Citadel Miniatures

• 1. Introduction

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  Citadel Miniatures began not with a grand plan, but with an announcement tucked inside issue 11 of White Dwarf magazine. The notice was brief: Games Workshop and Bryan Ansell had "got together to keep-alive Citadel Miniatures," a new company that would manufacture figures across fantasy, science fiction, and even historical wargaming. That modest declaration in December 1978 set in motion a company that would eventually put tiny plastic soldiers on tables across the world. What drew Ansell to this venture? What did it take to build miniatures people wanted to paint, not just play with? And how did a small outfit in Nottingham end up holding licences for characters from Judge Dredd to The Lord of the Rings?

• 2. Bryan Ansell's Road to Citadel

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  Bryan Ansell had already left one miniature company before Citadel existed. In August 1976, he co-founded Asgard Miniatures with Steven Fitzwater and Paul Sulley in Nottingham, taking on the role of lead sculptor. He was not new to the craft; he had built his skills earlier at Conquest Miniatures. But Asgard was not his final destination. In February 1978, Ansell walked away from Asgard and, with backing from Games Workshop, began shaping what would become Citadel Miniatures. The gap between leaving one company and launching another was less than a year. The first advertisement for Citadel's forthcoming figures ran in the very next issue of White Dwarf after the founding announcement, giving the new venture immediate reach to the dedicated wargaming readership that White Dwarf had already cultivated.

• 3. Metal, Plastic, and Lead-Free Shifts

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  The earliest Citadel figures were cast in a white metal alloy that included lead, a standard material for miniatures at the time. That changed in January 1987, when Citadel introduced plastic miniatures under two memorably odd product names: "Psychostyrene" and "Drastik Plastik." Plastic, though cheaper to produce at scale, carried a constraint: it only made economic sense for large production runs, so white metal remained the material for smaller or more specialised figures. Some models combined both, with metal used for bodies and heads while plastic handled the arms, weapons, and accessories. A decade after going plastic, Citadel made another materials shift. In February 1997, concerns about lead poisoning, particularly the risk to children, prompted the company to switch to a lead-free white metal alloy for all its figures. On the 16th of May 2011, Games Workshop announced the Citadel Finecast range, a resin line that received mixed reviews; one British retailer, Wayland Games, posted a note on their website warning that Finecast was "for experienced modellers only" and that "some remedial effort is required." Finecast did not erase the enduring reputation of the metal figures that had come before it.

• 4. Deals, Rivals, and Absorbed Companies

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  From April 1979 to December 1984, Citadel operated a reciprocal deal with Ral Partha, each company distributing the other's products on opposite sides of the Atlantic. Citadel handled Britain; Ral Partha handled North America. When that arrangement ended, Citadel continued to expand its own ecosystem in other ways. Chronicle Miniatures, run by Nick Lund, had been a competitor before Citadel bought it out and kept the name running for a period. Iron Claw Miniatures was a range Citadel itself designed, manufactured, and sold from February 1987 until October 1988; sculptor Bob Olley created the figures, and many of those designs were later folded into the main Citadel catalogue. Marauder Miniatures took a different path. Two former Games Workshop-Citadel sculptors, Aly Morrison and Trish Morrison, set up Marauder as a separate company in November 1988. Citadel cast and distributed their miniatures, and Marauder received promotion alongside Citadel in White Dwarf. The arrangement ended in August 1993, when Marauder was absorbed into Citadel entirely. Retailers across the United Kingdom, including the Medway Games Centre in Chatham, Kent, stocked Citadel figures throughout this period, with demand growing notably from March 1982 onward.

• 5. Licensed Worlds and Limited Editions

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  Citadel's licensed ranges reached across a remarkable breadth of fictional worlds. The list included RuneQuest, Fighting Fantasy, Judge Dredd, Doctor Who, Paranoia, Eternal Champion, Dungeons and Dragons, Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, Traveller, Star Trek, Lone Wolf, and both The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. Games Workshop eventually re-won the Lord of the Rings licence, which allowed them to produce miniatures tied to the trilogy of films released by New Line Cinema. They extended that range further to include characters drawn from J. R. R. Tolkien's actual writings, not just the film adaptations. Alongside the licensed work, Citadel also released limited edition figures for characters that occupied a more playful corner of wargaming culture. Among these were a figure of Thrud the Barbarian, a model of Ian Livingstone, drunken Space Marines dressed in Christmas outfits, and several versions of Grombrindal, the white-bearded character used as the logo for White Dwarf magazine. The Warhammer 40,000 setting pushed Citadel into new territory as well, adding vehicles to a catalogue that had previously concentrated on infantry; the Land Raider and the Rhino transports for Space Marines became part of the line alongside the fantasy war-machines, catapults, and chariots that had long featured in the range.

• 6. Reception and the Painting Hobby

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  Edwin Joseph Rotondaro reviewed Citadel's 25 mm figures, specifically those released in March 1984 and October 1985, in The Space Gamer No. 76. His verdict was direct: "Overall, I highly recommend Citadel miniatures to gamers who use any FRPG system, and especially if they use the Warhammer rules." Writing for Adventurer magazine, Mike Willis and Martyn Tetlow placed Citadel squarely in competition for the top position in the fantasy miniatures market. Their assessment pointed to public convention votes and White Dwarf reader polling as evidence, and singled out the core fantasy range, citing Chaos Warriors, Orcs, Dwarfs, and Fighters as staple figures whose demand was, in their words, "apparently insatiable." The act of painting those figures had by this point taken on a life of its own. Although Citadel figures were sold for tabletop wargames, the hobby of painting miniatures developed into an independent pursuit, one that did not require ever placing a figure on a battlefield. That distinction, between the miniature as a game piece and the miniature as a painting subject, remains at the heart of what Citadel Miniatures became under the Games Workshop name.