>>8629065And the Grey Mountain Battalion, of course.
Bit of a blog post but I thought this might be an interesting army men topic to discuss as well, and that is the manner in which army men are packaged. What I mean by this is there are essentially three kinds of army men:
>randomized set of poses>same or near-same numbers of every pose>exact set of posesThe first one is by far the most common, certainly across the cheaper range of army men. The second one seems to be showing up more, particularly when it's sets like the above. The last one tends to be the domain of high-end army men, from the old boxed Airfix and Matchbox soldiers to the more recent Armies in Plastic and the like. What would be interesting to hear is how do you guys feel about these different methods, which do you prefer, which do you care for the least.
For my part I grew up with the first method, didn't really encounter the other two until later in life. The random assortment approach was and remains my favorite, though it certainly has its drawbacks and I appreciate the benefits of the other two. Think I was quite fortunate to be a kid at just the right time for plastic soldiers, it seemed like some care had actually gone into maintaining a bit of balance to the otherwise random assortments. My first armies were a set of red British and blue German WW2 infantry, well-made copies of Airfix sets with relatively few poses per set. The British had a standing rifleman, kneeling rifleman, charging rifleman, marching rifleman, standing submachinegunner, crawling Bren gunner and charging officer; the Germans had a standing rifleman, crouching rifleman, charging rifleman, standing submachinegunner, grenadier and standing officer. All the poses were useful for battles, even the marching British soldier was useful for guard posts and manning artillery, and there was a good proportion of officers to troops.
