What will 2022 bring?

What are your New Gaming Year plans for 2022?

Here are my New Gaming Year Irresolutions for the coming year:

https://manoftinblog.wordpress.com/2021/12/26/what-will-2022-bring/

Crossposted from my Man of TIN Blog by Mark Man of TIN, 31 December 2021.

Vintage Pound Store Matchbox German Infantry copies

One of those presents put away on the Christmas presents shelf for this Christmas … and well worth the wait!

I like old toy shop packaging and this Battle Ground Military Series pack caught my eye online on EBay a few months back for £5, one pack opened and one still in the pack.

I can’t put a date on this box of Matchbox 1:76 German Infantry copies but it’s obviously post 1976 when these Matchbox figures came out. I only have a few surviving original ones from the time, so they inexpensively fill a gap.

They have a CE mark on the lower right hand corner as well as on the importer label, the CE mark about origin or toy safety is more modern than the 1970s /80s and standard in the EU area from 1993 onwards. So probably 1990s …

There is a maker’s or packager’s company logo of an H? in the top left corner which I don’t recognise. The figures themselves have no Hong Kong or China base markings.

The vibrant flaming orange packaging reminds me a little of today’s ‘Combat Force’ type pound store figure packaging.

In the cheerfully bizarre way of cheap copies and playsets, the packaging images showing vaguely WW2 to Vietnam era American soldiers but this is not matched by the content of German WW2 figures in dark green plastic but oddly does match an American flag!

Oddly included in the pack are some tiny walk-in talkie radiomen.

Accompanying this unopened blister pack was the contents of an opened pack, mixed in with a handful some Airfix American Infantry copies (copies of which still around today).

These look like they have got jumbled in from elsewhere, as I can see no such American figures inside the unopened pack.

Adding to the impression that this is someone’s jumble of figures, a much older stray metal diecast anti-aircraft gun (on a circular vehicle mounting?) with nice elevation gearing is mixed in with the bundle.

Anyway some cheap and cheerful recruits for the toy soldier box …

Blog post by Mark Man of TIN, 27 December 2021

Happy Christmas from Man of TIN to my fellow Pound Store Plastic Warriors!

Crossposted from my Man of TIN main blog, 24 December 2021

https://manoftinblog.wordpress.com/2021/12/24/happy-christmas-to-all-my-man-of-tin-blog-readers/

Charity Shop Find of slowly morphing shrinking copies of Airfix and Matchbox figures

This charity shop find of a couple of dozen bashed figures came to me as a gift from family.

I imagine they are the ragtag odd mixed bag of someone’s small army. Enough to make two small army squads of red-brown / tan versus everyone else?

They are obviously battle scarred and playworn veterans!

I found these figures interesting as they are mostly copies of Airfix and Matchbox figures. As they have slowly being copied (in Hong Kong / China?) over the last forty plus years, they have slowly shrunk and changed into different figures.

Not a maker’s mark among them either.

Airfix Eighth Army figures are 40mm – 50mm

In the same mixed parcel was other Matchbox copies and a couple of small but slightly larger Airfix copies, shown next to the smaller cousin. I have included the sole probably genuine Airfix figure, the 54mm German submachine-gunner figure for scale.

These bashed and limbless Matchbox copies were around in seaside pound shops c.2007 and still seem to emerge from time to time, getting thinner and more brittle (hence the missing limbs?)

These limbs and weapons might need a little repairing.

These white copies of Airfix German Infantry are slowly changing into squat Generic Infantry. The distinctive “coal scuttle” stalheim helmet is changing, becoming oddly more British or American.

The lying down figure who used to feed the Light Machine Gun is now a distinct figure in its own right, the magazine box in the right hand for the LMG has morphed into a very strange object in its own right.

The officer figure is getting shorter and squatter but still full of character!

Some nice modern American troops and Officer, one or two a bit bashed.

These look like TimMee / BMC / Toy Story sort of stuff. I like the baggy clothes and helmet covers.

The other figures are a curiously mixed bunch of figures and sizes, again with the 54mm Airfix German for size comparison.

Some Matchbox American Infantry copies in two different sizes and colours, and a few of those modern US Infantry / Rambo types.

Lining them up in height order from 54mm Airfix at the right shows how they have shrunk and thinned down over the years of copying.

Last but not least, one of those handy Khaki figures that could be a modern desert warrior, Special Forces / SWAT team or space marine.

An interesting mixed bag!

Blog post by Mark Man of TIN, 12 December 2021

A few old or new recruits …

Some new or old arrivals from the bottom of the toybox have come in from the wider family. Good old Herald Household Cavalry foot figures and a bashed 80s Britain’s Deetail Knight.

I think the white cowboy (sort of a solid swoppet Timpo clone?) originally came from me, from Pound Store bags back c. 2007. It has now returned to me after these many years.

Blog posted by Mark Man of TIN, 11 December 2021