Hobbies And Interests
Freelance and Imagination
The best thing about playing with toys is that you can use your imagination to create anything you wish. Toy army men can be used in this process by simply playing with them. Taking them outside for a freelance game of war can provide a realistic environment and a good excuse to get dirty.
Props, such as turning twigs into fences or adding earthen boundaries, can add to the fun. You also can imagine trees are high cliffs or small pebbles are large boulders that can be "death-defying" obstacles in your imaginative game. A more complicated prop can be made by tying string to the corners of napkins and tying the opposite ends of the string to the toy's arms to create a makeshift parachute.
These can be good ways to utilize your toys while engaging children in interactive activity. Ensure that you watch younger children, however, as smaller pieces can be a choking hazard.
Structured Events
There are also structured games and activities that can be done with your toy army men. Investing a small amount of money into ordering scaled environments for them can add a new twist to the game. These environments can be used to perform such activities as re-enactments.
Some factories also have colors to represent specific foes or genres. Toy army men and plastic figurine environments come in such sets as cowboys and Indians, knights, pirates, spacemen, foreign legion and the Civil War. Utilizing these in lesson plans or at home to interest children (and adults for that matter) in history can be a fun way to help them learn.
Structured war games can be a highly fun way to use your toy army men. Combat Storm, for instance, allows you to utilize your army men in a turnstile system of gaming. Other games allow you to use for your army men in a rule-based system that often divides your men into sections by weapon, such as riflemen, gunman and swordsmen. These games can be played with many people or by yourself with rules ranging from fairly easy to extremely meticulous.