Are you sitting comfortably ? …

… then I’ll begin.

Many, many years ago, one fresh-faced spotty youth, at that time deeply immersed in the world of 6mm Moderns (WRG Modern Rules 1950-85) had a go at scratch-building a church from plasticard and DAS modelling clay. A second, equally fresh-faced and spotty friend saw the model and said ‘I can make a mould of that’ – so he did. Impressed by the results, FFSY#1 made some more buildings, FFSY#2 made more moulds and they sold the castings on the bring-and-buy table at the local wargames show (Tunbridge Wells Wargames Society open day – now known as Cavalier).

That’s the point at which Phil and I consider Brigade Models to have originated, all those years ago. It took a while to get the company started properly, initially selling our buildings through the Society of Twentieth Century Wargamers, then making spaceships for the Society of Fantasy and Science-Fiction Wargamers (there’s a year scribed into the bottom of one of our early spaceships – 1996). Since then we’ve added to and then sold off the buildings range, added 6mm and 15mm vehicles, moved into Victorian science-fiction with Aeronef and then Land Ironclads, collaborated with other companies on a variety of games and scaled the heights of being able to purchase an entire established 28mm Fantasy range. We’ve gone from two members up to three and then back to two again. We started casting models over a gas stove on the kitchen worktop, moved up to a Tiranti benchtop centrifuge and nowadays proper industrial casting kit, each step funded from the proceeds of the previous stage.

And much to our amazement, looking back we find that it all started exactly 25 years ago. Cavalier is always held at the end of February, and using the Maidstone Wargames’ Society show game calendar and knowing what demo’ game we put on that year, we worked out that it must have been in 1988 that we put a bunch of our home-made 6mm buildings on the bring-and-buy stall and split the proceeds – around £25 in total !

So that must deserve a proper celebration. So here it is. For this weekend only, our Silver Anniversary weekend, we’re offering 25% off for 25 years. Everything* in the online shop is 25% from now until the end of Sunday (GMT – remember this if you live outside the UK !). You’ll only see this here – we aren’t posting it to any news sites or anywhere else (although feel free to spread the word via your own blogs if you wish). 25 years – 48 hours – 25%.

* – there are one or two exceptions, as in all of our sales – the 25% offer applies to everything we make, metal or resin models. Accessories, bases, dice, rulebooks and any models that we sell but don’t make ourselves are not covered. And postage is charged based on the pre-discount price, ‘cos the mean old Royal Mail refused to offer 25% off postage prices for us 🙁