R is for Return - or Not? Palitoy-Parker Horse of the Year Game, Anyway!

Something weird seems to be going on, with me and/or my blog, I'm absolutely sure we've actually looked at these twice now, horses and riders only, once briefly as a foursome, once in more depth with variations, which should all be on the Palitoy and/or Parker Tags, but coming a few days after I couldn't find the Jungle flat set I was equally sure I had posted, I now can't find hide nor hair, of raiders or beasts, anywhere on the blog?

 

It doesn't matter as we are about to look at them anyway, but I would have shot more images of the riders, if I knew I wasn't going to find the posts I thought were here, and while I can understand accidentally not tagging one post (which may have happened with the jungle set?), nor noticing it isn't tagged as it makes its way down the front page over days or weeks, I can't believe I would do it three times, twice with the same set?

 

First, let's hear it for the anonymous sender (it was 2021, and I've lost any record of it) who packed this to defeat the best efforts of Parcel Farce and Royal Fail to totally destroy it, but it's the large things with a full wrap of bubble which do tend to survive against the tendency of smaller things to get massacred!

 

Issued under both Parker and Palitoy branding (in that order - I think?), it was the BBC coverage of The Horse of the Year Show back in the 1970's to which I was referring last time, and this set clearly sold well as there's never a shortage of them going cheapish on feebleBay, and well worth the purchase if you also have/collect the Britains gymkhana/show jumping stuff. Although the playing-board is more cross-country/three-day-eventing than a London arena!

 

The fences which look closest to Britains, giving a real variety with full interchangeability between the two end-types, flat and angled, and the various ways you can arrange the boards or poles, along with a gate. Makes you think what you could do with Britains white gate and the wall sections it clips into.

I arranged these as a triple, but they can go anywhere on the board, the little one could also be used for the Britains kids on the Shetland Ponies, in a proper gymkhana! Or, you could put it just in front of the taller lattice-ends one to make a longer-reach jump? Officially, jumps have type-names, and I'm probably inventing stuff which wouldn't be allowed!

The wall and the water, there is one permanent water jump printed on the board, but you can place another one, somewhere else. I haven't played the game, but it seems to be a simple progression through 'jeopardy' cards and dice. I just wish I'd shot the riders better, it is a figure Blog! Still, an excuse to return to them another day, unless the missing posts 'turn up'?!!

 

Riders are a dense/stiff PVC, with one-each of another military (Britains post the other day), police, hunter's pink and female types, while the jumps are all polystyrene and the water-jump is card.

O is for Old-fashioned Odd & Sods!

The finale post in this hexapartite mini-season on old fashioned cars, brings us back to the Americans, even though one's a British brand! Yes - of course I Googled synonyms of 'sixth', I'm not that bright!

We looked at this years ago, but on that occasion we looked mostly at the figures, with a quick look at a car I had removed from the game-mechanism . . . this time we're concentrating on the car, as I found another going cheap in a charity shop and took photographs as I went about the vandalism! Love the artwork!

Made for Parker by Tonka, but as everything, box and components is CE marked, they must be recent enough to be from the Tonka-Hasbro-Funrise era, which - these days - also includes Parker Games, among many others! Hasbro's tentacles are very-much like the old Lines Brothers!

The spinning cars are easily removed with a sharp ker'nighff, and because there is a 'curb' running along the . . . err . . . running-boards, it's easy to get a nice straight line! I actually did the job without the driver in the way, proving that these shots are posed 'fake news'!

Which leaves us with a nice, if rather simplified 'ready-made' hoodlum's runabout, a mid/late-20's, prohibition-era, sports-convertible with the roof down. Would I be way-off to suggest Buick lines? And quite large, maybe around 1:40th in scale?

Last time we looked at this I think I may have said something about the small, simplified driver, but I've realised that as an American Mafioso 'drive-by' car, the non-modelled steering-wheel would be the same side as the shooter ("Get your hands on the wheel dude! Jesus!"), and what's actually modelled isn't a shrunken driver, but the violin-case associated with hiding Mr Thomson's famous, fully-automatic firearm!

These three are actually Disney! And a really nasty PVC which sweats an oily/greasy liquid, like a damp, chewy-sweet - they all had to be washed twice before they could be photographed! The wheels are non-turning, but are on a rigid - probably polypropylene - chassis which is clipped to the PVC body. Somewhere between my vague 'mini and 'micro' designations, they might suit 15mm figures?

I think they were made for the UK Disney Stores (most of which seem to have gone now, Reading's might still be in situ?) by Rainbow Toys, however, Rainbow (also connnnected to Toy Options) worked with LJN in the 'States, so it might have been that they are wider-known toys, possibly sold through actual Disneyland shops in the US or near Paris? Equally, Rainbow supplied Argos the UK catalogue shop, so there could have been several ways of getting your hands on a set?

'The Set' being a re-hash of the old 1960/70'sDisneyland play set from Louis Marx in America, which did have a car similar to the middle one above. It also had an omnibus, but a single-decked affair rather than this double-decker  . . . ♪♪ Big four-wheeler, scarlet-painted, London Transport, diesel-engined, Ninety-seven horsepower om-ni-bus! ♫

Did/do they have a red double-decked jobbie at the Paris Disneyland? I've ever been, something I'm quite proud of, almost as proud-of as the fact I've never watched the Kardashians! That's Old Fashioned Cars for a while, but we will return I'm sure, I found another couple of Hong Kong carded ones taking everything to to the storage unit, and we haven't done the Micro-ones yet!

A is for All The King's Men

No, not the old shop and poured 'new metal' maker, but the answer to the question-mark figure from Parker (clearly - now - a home-paint) which we looked at a while ago here.

Once I'd spotted them, looking for something else, I grabbed the cheapest one I could find on feebleBay as I was really only after the figures, consequently the one I ended-up with was a sun-faded one (most of them are, there was a period when printers used some really crap ink) and so this is enhanced somewhat in Picasa and is not true to life, but it gives you an idea!

The real reason for the shedding of shekels; The kings (left) are perfect 54mm accompanyment, which your own eyes will tell you leaves the knights (middle) knocking fifty-mil and the bowmen a tad over 45-millimeters. There are two 'army' colours with 1 king, 4 knights and 7 bowmen per side.

The board which looks like a conventional 8x8 is actually 7x8 and the movement controls make this a chess/draughts mechanism, but more constricted than the former, I did save the rules to the archive but didn't read them so can't bore you with them even if you want me too!

I rather like the little vignettes at either end of the board which are vaguely Bayeux Tapestry as it might have been rendered by a 1970's hippy, or a moonlighting Heavy Metal (Metal Hurlant) artist, of the day!

New employee . . . not! He's hopeless and we'll see more of him soon but suffice to say rather than sitting in boxes or climbing into bags, he likes inspecting individual 'mice' with his mouth . . . which is a fightey-bitey one, so I will have to watch the rarer figures carefully when I have them out!

B is for Box-ticking Boring Board-game!

It's not really boring, it can be quite fun, with the ruthlessness of Monopoly, yet without the drawn-out, slow-deaths which makes the latter so painful if you aren't the 1-in-eight winner!

But it is a real box ticker; there's tons on the internet, about dozens of versions, both current and vintage so I'm  just getting the Parker and Board Game tags up.

Both a bit tatty I held on to one to wait for the other to come out of storage, they are over a month-since gone to recycling, but these are what I consider to be 2nd (upper) and 3rd (lower) standard versions of the box, the 1st version had a game set-up photograph (I think) with the 'snowflake' pieces of the original game.

Contents; I'd forgotten it's a game with a biggly number of dice! Biggly-biggly, that's a Donald-fact! Hey, I haven't properly mined the comedy aspect and he'll be gone on the 20th Jan! Kept the rules pamphlet for scanning into the archive.

Boards, I seem to have picked up the Star Wars board at some point but don't know what I did with the pieces, if I ever had them? I think the 2nd version (top) is the same as the 1st version, while the 3rd has a more 'parchment' look to it and the Star Wars one is rather bland, if you ask me!

Newer on the left, older on the right and anyone over 40 should remember the strange set of asterisks, snowflakes and cheese slices of the original game! Nominally 10mm in scale/size, due to the thickness of the bases I suspect with judicious use some of these could feed into 15mm war-games armies as well? With nappies provided by the 1990's set and AWI/Marlborough covered by the newer figures.

And if you want to do it without paint, there are dozens of 'nations' now, with different main colours and variations between print-runs!

That's them, done!

M is for Mare Mediterraneanus

Had a bit of a board-game photo-sesh the other day, one of them was this, mentioned before in passing, we may even have looked at one or two of the figures from time to time, but today we'll get the box ticked properly!

Seems to be clear!

The pieces; each player gets an 'army' (including naval elements) in one of four colours consisting of various numbers of four unit types; Elephants, Horsemen, Infantry and Ships. The colours are in the lower image and consist of an ivory-white or cream, black, red and blue, scale is all over the place!

The box-art is superb, mixing the naval battles of the Persian or Punic-wars with the Islamic migration/invasions and fall of Constantinople (when, although still oared, the vessels looked very different) , it's trying to cover the four great empires, who waxed and waned around the edge of the Mediterranean Sea over a few thousand years, in order to justify the game which pits them against each other!

The artwork is also similar to some of that produced by artists Don Lawrence for the Trigan Empire strip in Look & Learn, or Frank Hampson for his Dan Dare work in Eagle, but the box carries no signature or credit note, and I'm mostly basing my wild assertion on the treatment of the smoke & flames of the burning vessel!

A full 'army' in red, the single cavalry and elephant units being joined by three of infantry and two naval, in a similar way to the later Risc, there aren't enough to cover each point (towns & cities), so have to be set out with strategic goals and working with your partner, the game being designed to be played either with two pairs of allies as a four-player, or two players commanding two armies apiece.

The cavalryman in blue has warped and I think it's heat-shrinkage (technically; 'cooling' shrinkage) due to premature removal from the mould-tool, not latter deformation due to unstable-polymer ageing, as they are otherwise a stable polystyrene; the problem is common with these, and some of my lose acquisitions are similarly warped.

As I was having a session, I had the time to spend on generating a couple of .gifs, the other to follow later. It's basically unpacking the box to the Nth degree and then setting the table up for a game!

The board is generally to be treated as a diamond, evidenced by the angle of the titles and the rule-cheat boxes, with the four 'contemporaneous' City States (for the purposes of the game) being Ptolemaic Alexandria (red), Hannibal's Carthage (black), Western-Empire Rome (cream) and Eastern-Empire Constantinople (blue, Byzantines?), there are two each of the red cards (which photographed abysmally) and which are randomly-dealt 'go to jail' type things each player hangs-on to, until needed.

Play is by a pack of cards (made in Belgium, interestingly) rather than dice, and there's not much else to add - so I won't.

"What? Board Games? No, I don't do them, there's far too much space in the lid and the walls aren't high enough, they don't call them 'bored' for nothing, you know! Wake me when there's something I can make a real nest of"

F is for Follow-up - Monopoly

Although, when it says 'follow-up', it was referring to something six or more years ago! AND, I thought I'd posted this all those years ago! Hay-ho! Just a quickie . . .

Following the card stand-ups with wooden feet (UK) and composition (US) 'erzatz' playing pieces of the Second World War period, when Waddington's re-vamped the Monopoly set after the war and for a while, they had these die-cast mazak/zamak-alloy flats.

I think we've looked at both the motorcycle and the tank in separate posts (the tank seeming to be derived from or influencing the larger US comic-book cheapness in plastic), but then I found a set (there's a bunch more in the garage somewhere!) of all of them, except of course, there's seven?

I think the 'Blimp' is from another board game . . . Airship, or Zeppelin or something? Where it - possibly - comes in four colours. Aug. 2022 - Waddington's Astron, six colours!

I also shot a selection pf the houses and hotels who have come over the years from various contract-manufactures, some smooth, some textures, some with hard edges, some soft and the plain wooden ones from the pre-through-imediate-post-war era, although I think if you find a few early sets you'll find variations among the wooden ones too!

That's it, it was only going to be a gap-filler when it was first uploaded!

T is for Two - Waddington's Board Games

Not quite as substantial as I may have been thinking of when I mentioned the possibility last week whenever (or one of the posts publishing yesterday ages ago!), but it ticks a couple of boxes and it's been a while since we had a board game's figures, while the Cludo shots are an addendum to that most vaguely recent games post - link below.

First though - the newbie; Goosebumps, not that old (1995/6 - Parachute Press/Hasbro) and looking familiar, so probably carried by Argos or the Toysaurus for a while? Although I may be confusing the availability of the game, with a brand familiarity (through the distinctive logo) brought about by the commoner (?) sightings of the books?

There are eight figural playing pieces of teenager-types; two each, of each of four colours, each pair being a 'team' of one boy and one girl. They are 45mm, so can be used with 54mm adults and there was a sort of pop-up/novelty ghost arrangement I haven't shot, along with the plastic skull and two game-specific die, although the 2-2-3-3-4-5 mean/average (?) dice could prove useful with other gaming?

I think these are too late for Stadden-senior's work, but I wonder if an apprentice of his might have had a hand in them, as it's faintly his style, and they probably came from the Havent plant of what had been Minimodels.

It's a complicated set-up with lots of slot-together construction and interactive components; apart from the above bits (and the ghost) it's all in landfill, or recycling now!

I picked-up the Waddington's box for the recent 'from storage' 40mm figure set along with a duplicate set of (Parker/Hasbro) figures, and only because of the - also 1996 - box art. The figures looking different from the ones we looked at the other day, but from the 'duplicate' above, you'll have guessed they weren't.

But that artwork still leaves us with enough stuff of curiosity to help this post! Top left shows pre-production prototypes which look similar to the final figures but are actually slightly different - the reverend isn't gripping his lapel, the cook's final small handled mixing-bowl is seen here as almost a frying pan. They may still exist somewhere!

However, they are balanced (no sign of glue?) on what would become the final tile-landscaped 'slotta' bases, although here with the slots either un-cut or filled-in. Also on the front of the box, a game in play shows the same prototype figures being used with chamfered-edge flat, smooth, almost puddled bases, with a rim around the lip (two lower images).

Another game in play on the back of the box shows the eventual production figures, in the paler gray plastic but with a third base type which, frankly - and despite the poor resolution -appear to be upturned, repainted, Smartie-tube lids?

Q is for Question Time - Parker Games Knight in Armour

Well . . . I know it's Parker, not KPG (Kenner-Parker Games) and not Hasbro and that's pretty much all I know! Whether it was also Waddington's on this side of the pond is anyone's guess and what it was called is beyond me, but hopefully someone will know the game?

It's a knight-in-armour alright, but then I wouldn't have said so if it wasn't! My guess - for what it's worth - is that it's probably an empty suit of armour in a grand house or museum, possibly being used as a prop in a posh version of Clue/Cludo or maybe to jump out at those 'pesky kids' in a Scooby Doo franchise game? A haunted-house or ghost game is another possibility?

This is one of those 'tip your screen slightly (or bob your head) to read it clearly' images - dated to 1978; a date that would fit Scooby's early popularity nicely, and wasn't that also around the time of the Clue movie? Anyone remember a board-game from their youth with a knight in armour? I suppose it could be a chess piece, but . . . Parker . . . 1970's? Bit highbrow for them, then! 

25th Jan., 2021 - All The King's Men board game, home-painted silver. 

R is for Return . . . To Cludo

You may have worked out by now that I took the camera through the Kenner-Parker-Hasbro board-game playing pieces box the other day!

So this is just a quick one to catch-up with the almost constant stream of Charity shop purchases of games with figural elements, and the almost constants stream of Cludo (Clue) games in particular!

Having looked at most of these I the last year or two, this is just to show the progression of the figures, while adding-in the figures I've mentioned in those previous posts and which I knew I had in storage, the grey ones with coloured bases. I suspect - looking at them in close up, that several are on the wrong base for the character, but that was as much the fault of Parker Brothers as it is mine!

Originally the pieces were wooden, and looked like the inset card's figure, albeit with a ball-finial in place of the cartoon head! That had become a similar-shaped plastic piece by my childhood.

In the 1970/80's they became the dumpy versions seen in the foreground, and by the 1990's the grey figures (second rank) with slip-on bases coloured to match the traditional characters had replaced the plain 'counters'

The 2000's saw the PVC (or substitute PVC) full-colour set of more caricatured figures in a slightly manga-anime style reflecting both the opening-up of the Asian markets and where they are made!

While the two sets at the back we looked at recently (and will be finable through tags) and are from variant games with the four realistic figures being actually four new characters enabling electronic game-play for the original six who are card-only.

This is the second set of these Simpsons licensed figures I've obtained in the last few years, as far as I know, it's the same game, just - new version = new money for Parker!

The irony is that while I scrabble around shoving the odd quid-or-two at charity, somewhere there will be dedicated Cludo (or Simpson) collectors who have every version ever made. It's the same irony with the TJF 'thing' he gets excited about stuff which is on evilBay every day; often photographed better! For nearly everything I've ever shown here, there's been a hundred better shots on feeBay! Or elsewhere on the wibbly wobbly way!

The best of the playing pieces was this cobra, death by cobra is surely the cobra's fault, not the players, that's manslaughter, not murder! "I didn't know it was a cobra your honor!"

B is for Battle at Sarlacc's Pit

Another board game now, the Return of the Jedi licensed Sarlacc's Pit game from Parker, a super game for figure collectors, but not if they are a bit discerning as the figures are pretty poor, and with no board or box to look at (went to 'recyc' years before I had a digital camera) it's the figures or nothing here Peeps!

Good Guys! From the left - Luke, Leia, Han and Chewbacca. Sculpts are poor, paint is poorer, but they are recognisable, so all is not lost and a repaint would give you four more figures for a Wizards of the Coast collection, which they are vague matches for, size wise!

Bad Guys! As you were - Nikto, Jabba the Hutt and Bobba Fett. The bounty hunter looks like a street cleaner from Blade-Runner, the Nikto looks like an Ewok on steroids and JTH looks like a blancmange which has been left too long in the sun!

The Gamorrean Guard however is a much better sculpt and better painted, to the point where you think it must be a different sculptor, and possibly a separate sub-contracting factory? I'm not saying it is, but that's the impression given by the sudden improvement in overall finish on the one figure sculpt!

If you've got any of the figures from this set sitting in your TBS pile, it's likely to be this chap as there are a bunch of them in every set; six . . . eight or maybe ten . . . I've put them away and can't remember the total, but they are like the 'pawns' of the game - and chief Sarlacc food!

Same marking on all eight sculpts, the 'board' was a hex-decked skiff, suspended over the Sarlacc's maw, all in card, which folded and slotted together to create a theatrical 'vignette' playing area.