Doctor Who and the Replacement Miniatures

I painted miniatures a bit as a teenager, but my return to the hobby happened thanks to Harlequin Miniatures and their fantastic Doctor Who range, which they released in the late 1990s and early 2000s. They used to run advertisements in Doctor Who Magazine, and it was especially fun watching the ads get bigger and bigger as they added more and more models to the range.

I was buying them purely as collectibles — they had a game called Invasion Earth, but I never got around to buying the rulebook, instead I was content just to paint and display the models. I never intended to amass a complete collection either, I just placed an order every few months as new models caught my eye.

At the time, my girlfriend (now wife), my brother, and I shared a house, and we would occasionally spend an afternoon together painting Doctor Who figures. My brother didn’t really care about the figures per se, but he had fun painting with us, and the whole collection remained with me.

Fast forward to 20 years later: my brother and I now live in separate states, but he was in town for a visit and we got to talking about miniatures. He was lamenting that the Second Doctor miniature from his Time of the Daleks board game had broken, and it occurred to me that he had actually painted my Harlequin Second Doctor. I did a quick check to make sure EOE Orbis (the current iteration of Harlequin) still had them for sale on their website (they did), then offered to let him take the tiny Patrick Troughton that he’d painted all those years before.

Since my brother’s oldest son has gotten involved in miniature painting and gaming, we though it would be fun for the old man to go ahead and take all the Harlequin models he had painted home with him to show off. After all, it would be easy enough for me to order replacements, right? In fact, I placed an order with EOE Orbis that very day.

Unfortunately, EOE Orbis never sent my order or responded to any communication, so that wound up being a dead end. I wasn’t very well going to ask my brother for the miniatures back, so now I had some key Doctor Who characters that needed replacing. eBay wasn’t much help, but Crooked Dice has been doing a great looking line of Who-compatible characters, so I was able to place an order for most of the important ones: the Second and Fifth Doctor, the Brigadier, K-9, and a few others, plus some versions of characters that Harlequin never got around to.

(Note: the recent Doctor Who range from Warlord games isn’t much help here: for one, they mostly did characters from the new series, and also, their scale is around 35mm, so a little too large. I once tried using some Harlequin Ice Warriors in a game with the Warlord models, and it was pretty laughable.)

Of course, once I had them, the models sat in the pile of opportunity for several months, but I uncovered them recently and decided to give eBay another try. I found someone in the US selling several still-in-package Harlequin models, so I snapped them up. Between the Crooked Dice and new Harlequin stuff, I’ve got 14 Doctor Who miniatures to paint, and I’ve decided I want to find a game to play with them.