Series 1 Minifigs Are Cool!

The series 1 collectable minifigs are pretty cool.  I am not really into the “normal” Lego (ie non-Technic or NXT) but there were two of them in that series that I really, really wanted:

The Robot	The Ninja

I already had a pirate from last year’s Pirate Advent Calendar. With the help of the very handy PDF published by Brickset and my wife’s Android phone I managed to pick the exact two bags I wanted.  The phone has a very, very useful barcode scanner application on it. Now, each minifig bag has two barcodes on it, one is used by the shop’s scanner to detect the product type (Series 1 minifigs bag) and the other, much smaller one, tells you which minifig is in the bag.  The barcode you want to check is the one on the left side of the bag, partially hidden by a small flap.  If you carefully lift that flap, you can easily scan the code with the phone. 

So there we were, my wife and I, at the cash register of a largely deserted toy store (the Netherlands-Denmark football match was on at the time) going through all the little bags in the box.  The girl at the register didn’t mind at all, she just laughed.  She didn’t even mind me opening the unopened box underneath the current one to continue scanning for the two elusive minifigs.  After about 10 minutes of scanning we hit the first one, the ninja.  Not long after the robot also came out of hiding. 

So if you’re after a specific minifig, make sure you take a barcode scanner of some kind with you and ask the lady (or guy) behind the counter nicely if they don’t mind you going scanning each and every bag for about 10-15 minutes.  Oh it helps to have a story; we used the one where our fictitious son already had about 20 of them and these were the only ones still missing.  I am not sure she bought it, but whatever, I have my minifigs!