Thursday 3 February 2011

Small Villages from Mighty Empires.....


Always on the lookout for teeny-tiny gaming related items, I managed to get my hands on some of the GW Mighty Empires game pieces that were recommended to me as a result of the long defunct 2mm Fantasy project seen elsewhere on this Blog.
A job-lot going for pennies on EBay, these pieces are readily available as spares both there and probably at a 'bring and buy' or garage sale near you - with Fantasy on the backest of back burners, I was looking at these with a view to augmenting the 2mm buildings available from Irregular, and provide some bombing targets for Aeronef, etc.

The principal pieces are a castle/fortress, a hill-top town, and small village with stream, which of course relate to the various factions in the original game. The village pieces in particular are rather nice, with quite a lot of detail for something that is barely 24mm in diameter - there's a steepled church, a mill with water wheel by a stream, and a couple of other smaller buildings - painted up quickly, they look don't look half bad - the only niggle, I suppose, the circular hole in the centre that was meant for the faction flag insert - left open here for demonstration purposes, but it could obviously be filled easily enough:


They sit very well alongside the pieces from Irregular, and are about the same scale, I would think - of course, they're generic, but provide some variety from the metal pieces we are so used to:


In terms of how they scale alongside each other, the castle, which has a great hulking Tolkeinesque quality, is probably the largest, (close to 1/900th?) the villages are in the middle, alongside the Irregular pieces, and the town is very much at the smaller end of things. (1/1200th?) In any event, they give a range of visual appearances that might fit in with, say, Land Ironclads, or more traditional Historical 2mm; certainly, if you can pick them up cheaply, you might insulate yourself against the inevitable recent price hike in metal miniatures.


As an aside, Mighty Empires also offers some other funky stuff, to whit a very impressive dragon, a huddle of medieval types made as a 'flat' group, and a rather excellent medieval cog warship - forecastles agogo!


Quite what I'm going to do with these, I can't imagine, although the dragon would easily grace any larger scale Fantasy project, and I guess the cog could draw one towards 1/1200th galleys etc.
I also managed to talk myself into picking up some other plastic mini castles at the same time - these are spares from I believe the Disney version of Monopoly, that as you can see, go pretty well alongside the aforementioned fortress - they might offer some conversion possibilities - sawing of a turret or two here or there - Hmmm, perhaps that 2mm Fantasy project might see the light of day once again after all......


In any case, I am sure that some of these pieces will be appearing in some guise or another on my tabletop - they certainly look all right being menaced by Robur's Albatross here, anyway:



5 comments:

  1. Used the ME stuff in Aeronef from the first demo game at Salute "back in the day". Very useful.

    The Cog fits in with the MoW stuff so is useful for that and historical (there was an article by David Manley in WI a few months back about Cog warfare that might be worth hunting out.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Looks very good SoS I've got some of those Ireegular pieces that I picked up at a bring'n'buy years ago and didn't know who they were by - so thanks for putting up the piccies! I'll keep an eye out gor the GW stuff as well

    ReplyDelete
  3. Thanks for the comments guys, thought it might be an idea to flag these up for teeny-tiny gamers - although I see that Mr Blease has me beaten by some considerable time - oh well, 'Great minds' and all that...

    Oh, and thanks for the Cog Warfare tip - that's all I need another excuse for a new period! :-)

    ReplyDelete
  4. Thanks for the tip off on these, they are just what I need! That disney monopoly castle looks extremely evil, I'll have to tiny dark elves or undead to one of those.

    ReplyDelete
  5. You're very welcome - a good trawl round Ebay should throw up some cheap lots containing these - I looked for Board Game and Monopoly spares, and that led to a lot of plastic goodies!

    ReplyDelete