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Saturday, July 29, 2017

T is for Treason - in the Tower!

Picked this up for a quid-fifty in a charity-shop the other day . . .

. . . Attracted to the image of a figure and the news - upon closer inspection - that there were more.

As with a lot of these games it's mostly air, stored in two loose-formed boxes supporting the board over the component compartment, but it was all there, with four figures, and a raven!

The figures (of a type I call Mocherette - but that's for another day and another page!) are a mix of two modern tourist box-ticking types - Yeoman Warder and Guardsman, and two historical figures - a knight in armour and Anne Boleyn. There's also a micro-model of the White Tower, the raven (approximately 54mm) and a gold-chromed crown ('Crown Jewels' token), which had its own plush, velveteen bag with a draw-string.

The figures are a standard 25mm (I didn't have the Airfix - or any - guards to hand!), and the knight is a scaled-down copy of the old Peltro-Westair figure later carried by Kinder. All four are a tad crudely-finished (the Yeoman leans drunkenly to one side and the Guardsman holds a pop-gun), but nothing which a bit of paint wouldn't hide at this scale!

Saved bits going into the collection, everything else went to the recycling bin. It's a tourist item really; the company behind it (The Green Board Game Company) has clearly approached or been approached-by Historic Royal Palaces to knock something together for the gift shops in the latter's high-heritage-factor, end-destination, tourist-trap, leisure facilities!

Indeed - because of the tourist-link, it's likely that a fair few of these have been taken out of the country?

The map may have some use for role-playing, but I think it's a bit too busy to be easily converted and if one was minded to do something in a real place, it would be easier to start from scratch.

The play, as far as I could tell, was a combination of Cludo (Clue) and Magic the Gathering (!), no; Monopoly, having a card-driven, collect-items-to-act, race-against-the-other-players mechanism, with moves in-turn, round the board. I've scanned the paperwork in case it ever proves useful, but I can't see myself getting much mileage out of the whole, and all this stuff takes-up a lot of space - for what it is - better to get it recycled before we all drown in human detritus.

I've actually visited friends in the Queens House buildings (well; now the Vichy French are calling me big-headed I might as well talk like a big-head!), which are used by some of the permanent staff to live-in and they are fascinating; from the outside they look like a row of large, semi-detached Elizabethan town-houses, but inside they are a warren of tight, narrow corridors, steep, snaking staircases, low ceilings and beams you can easily brain yourself on!

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