As is my usual habit, much to the amusement of my family, there were a couple of presents under the tree from me, to me. I knew I was taking a chance, but am having to learn the hard way about buyer beware. I'm sure there was no intentional misrepresentation on the seller's part, but sometimes what you get can be a bit, well, surprising. My first present to myself was a unit of Bavarians that I suspected to be Hinton Hunt. There are a couple of Austrian Grenadier officers masquerading as Bavarians, but enough line figures to accommodate a simple head swap, so no problem I thought. The problem turned out to be the muskets, which appear to be childishly executed, so I suspect these are either recasts with added muskets or conversions of some sort. Does anyone know a good source for 1/72 scale muskets? They really will have to be replaced to be use-able, otherwise the figures are quite nice.
This next unit was advertised as 1/72 by the eBay seller and I was curious as to their provenance, but really didn't know what they might be. Upon inspection of the bases, they turned out to be Hinchliffe miniatures without a doubt, but earlier smaller sculpts apparently done by Peter Gilder himself in the early 70s if the web is to be believed. While smaller than the later Hinchliffes, the style is similar, but much more slender. Indeed I thought these might be GHQ miniatures, but once I got them it was clear they are much taller - closer to 30mm.
Definitely not 1/72!
A couple of months ago while trolling around on eBay I also found some GHQ miniatures. I would like to do a unit of these but would need to arrange a trade with someone else who has a few, as two boxes of the same type would be needed (though one box could be elites of that type.) I have a box of 1808-12 marching French Fusiliers, and probably marching French Legere from the same period, but the plume is at the side of the shako instead of in front, so I thought perhaps they could be Swiss, as I have seen that plume arrangements in some illustrated plates - does anyone know if the French did a similar plume arrangement on occasion?
And now for Something completely Different
And now from collecting perils to a little bit of goofy fun. I finished the dungeon room for an evening of The Fantasy Trip and Death Test with good friends. It has been thirty-five or more years since I ran a role-playing game and it showed. We were all essentially new to the game, so we only made it through a couple of rooms before the party met its demise, but that was largely my fault for a mis-read that gave the monsters twice as many attacks as they should have had. Oh well, dinner was eaten, alcohol consumed and fun was had with good friends, so no matter. Here are a few pictures of the dungeon - a combination of plaster floor tiles and blue insulation foam that was etched and painted. The miniatures are 40mm Mindstalker miniatures for the most part, with a few VV miniatures and some LotR plastic combat hex pre-painted figure for expediencies sake.