Found this on my travels in a National Trust gift shop for the not strictly pound store price of £4.50 (but hey it’s for charity). Pound store bizarreness and quality though!
What you get squeezed remarkably into one small box
I look at these play sets part with the eyes of the child I once was and part with the slightly more adult eyes of the gamer and figure converter.
The National Trust shop product shot on their shop website.
The calves are small enough to be cows in a smaller railway or gaming scale.
The piglets are pleasingly stocky and wild boar like (lunch for Obelix and Asterix).
The rabbits (?!?) are just plain bizarre. The chickens and ducks repainted are good for farm vignettes.
The wobbly fencing would make good corrugated iron panels at smaller scales.
What I find most fascinating are the cloned farm figures which are in that indeterminate 40 to almost 50mm sizing. They are in slightly soft plastic, rather than hard and brittle.
Figures to scale. A surprisingly buxom wench (left). The Winston Churchill / farmer is equipped with pipe, whip or crooked stick and shotgun, proper “get off my laaand!” stuff.
How the mini farm set fits with 42mm figures (Irregular Miniatures WW2 British tommies). Armed Inspection by the Ministry of Ag, looking for illegal hidden pigs? Saving the Nation’s Bacon!
Throw in a slightly battered vintage car and you change the character of the farmer – a junk shop find of Ford Model T Yesteryear model in the process of being repainted khaki to a staff car. It all packs back inside the building and into the box – neat! Great as a child for holidays.
I think the figures will repaint well enough for civilian figures, as will the outhouse repainted to a small distressed farm outhouse. It is a clone of Britain’s Plastic small farm buildings that I still have.
Blogposted by Mark, Man of TIN, 2 September 2018
The Mini Farm set is manufactured by www.keycraft.eu, an interesting low cost plastic toy trade retailer with lots of business retail insights on their website. The Sceince of Impulse Buys? Note: Trade only.
The Science of Impulse Buying – Who could fall for impulse buys of such low cost, brightly packaged toys? Keycraft import the usual suspects – repackaged copy Matchbox US infantry clones (with no enemy) sold by several outlets including book shops.
Hello I'm Mark Mr MIN, Man of TIN. Based in S.W. Britain, I'm a lifelong collector of "tiny men" and old toy soldiers, whether tin, lead or childhood vintage 1960s and 1970s plastic figures.
I randomly collect all scales and periods and "imagi-nations" as well as lead civilians, farm and zoo animals. I enjoy the paint possibilities of cheap poundstore plastic figures as much as the patina of vintage metal figures.
Befuddled by the maths of complex boardgames and wargames, I prefer the small scale skirmish simplicity of very early Donald Featherstone rules.
To relax, I usually play solo games, often using hex boards. Gaming takes second place to making or convert my own gaming figures from polymer clay (Fimo), home-cast metal figures of many scales or plastic paint conversions. I also collect and game with vintage Peter Laing 15mm metal figures, wishing like many others that I had bought more in the 1980s ...
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Pound Store Plastic Warriors 