Budget wargaming: dollar store edition pt1

As a lead up to an upcoming gaming convention several months ago, I went to the local dollar store for some figure for running some improv RPGs. Among them, I got 2x 50 packs of army men  25 per side per bag. I wasn't interested in the unbagging, but I was very interested in the unit counts.

Cost: $2 plus tax (two packs of 50)

I was surprised by how fairly uniform they were. 3 of each unit type, roughly.
12 riflemen (3 prone, 3 crouch, 6 standing)
3 pointing men with rifle (NCO?)
3 radiomen
3 shotgunners
3 bazooka troops

Image courtesy of google image search, from an ARMA forum

With 3 riflemen and an NCO, you get a fairly usable squad with 3 fireteams. The rocket troops and shotgunners don't fit anywhere, and either serve as their own squads with no NCO, or the fireteams get buffed up to 6 man teams, with one shotgun trooper and rocketeer each.

One of the tan armies is short one NCO, but all the others are full strength with one bonus unit, to make 25. Get a couple bags and extras will likely offset the occasional miss, riflemen seem to be the most common extras (which statistically makes sense).

Quality: Models are a bit unsteady, but partly my little not-very-stable personal table I'm using is to blame. The quality of the modeling is meh, but it's sufficient to tell who's what, which is enough. For $1, you really can't complain. The degree of completeness and unit distribution is far beyond what I was expecting for the price.

Playability: With a $1 tape measure/measuring tape or just a straight dowel for Line of Sight, $1 for half a dozen dice and a D6 tactics system, or possibly a coin flip system (in most tactics systems, a basic troop winds up with about 50/50 odds), or even no dicerolling at all to enforce tactics and maneuvering, you wind up with a remarkably playable small unit setup.

Cobbling together a WH40k style system and unit cards works well, can fit your entire army's statblocks on a single notecard. Savage Worlds has the roots of a functional tactics game that was made with/in it, but they never really finished it out properly, and it requires the hard-to-dollar-store D&D dice.

Up next, I bust out the premium $1 army men, which are 35 of a single color to a pack.