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Re: Diorama v Wargamming in Today's 1/72 Scale?

TheBabylonian109
Hello everyone! Another curiosity question from myself concerning the state of collecting in the 1/72 scale today. So based on what I have understood over the past 20 years of collecting, the general reputation of the most common scales of plastic/metal soldier collecting can be summarized as thus:

15mm- Mostly for tabletop wargammers.

25mm (1/72)- Mostly for collectors who either grew up or have experience with Airfix 1/72. Since Airfix is for the most part a modelling company, this has tended to push the scale toward diorama building throughout its history.

54mm (1/32)- Mostly for collectors who either grew up with or have experience with Marx (USA) or Airfix 1/32 (UK) company toy soldiers. The former was targeted toward 1950s kids, so tends to have a reputation as an informal "play in the backyard" scale at least in the USA.

So my question is this: can the 1/72 scale today still be considered primarily a diorama based scale, or do wargammers (or somebody else) tend to be strongly considered as well? Naturally it is a subjective question on a certain level, as people will basically do whatever they want with these figures regardless of what they were probably originally intended for. Despite this, I am still curious to hear thoughts along these lines.

P.S.- If my personal context helps in answering such a question I have been a 1/72 scale collector since childhood (started with Airfix/HaT in the late 90s), but my father is a HUGE Marx 1/32 scale fan and has collected them for most of his lifetime. I have very limited experience with 15mm outside of some Jean Valiant (I think?) sets I bought at Yorktown Battlefield in 1996. I still have those Grenadiers and Continentals, tucked away in a mass of 1/72 scale figures. :joy: :grin:
Believe or not but Airfix marketed their first figures for "wargames"...

Theres always been a sort of snobbery around plastic figures, but only really for non WW2... since most models would have been 1/76 etc in the early days and many WW2 WW1 wargames were done in this or a similar scale often using compatible plastic figures from Airfix etc...