What to do with old miniatures?

Listening to a wargaming podcast yesterday, the topic was discussed whether you should sell miniatures of projects that have finished and will probably not used again.

I have been painting miniatures for at least 30 years, but never sold any that I have painted myself. Over the years, I have painted many miniatures for games we used to play quite lot at that point in time, but are now sitting idle in my wargaming room.

A good example are my Full Thrust spaceships. All bought and painted in the 90s, but I think it has been 15 years or so since we have played a FT game. So, what to do with them? Hold on to them for nostalgic reasons, knowing that they'll probably never see a gaming table again? Or passing them on, then regretting it several years later? Or simply consider them as trophies and mementos of gaming days long gone?

My drawer with spaceships. They saw quite frequent space combats, but now have been sitting idle for almost 15 years.

Full Thrust Boxed Set

In Miniature Wargames with Battlegames, issue 399, I read that there is now a 25th Anniversary boxed set of Full Thrust.

Wow, 25 years?

I remember I first played Full Thrust back in 1992 at GenCon UK, which was then held in Camber Sands. It was a gaming mecca for me at the time, and I was discovering a lot of new games that were not available on the continent back then (pre-internet days for the masses, so the discerning gamer-geek had to cross the channel to get the good stuff). Full Thrust was one of the games I discovered, playing in one of the demo games. I bought a rulebook, and I have played countless games of Full Thrust since then.

I always admired the apparant simplicity of the rules, which allow for some clever manoeuvring your starship around the table. Especially the elegant rule of "half turn in the beginning, half turn in the middle" of your movement always seemed very clever to me. The damage system was an eye-opener for me as well.

I enthusiastically bought plastic Star Trek and Star Wars micromachines for my first games, and modeled asteroids and planets. Moving asteroids always were a favourite, since there was always a player who steered his ship right into one. Later on I upgraded to proper metal models, of which most are still in my collection.

However, as the games and the years progressed, I started to feel there was a certain "sameness" to all the games. Tactics revolved not so much around manoeuvre - once most players mastered the intricacies of writing down orders - but who did get to shoot first with what at what target. Given the ranges, many games became a straight shoot-out, which called for more complicated scenarios. I also bought the expansion More Thrust, but somehow I lost touch when the Fleet Books were published.

In our gaming group, we launched a few efforts of setting up Full Thrust story campaigns, but they always petered out after a two or three games at most. Although I guess those campaigns never officially stopped, so they can always be revived!

For a number of reasons, I didn't play many games of Full Thrust during the past 10 years or so, but perhaps I should revisit this old favourite. However, this is always dangerous. Actual gameplay when replaying fondly remembered games often is disappointment compared to the memories :-)

Here's a picture from one or our last Full Thrust games, in 2006.

Eddy Sterckx, Phil Dutré, Frank Vleugels, Koen Devroey, all playing Full THrust during a hot summernight in 2006.

Cataloguing the Collection (10)

The next drawer to be indexed is my small collection of spaceships. These all date back to the nineties, and I haven't back-identified (i.e. identifying the original manufacturer) yet for all models.

This collection is very much a retro-collection for me. I first played a game of Full Thrust in 1992 (IIRC), at EuroGencon in Camber Sands. I have been a Full Thrust fan ever since, although it has been many years since I played a decent game. We played most games during the mid-nineties, in the gameshop in my hometown Leuven.

At one point I also had a large collection of plastic MicroMachines of various Star Trek and Star Wars ships, but I sold them at one point. The current collection are all metal models acquired during the nineties, with a significant presence by Games Workshop (Space Fleet), GDW (Traveller New Era) and FASA (Star Trek). The fighter stands are scratch-built, with counters printed and then mounted on a flight stand.

The purple shapes you see in the top-right corner are my attempt at scratch-building a space-floating alien, modeled after the planet killer in Star Trek.

Still unidentified;

•  all the green ships on the left-hand side.
• the red ships in the middle. They are Tholian ships (Star Trek), but haven't been to identify them properly. Probably FASA?
• the round and solid starbase (with 3 red griffons) in the top-right corner.

Full Thrust

For our monthly "Schild & Vriend Revival Game Series", we had a very nice Full Thrust game this week, at Frank's completely new wargaming facilities. We used to play FT quite a lot over the years, and it was nice to play a system again after so many years. It still felt very familiar.

Now, some people say FT does not have a lot of tactical depth. I do agree in some sense, since once you have mastered the movement rules, it all comes down to selecting what weapon type to fire first. However, when space is littered with planets and asteroids, things become interesting.

The first scenario we tried was a classic Space Academy asteroid belt run: steer your ship as fast as possible around the table without crashing into any big space object. Phil won this Space Race without too much trouble and was promoted to Space Cadet of the Year.

Now that everyone had the movement rules mastered, it was time for a more interesting scenario. Frank, Koen and Phil had a cruiser each, and their mission was to intercept an enemy fleet of 4 ships (Bart and Eddy), before these were able to check a suspicious radar blip on their screens. The tactical plan of Frank, Koen and phil worked brilliantly: send a cruiser on each flank, turn around the asteroid belt, and end up smack in the aft-arc of the main ship of the enemy. This all worked very well, so well even that Eddy's two ships were just obliterated in the process. Not to worry, Bart gave one of his commands to Eddy, so the game could continue.

With all ships converging on the same location, and the big one effectively standing still, the game to a small shootout. Eddy lost another ship, and after some shooting, the last big ship of the BartEddy alliance exploded in space.

So, the overall effect was that Frank, Koen and Phil had won the game (although we admit we had some lucky dice rolls on crucial shots), and that the intruders lost 4 ships, 3 of which that were under Eddy's control. After the court-martial it was decided he had to spend at least 5 years frozen in the Jive Cubes on Sigma Alpha X . Bart was sentenced to one week of forced labour in the Cobalt Mines on Pegasus III. Frank, Koen and Phil all won a free cruise to the Pleasure Palace of the Batuvian Demon Whores on Andromeda IV.

So far the Full Thrust game! On to the next dice-rolling fest!


_Update_: (robartes) [Some pictures](http://www.flickr.com/photos/robartes/sets/72157594284291860/) of this game are now up on Flickr.

Full Thrust takes off

As of today [Ground Zero Games](http://www.gzg.com) is providing [free PDF copies](http://www.gtns.co.uk/store1/commerce.cgi?page=downloads.html&cart_id=9772990.19950) of their Full Thrust rules -- the rulebook itself and both Fleet Books. While I own the three books mentioned in hardcopy, I will definitely download the PDF versions.

As to why the rules are now available for free -- as are the other OOP rulesets by GZG -- John of GZG mentions that the books are either out of print or getting there fast. I think the tacit acknowledgement is that the expected return from reprinting the books would be less than the cost of the reprint, hence this generous gift. Another factor in the decision might be the fact that GZG, as most miniatures outfits that produce rules and supporting miniatures, probably makes a lot more money selling the figures than the rules themselves (a business reality that [GW](http://uk.games-workshop.com) was probably one of the first to recognize and use to great advantage), so giving away the rules once they are no longer profitable makes good business sense.

And as an aside, this is the 100th post on Tiny Tin Men. Congratulations to us :)

Full Thrust Miniatures

I got an email in my guise as [Schild en Vriend](http://www.nirya.be/snv) webmaster, asking about which models we used for our [Full Thrust](http://www.nirya.be/snv/FT/ft.html) games. As this might be useful for more people, here's what I answered:

>> However, I was wondering if you please could tell me what models you've
>> been using, and where you got them?
>
>We've been using a number of manufacturer's models. GZG is one (e.g. the
>Tolstoy, mentioned in the campaign, is the big ESU dreadnought by GZG), but
>there are a lot of others:
>
>AOG's Babylon Five miniatures: AOG (Agents of Gaming) seem to have gone
>bust, but this site claims to have found a source:
>
>[AOG Babylon 5 minis](http://www.uncomyngifts.com/Main/Recreation_Room/Babylon-5/Game_Supplies/Babylon5Wars/Miniatures/)
>
>ICE Silent Death figures: there are many stores that sell these, but
>here's the manufacturers site:
>
>[ICE Silent Death](http://store.ironcrown.com/category.jsp?category=2043)
>
>Be sure to order the metal ones, the resin ones are huge (3 times the
>size of the metal ones, or around 10 inches)
>
>Irregular Miniatures: this is a miniature manufacturer in the UK doing
>all kinds of figures and scales, including spaceships (though they're
>basic - to get an idea: the Morgenes and most of Fleet Section 408 as
>pictured on our web page are Irregulars):
>
>[Irregular Miniatures](http://www.irregularminiatures.co.uk)
>
>The spaceships are listed in the 6mm section of the catalog.

BTW, that's [GZG'z online store](http://www.gtns.net/gzg/) mentioned in the first paragraph.