"To sell or expand" Topic

To sell or expand is the question?

Early this summer I saw some old heritage LOTR figures on e-bay. Looking at my collection I had a few of them and thought, why not expand to make a fair sized force. The final price of the sale was about 3 times what I was willing to pay. The result was that the figures from my collection went up on the block. Good return.

Next I took stock of the collection and saw I had around 7 old John Carter of Mars figures – off to eBay.

Finally, I got around to my samurai collection from the late 70's, for several days I went between sell or expand.

The final verdict was expand. The current prices are good and the earlier sales when a good way towards paying for the new (to me) figures.

I'm hoping my old figures will allow some else to fill out their armies.

For LOTR, I would recommend Red Box Alliance figures: 1/72 plastic, each box (12-48 figures each) can be had for around $20 USD delivered to your door, from Ukraine. The Alliance figures are sculpted to be like the movie characters -- pretty good likeness!

The plastic figures take paint, exceptionally well, if you prime them with acrylic artist's Gesso (white, gray, or black -- avoid the clear!). You can add in some Caesar Fantasy 1/72 plastic figures, if you like, as well. The Caesar figures can be delivered to your door for typically $20 USD per box, from Taiwan, off of e-Bay… Cheers!

I went through this about five years ago. The trick seems to be

1. know what you need for satisfactory armies--both what to build up to and when to quit. Once you know your minimum, you can work out how much it would cost to get your army to fighting strength, and then you can decide whether it's worth the money. Mostly, you don't want two sets of armies which could play out the same scenario.

2. try to get as much overlap in terrain as possible. Terrain doesn't necessarily cost a lot of money, but it eats time and storage space. I try to allow each 28mm army one distinct terrain piece. They have to share everything else.

I think that Robert's advice is good. As a rough rule of thumb one box file of figures in 15mm or 20mm may be enough, more than two box files is probably too many.

On terrain, for most purposes I go down a scale, and try to stick to buying generic pieces where possible (although the cafe for Pegasus Bridge was a must and it was worth scratch building the bridge and gun pit… I have doubts about the time I spent on the chateau at Benouville although it has had a second outing as a generic chateau).

If you only collect the bare minimum, if you only buy what you need but buy it all when you embark, then you never need ask the question. It's what I tend to do. The question I face is: "Do I like this period any more?"

Some finished armies, including Crusades, 7YW, Napoleonic French, 15th Panzer Division, ancient naval, Punic Wars:

But I doubt I could get any into two file boxes.

The point about terrain is well made. It is always my limiting factor these days and the reason I went for desert WW2 – because you don't need any big 20th century terrain pieces for doing Libya 1941.

Do what veteran gamers do, expand past all expectations then sell for a huge loss when the missus complains about "too many toys!"