After the fun I had messing around with my universal skirmish rules I wondered about using them for skirmishing in the Deathzap universe. To that end I’ve been painting up more Poundland figures:
I think the 25mm Warhammer style bases really make them look like ‘proper’ gaming figures:
Not that there’s such a thing as ‘proper’ gaming figures. In the dim light of the gaming room with 2-3 feet between your eyes and the table, you genuinely can’t tell:
Anywhere from 80-100 figures for your humble pound coin, a full army in a bag, are they really 0.5-1% the quality of your ‘proper’ gaming figures? (That’s assuming a £1-£2 cost of a gaming figure, obviously GW figures are far more expensive)
With the ensuing cost of living crisis, I wonder if more will turn to the humble army man for all their gaming needs?
I suppose the big draw for me of these figures has always been the idea that they can be anything, and entire worlds can be made from them. There’s a lot of potential hidden in that little plastic bag hanging up in your local discount shop.
I may fight wars between the Jendari Collective and the Allegiance of Gnossos.
But you could come up with your own imagi-nations, your own imagi-universes, or something really and truly strange:
It’s worth a go at least, it’ll only cost you a quid.
Deathzap 
I’ve discovered that they can paint up pretty well, and I’ve smuggled them into 40k games at the club and whilst people realised that they were not games workshop, they assumed they were ‘proper’ wargames figures 🙂
I base mine on 2p pieces which triples the value of the figure 🙂
there’s clearly a whole plastic world of 1/72 25mm models that I hadn’t appreciated. I’m just too far down the road of smaller scales, with the odd repurposing exception.
Half the appeal, especially as a solo, is being creative. Having a (once wonderful) company dictating every detail of how you collect, paint and play is a truly dreadful thing. My wife occasionally buys me a copy of white dwarf. I just don’t have the heart to share the unpalatable truth!
When it comes to fantasy settings, I’m with you 100%. But if you start getting into historical stuff, that’s when the ‘accuracy’ bug starts to bite and/or you begin to hanker after ‘period flavour’, and so the generic pound store figs may not cut it. That’s when I turn to 25mm plastics from ‘proper’ toy soldier makers.