About Me

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No Fixed Abode, Home Counties, United Kingdom
I’m a 60-year-old Aspergic gardening CAD-Monkey. Sardonic, cynical and with the political leanings of a social reformer, I’m also a toy and model figure collector, particularly interested in the history of plastics and plastic toys. Other interests are history, current affairs, modern art, and architecture, gardening and natural history. I love plain chocolate, fireworks and trees, but I don’t hug them, I do hug kittens. I hate ignorance, when it can be avoided, so I hate the 'educational' establishment and pity the millions they’ve failed with teaching-to-test and rote 'learning' and I hate the short-sighted stupidity of the entire ruling/industrial elite, with their planet destroying fascism and added “buy-one-get-one-free”. Likewise, I also have no time for fools and little time for the false crap we're all supposed to pretend we haven't noticed, or the games we're supposed to play. I will 'bite the hand that feeds', to remind it why it feeds.

Tuesday, February 20, 2018

R is for Ravensburger - Board Games III

Our third visit to board games today, brings Ravensburger into the tag list for the first time - I think? We're looking at two games, but I suspect some of you will raise an eyebrow at the second, but hey, figurals are figurals!

Picked this up the other day for three-quid I think, the fact that this is the fifth (?) game from charity shops in the last four or five weeks is a sign that the post-Christmas clear-out is now in full flow!

The board has 16 fixed sections of dungeon and then there are a number of others that get slid through the gaps, building the dungeon and constantly changing the pathways, while the icons on 12 of the moveable sections and all the fixed-elements affect the players as the battle-through.

The all-important bit as far as Small Scale World is concerned - the figures! Basically four practisers of magic, be they; wizards, warlocks, witches, necromancers or mages! From the left; there's a Gandalf-a-like, an eleven Queen, a Dwarven mage and a hagged witch!

Comparison shot with one of the Bilbo's Graham Apperley donated to the Blog a couple of years ago (far left), and a few other figures that were kicking around, close-to-hand; two chinatroops and two game-playing pieces - Wizard's clone trooper from Star Wars and TSR's larger Buck Roger's Battle for the 25th Century counter.

Each month, at the start of the month (or when I first need to scan something!) I reset the title-bar on the scanner to that month and zero, thus; Feb18Toys-001, and as the month progresses all sorts of stuff is scanned-in, mostly for the archive, but as you know, some stuff is cropped and included in posts.

Now the other day; scanning the instruction sheet in (for the archive) of this game, my scanner - struggling to provide a preview of a small black&white illustration on a high-resolution colour setting -invented some colour! And not just any colour, but the sort of gradated, neon-rainbow colours designed by the gods to appeal to an Aspergic mind!

So I took a screen-capcha, blew it up, took another and here it is! Pretty huh?! This existed, while not really existing, only for a moment, ephemerally, in some non-existent, side-room of cyber space . . . it makes you think . . . well; it makes me think!

What it looks like when it's not indulging in a spot of psychedelic self-weirding!

It also helps explain one of the main game mechanisms, not that I ever really dwell on them, it's about the figures!

Speaking of figures, this is also Ravensburger, it's actually been in Picasa for a while, waiting for a suitable post, as I don't try to subject the Blog's readers to ephemeral juvenilia for the hell of it, or to deliberately annoy them, but it's all got a place in the whole; it's all 'grist to the mill'!

See - It's all figural! They're snails! Flats! From Ravensburger! There's another wood flat in the queue . . . a cow . . . fresh-in . . . coming-soon!

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