How Many Minis Do You Have?

[Blue]

Okay, back in my late teens I painted minis with friends. But I had no money to buy them, so it was mostly characters. In my twenties I had more money and I have a lot of lead minis. But I had less time to paint. Long time with really no change except finding a great deal on the older boxes of prepainted minis at a show and buying them all up. But since then I have done three of the Bones kickstarters which have usually been 100+ minis, and me and my youngest will occasionally paint minis together.

So I have several hundred total, with somewhere in the 200-300 range being unpainted resin minis from Bones kickstarters, 20-30 more of those self/kid-painted (my youngest quickly became better than I), a couple of shoeboxes of prepainted resin (?) minis that are mostly monsters, maybe 80-100 lead minis unpainted that I really should at least prime before handling, a small number of pewter minis, and four half-full foam-insert storage boxes of self-painted lead minis, mostly done over 20 years ago - call that 50-60 more.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

I forgot about cardstock minis! Got a few of those from SJG a long time ago. Haven’t used them much, though.

 

[MNblockhead]

Speaking of cardstock minis, does anyone have any recommendations for where to get them in bulk? I have a bunch of M&M cardstock minis which is starting to loom large in my what am I running queue.

If you don't mind paying a bit more up front and putting a bit of work in, buy a Silhouette or Cricket paper cutter and buy mini designs on DTRPG that come with the cut files. There is a bit of a learning curve in terms of figuring out the best settings for the paper/card stock you are using, but once you get the hang of it, you can print and cut a LOT of minis in a short period of time.

If you just want to buy 2D minis pre-printed and cut, check out Arcknight's plastic flat minis.

 

[aramis erak]

Speaking of cardstock minis, does anyone have any recommendations for where to get them in bulk? I have a bunch of M&M cardstock minis which is starting to loom large in my what am I running queue.

SJG has moved to electronic files for their cardboard heroes line; an inexpensive color inkjet, some 110lb cardstock, and you can make as many as you need.
Likewise, S. John Ross has some figure fonts for the same style A-frames. Same setup, and again...

Oh, and the riverhose Boxed Set for Tails of Equestria has a really great set of chipboard standees for MLP:ToE...

 

[MNblockhead]

If you really want to save money and build up easily build armies of enemies and don't mind using pog-style tokens, you can easily find 1" circle images of everything in the monster manual and more. A lot of it meant for VTTs but you can print on card stock. Just get a 1" paper punch, it is just as quick if not quicker to punch out the circles with the images as it is to use a paper-cutter machine to cut them out.

You can use them as is, esp. if you use a good, heavy cardstock. But I bought a large bag of 1" wooden blanks and glued the card stock to the top. For boss monsters or other non-minions, I glued the cardstock on top of 1" round magnets (and other appropriate size for large and huge creatures) so that I can use them with Alea magnetic status markers. I also put magnets on the bottom of all my slotted bases for the same reason.

Man...I really miss in-person games and my physical toys.

 

[Mezuka]

Close to a 1000. 70% of them are for D&D. The rest are for Battletech (20), Battleship Galaxies (60), Star Wars (30), Starfinder (10), Galactica (20), LOTR (30), Necromunda (20).

I used to have a large collection of wargames, including 40k, Infinity, Warmachines, but sold them off.

 

[dogoftheunderworld]

~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

 

[Tallifer]

I picked "zero," but I do have some cardboard character minis made by my Korean elementary students.

 

[Voadam]

I have a couple dozen minis, one set from a 4e boardgame, a couple other multipack random minis, and a few old ones I got in the 90s. Some are on a shelf, a few select ones in my FtF game bag, and a bunch in an old hard sided doctor's kit travel bag I have (about the size of a tackle box).

As a DM I mostly used paper minis, either making my own custom ones or going with things like Fiery Dragon's old CD of 3e MM pictures. I have a bunch of paper mini PDFs from a variety of companies. I also got great mileage out of the counters that came with the 4e Monster Vault once that came out, it became my go to for face to face games until the people who hosted our games got into Reaper miniatures and had bins of them available for our use.

I own a set of Steve Jackson games cardboard ones but I am not crafty so I have not even cut them out. The Pathfinder ones look nice but I have not picked up any besides some PDFs of them in bundles.

 

[Voidmoji]

I answered 500-1000. Back in the day, I bought a lot of the random D&D 3e miniature boxes, and I still have them all. They are really quite handy, even if the paint jobs aren't very good.