ABOUT:
Looking for cheap wheels for your game that don't look like a bunch of boxes taped together? Well, we've got what you're looking for. This series presents a broad range of papercraft vehicles of all shapes and sizes. And unlike other similar products, these look like the real thing, rather than some blocky, generic, born-of-the-70's-oil-shortages, A-Team-rejected-from-the-flip-and-burn-carpool design.
Bargain Wheels is an older product line developed in response to the growing miniatures craze started by collectible miniatures games. These games spawned a real need for props that gamers weren't filling by using coins, dice, or other impromptu selections of items to represent buildings, wall,s vehicles and more. The first stage in filling the need came in the form of a vast array of paper model buildings, primarily in the fantasy genre. The Wild West gained support early on, but modern and scifi were ignored for most of a decade.
People made do, but then support for more modern structures began to appear and gamers started clamoring for vehicle support. For years, there was some sort of inadvertent support from the model industry, producing vehicles in roughly the right scale to work with lead minis. A few miniature companies lent some support to this, in the form of base metal and resin vehicles in the 25mm to 35mm scale range. However, this was expensive, with vehicles averaging more than $30 each, the price of several box sets of miniatures. The paper mini industry did eventually respond, but with simplistic, cubic vehicles more akin to the toys of a 2-year-old child than the real things on the street.
We saw a market niche and stepped into it without properly researching the market. Yes, the demand is there. No, we do not yet offer a properly expansive line of models to meet that market need. Worse, we moved a bit too fast and selected a scale that was too small.Needless to say, after learning the error of our ways, we have a need to revamp the line, but have yet to do anything with it.
In the summer of 2006, we made some significant changes. First, the existing product line of mismatched vehicle assortments was terminated and replaced by a line of individual model kits. Second, the kits were rescaled from 1/60 to 1/48, an increase of roughly 25%, which provided the vehicles with the necessary size to offset the diminutive appearance provided by the skew in perspective caused by oversized bases on many miniatures. Third, we build the models, put them through numerous sessions of game play, and photograph them. When you see them on our pages, remember that those paper vehicles have been through the same paint-chipping gaming conditions as the average metal mini figurine. What better way can we possibly demonstrate that these models are not as flimsy as the word "paper" might suggest?
Most of the models are single page models, plus written and/or photographic instructions. A few of the more complex ones, however, will consist of multiple sheets of parts. In addition to vehicles, we will soon be adding aircraft, river vessels, and structures to our catalog.
Now Available
| Big Bang | ||
| Please visit our new catalog page for more specific details of all our available products for the paper props line. |
