You get back to your car and see the window smashed in. Missing? Your army case, containing hundreds of pounds worth of miniatures but more importantly hundreds of hours of work and an emotional attachment. It could instead be your garden shed broken into, or your garage, or any number of places – the key point being that your army has been stolen.
This, unfortunately, happens from time to time and people seem to almost give up and assume it’s lost. Don’t. If it happens to you (or someone you know), immediately start searching nearby dumpsters. If it’s recently happened then you won’t need to pick up anything that’s on the top layer of rubbish, you’ve got a good chance of finding your army dumped on top.
What seems to happen is some little shitty scrote steals your case because it looks like it contains power tools or expensive equipment. They run off with the case and down a nearby alleyway. They open the case to see what they’ve been able to steal… and find a bunch of toys. They either don’t know what miniatures are, so don’t know the true financial worth, or know that each army is unique and they’re not going to be able to sell it since they’ll be outed as having stolen some guys army. Either way, the response is the same. Throw it in the nearest dumpster.
Of all the cases I’ve heard of armies being stolen from cars or whatever, almost every single time that someone has searched nearby alleyways and dumpsters, they’ve found the army. Might be a fair few pieces broken, might be a bunch of them lost in the depths of the dumpster, but most of it found. Most recently this happened to “ElectricEve” with her Eldar army:
A local found my Eldar… in their bin. Luckily saw my sign in a local shop & returned it this morning. Some missing, many broken, no case. pic.twitter.com/J7Owj2VFAK
— Em (@ICantThinkEm) October 3, 2017
If your army gets stolen, the first thing you should do is check all the nearby alleyways and dumpsters. Do this before the dumpsters start getting filled up and before they’re emptied. If you’re unsuccessful, then start doing the police reports, local posters and posting to social media, but yeah. Dumpsters first.
