Army Men and RPG's

I love Army Men. I'm almost twenty-five years old and I still think army men are cool!

Who here remembers the Army Men? Those little green plastic soldiers from way back when? They've been around since the 1950's and are still a popular children's toy to this day.

Chances are that if you were a boy between the late 1940's-early 1950's and the late 1990's-early 2000's, you probably owned a set of army men. They are a timeless and classic toy that has always been around since their inception, although their popularity does tend to run in cycles.

They were very popular in the 1950's and 1960's, became less popular in the 1970's due to both the oil shortages and general anti-war sentiment following the aftermath of the Vietnam War, and then became extremely popular again in the 1980's and 1990's, though even today they're still around and while there is generally less variety of figures and eras for army men than there were during the boom periods, they are still easy to find in most dollar stores, supermarkets, and Wal-Marts all across the United States.

They're extremely cheap and ubiquitous, can easily be bought in bulk for only a few dollars at most, and are very versatile in how you can play with them.

I played with army men a LOT when I was a kid in the late 1990's and early 2000's (I was born in 1993) and I loved all the different kinds of imaginary scenarios you could fit them into. Hell, even as a young adolescent in the mid-2000's, it was still fun to play mock battles with army men and also fun to blow up army men with fireworks around Independence Day or Halloween or even melt them with lighter fluid. At my house, we called that one "Roy Mustang Fire Alchemy" back in the day.

(On an unrelated note, a good M-80 can blow a mailbox completely over a house. I later learned that was a federal offense. But in Dickenson County, Virginia, that was a cool Halloween!)

The most common army men I had were the cheap Chinese-made clones of Tim Mee's "M16 Troops", who were originally released by Tim Mee Toys in the 1970's and whose uniforms and weapons were modeled after American soldiers of the Vietnam War. (In recent years, Tim Mee has made a comeback as a manufacturer of army men) and other notable types of army men figures I owned over the years included World War II soldiers, medieval knights, and especially Cowboys & Indians, as I was a huge fan of Westerns at the time and I also loved toy trains, and I felt that Cowboys & Indians worked very well with my toy steam trains (modern army men work better with toy diesel trains, of course) and as I have recently rekindled my love of army men and similar soft plastic toy figures such as Cowboys & Indians and historical soldiers, I figured I'd discuss the prospects of Army Men and their relation to role-playing games and wargames.

I am not a player of miniature wargames, although I would love to get into historical wargames (not so much Warhammer 40K or anything like that) and it is worth noting that the earliest RPG's branched off of miniature wargames back in the early 1970's.

The most famous example was the very first one. Of course, I am referring to Dungeons & Dragons (1974), which spawned off of the medieval wargame Chainmail (1971). Other examples of RPG's tied to wargames and wargaming assumptions include Boot Hill (1975) and En Garde! (1975) as well as the unpublished proto-RPG Braunstein (1967), which was originally Napoleonic-themed and along with the aforementioned Chainmail, was a direct predecessor to D&D.

As someone who loves the idea of playing wargames and RPG's with toy army men as miniatures, I have always considered ideas for RPG's that incorporate army men and similar toy soldiers into the concept.

The one gaming concept related to army men that I have contemplated the most is the idea of a role-playing game where the PC's are anthropomorphic army men figures fighting in actual wars. Sort of like Toy Story meets Twilight 2000. A great example of this concept in video gaming was the Army Men video game series originally published by 3DO in the late 1990's and early 2000's. I loved the Army Men video games for the original Sony Playstation back when I was a kid, although the later installments definitely deserved their poor reputation.

I have proposed several ideas for campaigns or even whole OSR games centered around this concept of living toy soldiers, whether it be a campaign set in an ordinary family house in our world (like in Toy Story and Small Soldiers) or in an imaginary toy world (like in the Army Men video games) and you could make the concept work with the traditional late 20th Century styled figures, or with more historical army men types (Cowboys & Indians, American Civil War, Pirates, Knights, Ninjas, etc.) and it would be great.

I've wanted to do such a game since I was sixteen years old, but I have yet to find players who would be interested in such a niche concept.

Again, I welcome feedback and other people's thoughts on Army Men in RPG's and wargaming, or just Army Men in general. Comments are always appreciated.