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

T is for Toy Fair '18 Reports - Tactic Games

Continuing le theme du'jour! This was a new company to me, and they only had three or four games on display, two of which contained the figural elements Small Scale World craves, both of which will annoy anyone who groaned when they saw the snails earlier, but for posterity and completion - I'll persevere!

Alias; not a game familiar to me, but it has little men who are half-way between Rowntree's jelly-babies and Tony Hart's Morph! And that fact alone gets them onto the Blog!

Sadly the poses on the box are not repeated in the counters, who look even more like jelly-babies and less like Morph! Likewise the smaller 'children' on the box don't seem to have made it to the games contents, clearly a graphic trope to get across the family-friendly nature of the game?

They are very much a case of find-one-of-each-colour-file-and-forget as far as collecting goes, but they are figural, you get a 'free' sand-timer and they are probably fun! I'll be looking out for them in the charity shops in a year or two's time.

The same figures are included in the Junior Draw Out game seen in one of the background shots below. Also note how one of the red figures doesn't have the small disc-base of the others; earlier version left in the sales-team's display sample, or common variant?

They also had Cool Catch out on a table, this has . . . er . . . wooden flats I'd clearly forgotten about when I mention cows (or a cow) in the previous post (the problem of queuing these posts up on the laptop in random order!)

The reason I haven't collaged these is because I didn't crop them tight as they have some of the other games from Tactic in the background which I thought I'd leave visible!

A nice touch - especially for wooden flats - is the addition of a faux-fur fringe on the hoods of the Esquimaux's suits. And it looks from the box art as if the game was initially going to be for four players, but there are six figures; brown and yellow being included.

And a polar bear! I think (I hope - given the target age-range!) he only steals fish, and isn't in the business of eating Inuit! I only got  a bum shot I'm afraid, but he was more realistic (for a wooded flat!) than the cartoony inhabitants of the Arctic circle!

Again, it's not something I'm going to buy as a grown man who is supposed to collect Toy Soldiers, but if/when I see one going cheap I'll be getting it for completion, and to make sure samples are in the archive!

And if I attend the fair next year I'll try to remember to pay more attention to Tactic's stand and see what else they've come up with; of a figural nature.

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