C is for Card Game, Card Table & Card Players

Matt Thier was at the show on Saturday last, and had his new card player's set for the saloon collection of White Tower Miniatures, the painted figures aren't available yet (but it should only be weeks or days now, keep checking the website), but the castings were there, for those who still have the eyesight to paint their own figures!

 

And they were being displayed on what looks remarkably like the water-butt cover I used to shoot the rocket-launchers, Jean stuff and a few other bits in the garage during lockdown! . . . Where did those four years go?

They are lovely, and I particularly like the standing figure, who could be Lee Van Cleefe, quietly sliding his hand to the six-gun's pistol-grip! Between him and the Moll and an eyebrow code, they've got the game sewn-up, but who's their man? My money's on the old bearded mule-poke, pretending to be a drunk!

They're not on the website yet;

https://whitetowerminiatures.co.uk/

But should appear soon under the Wild West Town folk heading near the bottom of the shop list. And the Windsor Chairs, previously available as part of the saloon range, are delightful!

F is for Found Objects - Two of . . . a Few

Continuing with this little bit of silliness, and I seem to have shot these in different configurations - as I was sorting and putting away I guess? More bits & bobs as found over the least three years.

A bunch of keys, with a PVC peanut, possibly from the old VW Golf Mum had many years ago? Lego bits and a marble, a cat's collar bell (which will end-up on the Christmas tree, they fill all the teeny gaps at the top!) and a plastic ring - probably from a Christmas Cracker's 'ring-toss' game - which will go to 'spares'.

 

An old Remembrance Day poppy stalk (we'll revisit them one day) and half a pistol grip from a small gun, its antler-horn finish has mostly been scraped away, and I suspect Mum was mid-way through reshaping it to replace a damaged or missing one on another weapon when that too was lost or broken? Mum was very handy at that sort of home-craft stuff.

 

A relatively modern looking box of crayons (99p in Woolworth's, they're about a fiver now! And have their own collector community), a plastic bullet (anyone know the toy it came from?), a playing-card joker, bouncy ball, Airfix Paratrooper and a wooden elephant of some style!

 

Two balls, and while I've only just added a collective image of balls to the Jig-Toy Page, these two have yet to be added to that page, although a reverse-colours football is there! The larger one has the same mechanism (i.e. 'simple') as the modern rubber one in that other picture!

Most seen above, but the gold-paper cracker-crown is an addition. I believe the elephant was made by my brother in woodwork classes at school, and may be a pattern some of you will recognise from your own past efforts? And I've mentioned before his private army of red/blue uniformed figures! It contained all his favourite figures from about four different sets, it was officer-heavy!

The card is somewhere between the very small ones you find in Christmas crackers, and normal or full size ones, and I have a small collection of mostly jokers and ace-of-spades somewhere, so this will join them, and I'll blog them at some point!

 

I believe the ball is a Wham-O original, it has that strange creaking noise I've observed with them before, and while I 'know' what the two neutral plastic pegs are from, I can't - right now - remember, and it may have nothing to do with toys, but I shot them together, so I think it must have? Maybe they just looked useful?

Liqueur miniature crates! Very useful for Action Man (beer) or larger doll's houses (milk, or something 'girly'!), I've put the cover in the spares zone as I though it might make a good roof for a sci-fi building or space-station at some point! one is old and has been hanging around for years (red), the other was from TKMaxx a year or two ago -blue one.

M is for Mare Mediterraneanus

Had a bit of a board-game photo-sesh the other day, one of them was this, mentioned before in passing, we may even have looked at one or two of the figures from time to time, but today we'll get the box ticked properly!

Seems to be clear!

The pieces; each player gets an 'army' (including naval elements) in one of four colours consisting of various numbers of four unit types; Elephants, Horsemen, Infantry and Ships. The colours are in the lower image and consist of an ivory-white or cream, black, red and blue, scale is all over the place!

The box-art is superb, mixing the naval battles of the Persian or Punic-wars with the Islamic migration/invasions and fall of Constantinople (when, although still oared, the vessels looked very different) , it's trying to cover the four great empires, who waxed and waned around the edge of the Mediterranean Sea over a few thousand years, in order to justify the game which pits them against each other!

The artwork is also similar to some of that produced by artists Don Lawrence for the Trigan Empire strip in Look & Learn, or Frank Hampson for his Dan Dare work in Eagle, but the box carries no signature or credit note, and I'm mostly basing my wild assertion on the treatment of the smoke & flames of the burning vessel!

A full 'army' in red, the single cavalry and elephant units being joined by three of infantry and two naval, in a similar way to the later Risc, there aren't enough to cover each point (towns & cities), so have to be set out with strategic goals and working with your partner, the game being designed to be played either with two pairs of allies as a four-player, or two players commanding two armies apiece.

The cavalryman in blue has warped and I think it's heat-shrinkage (technically; 'cooling' shrinkage) due to premature removal from the mould-tool, not latter deformation due to unstable-polymer ageing, as they are otherwise a stable polystyrene; the problem is common with these, and some of my lose acquisitions are similarly warped.

As I was having a session, I had the time to spend on generating a couple of .gifs, the other to follow later. It's basically unpacking the box to the Nth degree and then setting the table up for a game!

The board is generally to be treated as a diamond, evidenced by the angle of the titles and the rule-cheat boxes, with the four 'contemporaneous' City States (for the purposes of the game) being Ptolemaic Alexandria (red), Hannibal's Carthage (black), Western-Empire Rome (cream) and Eastern-Empire Constantinople (blue, Byzantines?), there are two each of the red cards (which photographed abysmally) and which are randomly-dealt 'go to jail' type things each player hangs-on to, until needed.

Play is by a pack of cards (made in Belgium, interestingly) rather than dice, and there's not much else to add - so I won't.

"What? Board Games? No, I don't do them, there's far too much space in the lid and the walls aren't high enough, they don't call them 'bored' for nothing, you know! Wake me when there's something I can make a real nest of"

News, Views Etc . . . New Content - Airfix Blog, Galoob, Football, Card Collector's Flyer +

New content has been added to various small-scale posts on the Airfix Blog today, including horse/base comparisons on the Bedouin/Nap. French Infantry/AWI Grenadiers posts, new content on the 1st & 2nd version WWII Eighth Army, 1st version WWII German Infantry, Civilians and the Infantry Combat Group, while the Lone Star/Airfix comparison shots have finally been added to the 1st & 2nd versions of Afrika Korps & WWII German Infantry and to the British Paratroops. Most have had some text, but it's only reminded me of how behind I am over there!

I've also added two pairs of new pictures/screen-capchas to the Galoob page - numbers 40; pilot, and 41; a new carrier-deck bib-colour/base variant.

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For any fans or collectors of tea, gum and cigarette cards, The Card Scene magazine (formerly Card Times) is the one for you - if you've not found it yet? Six issues a year (each with up to 36 pages) for £17 seems reasonable value for money compared to other publications of the same type.

Contact:

[cheques payable to Ace Card Ents]

Ace Card Enterprises (C/O J. Devaney)

10 Yelverton Road

Whitley

Reading

Berkshire

RG2 7SU

johndevaney222@btinternet.com

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Football News

The first casualty of the current pig's-bladder kicking contest in Putin's war-mongering gulag may be Panini's UK-distributor Connect. After some negative publicity earlier in the year over how many packs you'd have to buy to guarantee a full set following - what seems to be an act of pure profiteering - a price hike from 50p to 80p (about a Dollar or Euro), sales dropped, leading to an ironic - if you accept my charge of profiteering - profits warning last week!

Although this is not to mistake a profit warning as equating to a lack of success; with or without a price hike the two packs (single and x6) were the second and sixth best selling items in the toy sector; week-ending 19th may, according to analysts NPD Group.

Nevertheless, Mark Cashmore the CEO of Connect has resigned and WHSmith the High Street newsagents (themselves, recently declared worst shop on the said High Street by the consumer watchdog Which?), felt the need to organise an in-store 'Swap Event' (Saturday 2nd June) encouraging kids (or dads?) to come in and swap their duplicates with each other, in order - presumably - to minimise purchases, in the normal course of events I'd say "You can't make this shit up" but in the new Trumpundbrexit 'world order' it seems anything goes while we wait patiently for the end!

The cause of all this was a work published back in March by mathematics Professor Paul Harper who calculated the cost of obtaining a full album to be a eye-watering £773.60p which is probably about the same as my total toy-figure spend in two or more years.

With 32 squads to collect plus the special-page and whole-team stickers it could be more, I'm not sure he's calculated the potential inequality of the 'randomness' of packs contents (vis-a-vis batches or waves) given that a sheet (seen at the printers - in the i newspaper; Thursday, 7th June) only had 200 stickers on it (A1 sheet, 20x10), suggesting different batches will have different duplicates - if you see what I mean?

As far as other football playthings go, Match Attack and Top Trump football sets are also selling well at the moment. Apparently football-related toy-sales have doubled in recent times for the periods of each World Cup or Euro-Championship, making up 6% of toy sales in those years, for a seasonal industry relying on Christmas and summer 'super-soakers' - that's not small beer.

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Toys in the Media! This is a current flyer locally my friends got sent, for the central heating firm undertaking checks for Vivid, who are the new name for several local authority's preferred housing association. It looks to be a library shot, possibly available on-line somewhere, as it's unlikely a central heating company in Farnborough would have access to a HO-railway model of an alpine chalet, but you never know! Anyone recognise the model/maker/brand?

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Returning to Galoob; my assistant - being as helpful as always - decided that sorting the Micro Machine G.I's numerically by base-mark is just not the sensible way to go at the task, in her own words -

"Hughman - You need to sort them leastest lastest, mostest firstest, and the red & white ones can go on the floor for now, look, here; I'll do it for you, you're obviously 'busy' faffing about with that camera!"

Q is for Quickie

Rather poor images I'm afraid, but it's only a quick box-ticker to get something up here today, and the thing's already been put away so I couldn't be arsed to dig it out and re-shoot it, soz!

Picked this up for a quid-fifty the other day in a charity shop, nothing exciting, it's a CCG (collector's/collectable card game) from Steve Jackson games, but you may remember I got some figures tied into the same branding a while ago?

Well, there's no mention or mechanism for the figures in the rules or on the box, so they would just seem to be a gratuitous 'Let's do some figures' type thing - which I think I suggested at the time? But there are two spare compartments in the box, probably/primarily for expansion-set card packs, but my figures fit nicely, so they are all together, which is nice!

Just need to find time to play the game . . .