Far Corfe: EXTERMINATE!!! - Charity Shop Daleks

Gangers of the Widdershin's Corpse Junkies crew are given the unique opportunity to view each others skeletons moments before death...

I get a lot more pleasure from rummaging around in charity shops for things to add to my gaming collection than I think I ever possibly could if I had vast amounts of cash and spent some of it on buying the latest thing that GW have crapped out. I suppose it's a combination of loving seeing something brought back from the brink and knowing that if it doesn't quite come off, I haven't wasted good money on a white elephant.

Recently I was sheltering from the rain in just such a place on a freezing day, and happened upon a small pack of what looked like plastic Daleks, just about the right size to work with 28mm scale minis. They were only priced at a quid, so they seemed just too good of a find to ignore.

Now I'd never seriously thought about collecting or painting Doctor Who minis, that was until I saw a certain talented painter from Abingdon sticking a version of Peter Davidson's Doctor into various sci-fi and historical shots, and it just looked so apt that it made me think again.

"We are the sons of Skaro, and we will...what? No, we contain neither Piperaceae nor Sodium Chloride!!!"

Once I got the Daleks home, I washed them in soapy water, based them and then gave them a rattle-can undercoat of black, heavily dry-brushing next with Leadbelcher. But then I was left with the conundrum of just which incarnation of the Daleks to hark back to in terms of their colour scheme.

A close inspection seemed to suggest that they were supposed to be modelled on the "New Dalek Paradigm" pattern, that debuted in the Matt Smith era episode "Victory of the Daleks", on account of the (IMHO: rather ugly) humped backs.

I wouldn't have been opposed to painting one in the colour of each of the new five Dalek varieties, but they look so much like boring modern compact cars that I instead decided to fall back on the more familiar design from the Christopher Eccleston era episode "Dalek".

So atop the dry-brushing, I gave the heads, bodies and other prominent elements a coat of Beaten Copper (yeah, I still have and use the paints from the old Citadel Metallics box set, so what?), then washed them heavily with Feugan Orange, picked out the lights on the heads with Bleached Bone and calmed it all down with a final coat of Agrax Earthshade.

I think the choice to have five uniform Daleks means they more striking than they would have been with five individual colours, and while the pictures don't capture the effect, somehow they seem to reflect daylight really well, making them look very convincingly metallic.

But then the thought occurred to me - I just got five Daleks that look damn good for a quid, whereas Warlord Games sell the (admittedly excellent) "Davros & The New Dalek Empire" boxed set for £28.00 and that gets you a Davros and six Daleks.

Just what are these things, and where do they come from?

The blister pack they came in was lacking in any real details, just calling them a "Dalek Patrol", and while it had authentic-looking graphics, that didn't mean they weren't a well-made knock-off. But searching around Ebay, I soon came across similar plastic minis in different colours, often with the title "Mini Monster Army" attached to them.

Searching with that new piece of info, I was able to discover that they were actually a recurring free gift that was taped to the cover of the weekly Doctor Who magazine here in the UK, and the wondrous Tardis Data Core site even provided shots of the other minis that were given away and what issues they were attached to.

Six Gold = Patrol and Six Red = Army - yet Six Red + Six Blue + Six Orange + One Yellow and One White = Army also...the ways of the Dalek are hard to fathom indeed!

Looks like I drew the short straw here, landing five when there are evidently blister packs with a staggering seventeen Daleks to be had!

Intergalactic and temporal monster mash...

A bit more digging also revealed that there were Cybermen, Sontarans, Ood, Silurians, Judoon, Silence and Weeping Angel minis given away with other issues, enough to populate an entire universe of Doctor Who wargaming or collecting.

The pictures aren't great, and some of the sculpts look a bit dodgy, but that doesn't mean that I wouldn't love to stumble across some of these in the same way that I did with the Daleks.

My searching around Ebay turned up some unopened blister packs that at first seemed massively over-priced, but then I considered that one seller was asking around £16.00 for a pack of twelve Daleks with £3.00 postage and packing, and that you'd be laughed out of town for trying to get the same number from a company making them off of an official licence.

That was the biggest thing that I took away from this little journey into the obscure world of Doctor Who themed magazine free gifts - that there's potentially a vast and untapped resource of minis available to anyone who wants to collect and play table-top games set in the universe of the endearing Time Lord.

So what do you think?

Have you painted up any of these yourself?

Do you like the look of them, or think that they're just plastic junk that should be consigned to landfill?

Are you convinced that the stuff available from the likes of Warlord is better?

Let me know in the comments below.