"Counted up my Miniatures; yikes!" Topic

Hoo-boy. It took many hours over many weeks, but I have done what needed to be done and pretty much calculated my PAINTED miniatures and related hobby game items. This total includes figurines, buildings, vehicles, objects, painted boardgame pieces -- it excludes trees, foam hills, bushes, rivers, ponds, roads, small tabletop decor, and most plastic animals/monsters. Metal (or plastic) soldiers for tabletop gaming compose about 2/3 of this total.

9,561.

Unpainted figures? Unknown, and I'm not inclined to spend the time to go thru all those tubs and loose minis and packs -- but my GUESS is three or more unpainted to every painted figure.

This is illuminating, and not a little depressing. I can't help but feel, was this worth a lifetime of work?

Not done yet!

Been there, done it, got the t-shirt!
50+ years and approx 20,000 figures collected (plastic and metal 20 and 28mm), with about 9,000 painted.

Hoping to finish the unpainted before the grim reaper appears, and bequeath a legacy to the grandsons.

Depending how you count I have 20,000 painted.

Unpainted is trickier. A lot of my unpainted came as part of a lot off Ebay or at a flea market. You know, I bought the 4 painted platoons and some unpainted comes with. That said, I'm guessing 1000-2000 unpainted not counting a pile of micro armor I'm currently painting for my summer big bash game.

I take nothing seriously without a mention of scale. Around these parts, 6,000 25-30mm castings ready for battle rates as respectable but not really noteworthy. One friend has 10,000 in Napoleonics alone, and another somewhere north of 40,000. Whether it was worth it is for you to decide.

OP, I find my unpainted lead piles depressing as well. That's probably why I sell off so many projects.

Four years ago I did the same thing. I had 21,880 total figures [soldiers, horses, and guns] (6mm, 15,, & 25/28mm) with 13,139 painted (60%) and 8,741 unpainted (40%) in 20 different periods. And that doesn't include ships, boats, vehicles (except for 6mm microarmor), planes, etc.

I haven't undated this census since then and am not sure I want to do that yet.

Jim

This is an intervention. Put down the brush and let's talk about it…

I'm not good at math, and I am superstitious enough to believe that counting them is bad luck, so the most I can say about my stuff is that I have about enough.

Piper909, I think you are wise not to count the unpainted figures. I did that once back in the 1990s and was thoroughly depressed and dismayed by the results.

I do track the numbers of figures purchased and painted, so I can produce a rough estimate of the number of painted and unpainted figures I have. Because of the way I counted things, it isn't exact (among other things, for years, I didn't track the unpainted and painted figures sold off). The results are adequate for my purposes.

FWIW: 19,702 humanoids purchased, 11,359 painted, and 1,734 sold off (since I started counting in 2009) So, the unpainted are in the 8,000 to 9,000 range. Maybe. Possibly. I guess. Perhaps. In any case, having painted two figures this month, I'm not narrowing the gap very rapidly.

RP: I like to think that over half of the unpainted are 15 mm while the rest are 28 mm, but I really have no idea.

Grelber

This is an intervention. Put down the brush and let's talk about it

No, no, no, no

Put down the wallet, pick up the brush

There's always one more unit needed for that next scenario

Nobody thinks you're sane once you start talking about toy soldiers

John

Never coin the unpainted. Depression is real.
I've got 20K painted between 12mm-28mm. And probably 1/3 that many unpainted.

I did this about 15 years ago, came out to >8000 25mm figures. Many more by now. Unpainted probably 500?? I've sold off a lot of them & have bought very few new ones.
Paul

There's a serious difference between castings you need in order to play a game and deep reserves.

I've got a dozen or so 28mm limbers and two dozen plus horses on the painting table. I need them for horse & musket games in which "limbered" and "unlimbered" is more than which way the gun is facing. They'll be painted before the end of May.

I also have thousands of RISK figures of the three horse and musket types poured into screw-top plastic jars in the garage. They'll be painted if some sort of catastrophe forces me to start over and game on a card table.

There are a lot of deep reserves. There are very few castings awaiting painting because I need them for a game.

I ought to have specified, my collection of minis and related terrain is 25mm/28mm scale and dates back to my beginnings in the mid-1970s. Apart from about twenty-one hundred 20mm board game pieces -- my Alamo project, my Axis & Allies custom sets with "Airfix" level infantry substitutions alone number around 1700 -- and similar scale Napoleonics.

I've just started counting my collection. At 4,000 figures so far a mix of painted and unpainted. I still have a few larger armies to count and some recent purchases to add but I don't think it will put me much over 5,000.

Thank you to all who posted their counts I don't feel so bad now about having too many toys :-)