$23 Castle Board (Alternate Title: How I learned to love secondhand shops)

While one is a more current Hogwarts, the rest are Fisher Price little kid toy kits (from 20 years or so back) plus a random girlie princess palace (see previous post for it in all its pink glory). I think the castles were $20AUD for the pair, and the palace was $3. Admittedly Hogwarts was $30, but it is on loan from my daughter so it doesn't count. 

We have been hunting more dollhouses; we want a larger wooden one for a multi-level cyberpunk skyscraper with many floors, (I may even use a secondhand book cupboard), and some more rustic Sylvanian-esque ones for Mordhiem-y Euro village buildings.

Yep, I've also found more LoTR models in storage. The 28 orcs and 6 Knights of Dol Amroth bring my 2023 total to 196 painted. Apart from a few random spares I'm 100% up to date. I'll try to get a few more so I get a nice neat 200. However I found some glorious old metal Confrontation sculpts when digging; so the painting crusade is not yet done....

The latest addition to the collection. While not 100% to scale it's certainly acceptable. Basically I just spray black undercoat and use cheap craft paint to drybrush messily. It only takes 45 minutes or so.

I've got some LoTR siege ladders that should work to bridge the levels.

A closer shot of my Dol Amroth metal knights. I'm glad I picked them up years back (~$30) as now I wouldn't be able to afford them. They probably cost that each! I've now painted ~100 standard orcs and I'm a bit bored with both their sculpts and their drab paint scheme. It kinda puts a damper on my plan to get started on my horde of 15mm WW2 tanks next.  Camo = dull. 

.....Although my daughter is agitating for Girls Und Panzer paint schemes...

I've mostly been buying Plastic Soldier Company and Zvezda models. Zvezda is lots cheaper and except for the Lee and Su-76 (major pain in the butt) they were simple and neat to assemble and look crisp. They came with gun/turret options but lack the extra customization bits PSC has. Zvezda's model-kit approach feels a bit flimsy though - might be nice to add a bit of weight underneath to get more 'heft.' The gun barrels are also flimsier than the PSC ones, but due to the pricing I'm going to keep with Zvezda while stocks last (Russian company etc). 

Although my to-do list should be the same as my last post, I DID discover some metal Vostroyans which look kinda neat....