Tom Elsworth won first prize at HISTORICON in the DBM tournament. He got a plaque and a $25 gift certificate from Ral Partha. He left me the catalog, and in looking through the Ral- Partha booklet, I noted a couple of interesting items. First, the Ral Partha figures are cast of Ralidium! And what is "Ralidium?" Why, it's "Ral Partha's lead free pewter", says the booklet. The term 'Ralidium' has a trademark symbol next to it, which means it's really not a newly discovered element, mined on the Asteroids of Oglanthicus, but simply a term which the company plucked out of a hat. Next, I noted that the catalog is truly first class... thick, glossy pages, color, lots of photos. And of the 80 pages in the catalog, 63 are devoted to fantasy... an absolutely mindboggling number of wonderfully sculpted figures: thingies and beasties and dragons and uglies and assorted warrior-persons: warrior-men and warrior-ladies. Third, throughout the catalog, every time there's a reference to a specific figure line, it contains all sorts of copyrights and trademarks and registrations... it's as if the firms are afraid that if they do not continually remind us of their property rights, someone will steal their prizes from them. Finally, Tom asked me to order several figures for him. I did so, and PRESTO!... four days after I mailed in the request, the package arrived! An unbelievable response time. 2. There's hope for the wargaming world yet. On the back cover of Hal Thinglum's Midwest Wargamer's Association Newsletter (MWAN), there's been, for the past couple of issues, an advertisement for ARMATI. And the advertisement quotes Kruse Smith as saying: The best set of rules I every (sic) played. One astute MWAN reader wrote to Hal to comment, amongst other things, on Kruse's purportedly poor grammar. It's good to know that there's at least one wargamer out there who actually cares about such unimportant little things like grammar. Back to PW Review August 1995 Table of Contents Back to PW Review List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 1995 Wally Simon This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com