"Well, you probably wanted to do this at one point" Topic

Shooting plastic army men with a miniature cannon
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Doesn't everyone? Marx ACW figs and the dark brown cannon or the mortar that came in the sets.

My late cousin once made a firing version of an Elastolin cannon, and started a fire on my game table that was covered with indoor/outdoor carpet!

That is how I started. We had the Swoppets ACW figures and a spring loaded cannon. We made our own rules and would take turns firing the cannon at the enemy side.

I had dinosaurs, cowboys and firemen.

I would fight in the back yard. We would put white power in a small balloon, bury it in the dirt and turn it into a small hill. We you put men or cannon on the hill and when we fired a cannon at the troops, we stuck a pin in the balloon. When it exploded, it would send white smoke into the air leaving a crater with dead troops in it. So much fun! Of course they were 54mm plastic troops.

We used a BB gun to pick off the soldiers defending a fort made out of dirt

I did it with a dart gum. The ones with the rubber suction cup. I used it on my Fort Apache and my Lincoln Logs, lots of fun.

Firecrackers planted under the little green army men. And penny rockets for ranged shots. (They were legal back then.)

The video shows a neat way to make lightly toasted bread, too!

We shot rubber bands at them.

I did similarly when I was a kid. When I had my own family, I remembered how I wished, as a kid, I'd had rules for fighting large battles with my Army Men figures.

My sons loved my 28mm fantasy miniatures, and of course they wanted to play with them, but having paid handsomely to have a large number of them professionally painted, I could not allow that. I saw that my sons had plastic Army Men in their toy collections, so I hit upon the idea of writing a set of basic, introductory war game rules they could enjoy with me.

I later printed copies at my local office supply store, using their photocopiers, selling them through a free website. I ran local Community Education classes for the public, introducing them to war gaming with plastic Army Men figures. It was not terribly popular with the adults, but my youth classes always sold out, with the School System asking me to run additional classes to meet the demand for them. I sold a number of my rules sets through the classes, but the majority were sold through mail order from the website. I ran the website from 1998-2007, before I retired it.

I still play Plastic Wars, with two of my three sons, when I can (my third son lives half a country away, in the deep South of the USA, while I live in the North). I've updated the rules a few times, hoping to re-publish them maybe next year, in a PDF/POD format: loads of scenarios, loads of color photos, loads of instructions on how to build terrain, how to paint and base the figures, etc. The rules play fast and fun, the cost to get into the game, is low. The rules work for small games, up to very large games, with ease, as long as you have enough players to move all of the figures in play. The largest game I ever played was on a 12' x 30' table, and it was a blast! We actually played two different, but similar games on that table setup.

The linked photos are of the first game; for the second game, we added a mountain with a train tunnel, and hydro-generators along a river. The train was delivering reinforcements and supplies for the Tan Defenders, a few Turns into the game. The Green Invaders made a beach landing, slogging their way towards the town. The Tan's had a sniper in a water tower who killed more than a few Green's before he was neutralized. When the Train arrived, the Green's hurled what they had at it, destroying its cargo, killing more than a few of the relief troops. In the end, the Green's scored a pyrrhic victory, paying a very dear price for it. Those two games were more fun than a Human Being ought to be allowed… Cheers!

We used pea shooters. We'd buy boxes of dried peas ( dirt cheap) and used oversized plastic straws (made for that purpose) and used them like blow guns to shoot each others troops. And we'd shoot each other, too, just for fun.

I can achieve just as many casualties with my 1960's Britain's 4.7 inch gun shooting matchsticks – and with a lot less effort!