How Many Minis Do You Have?

[Olaf the Stout]

I voted 1,000+

This is made up of:

• Over 1,700 D&D pre-painted minis (the original ones, not the WizKids ones).
• About 500 plastic Reaper Bones minis. Most of these are unpainted, but I've made an effort lately to paint more.
• About 200 metal fantasy miniatures from Reaper and Stonehaven miniatures.
• Another 50-100 metal and plastic fantasy minis from various Kickstarters.
• About 60 Blood Bowl teams. Mostly metal, but some are resin or plastic. I'm not sure how many minis there would be exactly, but I'd estimate about 20 minis per team, so around 1,200 Blood Bowl minis all up.
• About 160 metal Necromunda minis (from the 1997 range).
• About 20 metal Star Wars minis.

So that's almost 4,000 minis. I'll stop counting there, but I've also got some Warhammer minis plus board games such as Descent, Zombicide (plus expansions), TMNT and Batman Adventure System Games, Mantic Deadzone and Walking Dead games, all which come with numerous minis. If you added in those I'd probably end up at a little over 5,000 minis.

Then there's all the pieces of terrain. I'm not sure if they count or not.

The scary part is that I got a 3D printer for Christmas and have already compiled 1TB worth of STLs to print in the space of 6 months. So I likely have more digital models that I have physical!

I don't have a problem, I can stop any time I want! Honest!!!

 

[Olaf the Stout]

~1,000. I have a couple old school, but really started back into it with Wiards/WizKids random boosters, back when I actually had a game or two running. Then Cases. Then Pathfinder. About the time I broke my pre-painted habit, along come Reaper's Bones Kickstarters... new hobby in itself I also bought a couple of eBay lots of Star Wars minis for Starfinder, d6 SW , etc.

And even with all this, I struggle to find the right mini for encounters But having the right sized/shape mini does help with player/character perspective

Probably the thing I love the most with the 1,700 pre-painted WotC minis I have is that I almost always have the exact mini we need for our game. As the years have passed there are more monsters I don't have, simply because they didn't exist at the time the pre-painted minis I have were made, but that tends to be the exception more than the rule.

I've also got them sorted into labelled snap-lock bags. So, despite having so many, I can pretty much find a specific mini I need in under a minute.

 

[Olaf the Stout]

It's interesting, most people either have none or over a thousand. I didn't expect that.

I wonder how much Reaper Bones and the availability of consumer-grade 3D printers has contributed to that.

I've backed all 6 of the Reaper Bones campaigns now. Prior to the first Reaper Bones campaign in 2013, I owned only a hundred or so fantasy minis (and still a tonne of pre-painted D&D minis, Blood Bowl and Necromunda minis, but not many fantasy minis).

While I only got the core set for the first 2 Kickstarters, and got more selective with the other 4 campaigns, the 2 core sets alone gave me almost 400 minis. I feel like those Kickstarters completely changed the market for physical minis.

Similarly, the only reason why I have been buried in a sea of minis since I got my 3D printer is because I made myself a rule that I would only print as many minis as I painted. Otherwise I could have amassed a literal army of plastic minis by now!

 

[Bluenose]

I'm working on having more than a thousand. But I have to finish painting the ones I currently have.

That would be a first for history, someone finishing painting all their minis. It might be heresy.

And anyway you'll walk into a shop looking for something else, see that beautiful Sassanid war elephant that you've absolutely no use for but it looks so nice and you can always paint it as part of a diorama, maybe have a few desperate javelinmen trying to fend it off, so you probably need to buy some Roman limitanei, and if you're buying those perhaps it's worth adding a few more Romans and Sassanids as once you've started an army you might as well get enough of it for a small game of some sort... And that's how you end up with £100 worth of minis that you need to paint on top of the already existing pile.

No I did not do that when I was visiting my FLGS today.

Spoiler

It was an Assyrian chariot, and now I need to find some use for that and my newly acquired early Arabs.

 

[MGibster]

I wonder how much Reaper Bones and the availability of consumer-grade 3D printers has contributed to that.

I'm hardly an industry insider, but I do think Reaper Bones paved the way for other companies to use new kinds of plastics in their production. Their Bones line still isn't the highest quality of miniature, but they've improved over the last few years, but they were so abundant and cheap that a lot of people didn't care. I see the Bones DNA in Wizkids' miniatures.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

So, you folks with 1,000+ minis, where do you put them all? How are they organized?

 

[MGibster]

So, you folks with 1,000+ minis, where do you put them all? How are they organized?

I don't have 1,000 (I think), but I bought a fancy Ikea bookcase to house my miniatures. I have more miniatures on the wire frame shelf next to the right.

Edit: And now that I can see my reflection, I'm so happy I wore pants.

 

[Mannahnin]

Most of the painted ones are in cases or boxes with padding for transport. I have a bunch of purpose-built army transport cases from a few different producers, and I got a case as part of Bones 1. Some are displayed on shelves. Other unpainted ones are in boxes, some of those unopened, waiting for me to get around to building and/or painting them.

 

[DrunkonDuty]

That would be a first for history, someone finishing painting all their minis. It might be heresy.

Well, just between you, me and the internet, I have allowed myself a loophole - minis for PCs and important recurring NPCs don't count against the "no new ones till their all painted" rule. But ssshhhh, don't tell my wife.

Also the Reaper kaiju mini I have, Khanjira the World Breaker, is so intimidating that I'm not sure when I'll get up the nerve to try and tackle it.

Meanwhile, I am building up quite the wish list of new minis I want to buy.

Edit: And now that I can see my reflection, I'm so happy I wore pants.

Us too, dude. Us too.

 

[aramis erak]

Well, just between you, me and the internet, I have allowed myself a loophole - minis for PCs and important recurring NPCs don't count against the "no new ones till their all painted" rule. But ssshhhh, don't tell my wife.

Also the Reaper kaiju mini I have, Khanjira the World Breaker, is so intimidating that I'm not sure when I'll get up the nerve to try and tackle it.

Meanwhile, I am building up quite the wish list of new minis I want to buy.



Us too, dude. Us too.

There is always the dip, dip, dip, dot, dot, dab, wash method.....
Dip in primer. Let dry
dip in body color. Let dry
dip head in flesh color. let dry
dot the eyes, let dry
dot the mouth, let dry.
Dab on the hair/helmet
if needed, dip the metal of the weapon in metal paint.
dip in an inkwash, and stick above sink or blotter, hanging upside down, until dry.n (This puts the shadows on the doward facing side of cracks.

Great for low res hordes of similar minis...
And, for one friend of mine, about the amount of care taken to paint his PCminis.
I gave up - I use mini-meeples.