Army Men, green, tan, blue, grey, and lots of them. I actually took the time to count out that I had 1,400 Army men (I had the exact number, but 1,400 will do for here). I also had a massive collection of fighter jets, which eventually included 5 of the black plastic army men sized B-2 bombers and countlesss plastic F-15s and F-14s, as well as three huge transports and several aircraft carriers (but never any defensive naval units... although I once had a battleship until it snapped). Besides this I would bolster my ranks with metal F-18s, plastic apaches (one of my favorite weapons), light, medium and Abrahms Tanks (I don't know why but I believe the Abrahms deserves a class of it's own). I also had a massive amount of mountain playsets used from other toys on which I would set my army men up.
So why the mass amounts of army men that took about four hours just to set a good number of them up (later on, I wanted to be a "good general" so I left most of my men off of the field and stuck to tanks and jets... otherwise the men would just be cannonfodder because they would be too closely spaced). The reason was that it was sort of a compitition between a friend and I we were always planning this massive war, sort of like the RP Of Nations and States but with army men and the fact that the cold war went on for years on end. We planned on taking over the park near our house for the battle, I even had a battle plan drawn out with divisions and everything. Thus I have a massive amount of army men which I used to set up and train with military exercises, and then commence the political manuevers with my friend over the phone. I even wanted to learn military stratagy, but you'd be surprised how difficult is is to find tactics other than the ever too common pincer manuever in any book. All the stratagies were field spefic and stated nothing about how I should set up my own contingency plans...
Needless to say, we never actually had the war we were both planning. But I found someone else who happened to love army men just as much as I did and we DID have many wars, but only as "Training Exercises"... Today we both still have all of our army men, but we no longer continue to do battle. The problem comes down to fairness, you can't have a GM when there are only two people battling, I tend to enjoy more traditional wars with only tanks and jets, while he prefers the USS enterprise and nukes (these as you can imagine always make too large of an explosion). But even when we agreed to no longer use the weapons of mass destruction there was the problem that we had no rules, I wanted to create a realistic statistical war-game based off of real-world parameters, but he just wanted the old-style game that would only work with a GM, which was less mathematical and more fun. Finally I really wanted to continue to have the war games outside (the grass makes perfect camoflague, the dirt a great desert and the toy soldiers stand up much better on the ground then on loose carpet). But we have dogs... dogs that my parents just wouldn't keep in because, well, they are spoiled... and anything they want they get
... As a consequence we would just about set up a war game and build contingency plans and the dogs would want to get out... God only knows why... Then they would commence (as they always do) to run around the pool and destroy everything... Making the entire affair absolutely frusterating and rather futile
.
Well... the lesson today, is that all childhood toys can still be played with... All you have to do is give it a cool adult name... I do not play with toy soldiers... I am a cheap avid wargamer (army men are alot cheaper then war-game equipment) I personally found that yardsales were the best location for these things, because they can sell 200 of the soldiers and a ton of tanks for only about 3-5 dollars (otherwise you'll be paying 5 dollars for about 30 of them and a tank). Dollar stores are faily good, but often contain cheap plastic men that really don't stand the test of time as the old soldiers do... Never mind the fact that some of them are police officers with missile launchers, firemen with machine guns and they wave the Soviet-American Flag. ( I once purchased a toy submarine from a dollar store with the US flag on the side called the USS Kursk, named after the recently sunken Russian Submarine, on which many a brave Russian Sailor Perished... rather disturbing but sorta funny at the same time).
Anyways, that is the result of my childhood activities (other than playing countless hours of video games and swordfighting... If my parents didn't stop me from swordfighting with plastic swords I would be much healthier today, nothing is quite as fun or healthy as a good mindless swordfight! But alas, people are far too obsessed with traditional sports
.)