W is for Wild West . . . Checkers!

This is really an addendum to a post published here ten years ago! A better look at one of the three games mentioned on that occasion, by two brand marks (Triang and Omnia), using the Minimodels Wild West figures, originally sculpted by Charles Stadden and manufactured at Minimodels' Havant factory on the South coast.

I'm not sure if Triang's game should be quite as sun-yellowed as this example, it seems a little too subdued for attraction on a shelf, and with some water damage, may also be suffering from non-art-room sun damage too! They don't turn-up on evilBay that often but when they do the sky is bluer!

Quality Assurance Inspection; the production values of putting this together must have be enormous, bigger people; rivals, like Waddington's here and Milton Bradley in the 'States had been throwing everything in placky-bags set in 'styrene trays, for a while by the time this hit the shops, and pairing-up all those figures and setting them in three different, die-cut holding devices must have taken someone forever, even once the operator was practiced.

Almost certainly done by women, possibly out-workers, but I think you'd need to do this in-house with stillage-bins of draughtsmen, bins of figures and the quite huge box - I couldn't scan the board as it's over A3 on a side and the box is bigger! Plus; all that was after they had all been run in one of two colours of polymer and hand painted with between three and five colours!

A reminder of the four figure poses, where these differ over the half-dozen other iterations of the figures (2 other games, window box, cake-decoration bags, shop-stock counter boxes etc...) is that they have added studs which connect with a hole in the draughtsman, the fit is tight and the figures are a frangible polystyrene, so damage would have occurred from first play on Christmas Day!

They are lovely figures, but that frangibility means finding them intact is hard, the six-shooter being the one most likely to survive, the tomahawk being the least likely to be found still attached!