero in every sense. No back catalogue, no numbering pattern to anchor to, no obvious comparison to offer readers. Everything about 11390 has to be judged on its own.

One minifigure onboard, and that is likely the point.

Shipping a flagship license debut with a single minifigure is a deliberate bet. It tells you the set is meant to be read as a scene rather than a roster. Kid Goku on the Kintoun, arriving as the wish dragon rises, is arguably the most recognisable single image from the earliest chapters of Akira Toriyama's story, and building the set around exactly that moment plays to instant recognition rather than completeness.

It also leaves an obvious gap for anyone hoping to build out a wider Dragon Ball shelf immediately. There is no Vegeta, no Piccolo, no Frieza, none of the cast that longtime readers would associate with the series' later, higher stakes arcs. If your interest in the license was sparked by anything past the earliest manga chapters, this particular set will not scratch that itch on its own.

The good news, cautiously, is that outlets covering the announcement report the licensing deal covers more than one set. Whether a second wave brings additional characters, vehicles, or another display piece entirely has not been detailed anywhere we could find, and we are not going to guess on your behalf.

This is a licensing first for the brand, and it says something about how big anime got.

Licensing an anime and manga property into the Icons range is new territory for the LEGO Group, and the choice of Dragon Ball specifically is not a small one. Outlets covering the reveal repeatedly described it as one of the most requested licenses among the fan base, the kind of gap that has been pointed out on forums and wish lists for years without ever quite landing.

Positioning the set at 18+ and inside a display-focused line rather than a kids-oriented one signals exactly who the target buyer is: adults who grew up on the manga or the various anime adaptations and now have a shelf and the patience for a 1,764 piece build. That fits how nostalgia-driven properties have generally been treated in this range, built as objects to finish and keep rather than to play with daily.

It is also, bluntly, a statement of intent from Toei Animation about how it wants its properties represented outside of games and merchandise. A construction set is a slower, more deliberate kind of licensing product than a t-shirt or a mobile tie-in, and putting Shenron on someone's shelf for months at a time is a different kind of exposure than a limited retail run.

Every outlet that covered it agrees on the same numbers, which is unusual.

Something about this story stood out compared to the usual new-set cycle: every outlet we checked agrees on the same facts. English language sites, French sites and a German site all reported 1,764 pieces and a 1 November release date with no contradictions. That kind of unanimity, across seven separate posts in three languages within a single day, points to a clean official reveal rather than a leak pieced together from partial information.

The one detail that appeared in fewer places was confirmation of additional Dragon Ball sets arriving from 2027 onward. That specific claim traces back to reporting describing an official Toei Animation partnership announcement made the same day, separate from the product reveal itself. We treat it as confirmed, since it comes from an announced partnership rather than fan guesswork, but the actual contents of that 2027 wave remain unknown.

What nobody reported, interestingly, was any pricing detail worth repeating here. We don't publish set prices as a matter of policy, so if that is what brought you to this article, you will need to check the official product page directly.

What we would want to know before buying, and what still isn't public.

Our main reservation is not about the set itself, it is about how little there still is to compare it to. A single-set theme launch means every judgment about value, quality and completeness is provisional until we see whether the 2027 sets build out a real line or stay a one-off tribute. Buying in now means buying the debut piece of a theme with an unwritten future.

We also don't yet know build-quality specifics that usually shape our opinion on a set like this: how the dragon's body is articulated, whether the display stand rotates or locks in one position, how the instructions break the model into stages. None of the seven reports we reviewed went into that level of detail, which is normal for a same-day reveal but means a real verdict has to wait for hands-on coverage closer to the November launch.

Once the set is on shelves and we can update our own database with a verified parts list, box contents and any regional variations, we will revisit this piece. For now, everything here reflects what the LEGO Group and its retail partners have confirmed as of this announcement, nothing more.

• LEGO Icons
• Dragon Ball
• 11390
• Shenron
• Goku
• new sets 2026