For years now I've been working on and off as a miniature painter. It might sound like a cool job, but really it's a lot of work for very little pay. More often than not I find myself working for less that a £1.00 and hour and I wouldn't be able to survive if it wasn't for state benefits.

For the longest time I've always known that the real money in miniatures comes from making them, not painting them. So I decided to follow that goal, grabbed my tools and putty and got to work. I'm a big fan of the Cthulhu mythos and it's struck me that there is a very limited range of miniatures based on it available. Really, there are only the old Reaper minis, which have been around for decades now and aren't very appealing. Apart from those, you get the occasional original sculpt that might get a few dozen castings, but that's about it. I thought I was on to a winner, so the last few weeks I've spent day and night creating alien monstrosities from beyond the stars in 30mm.

The question of how I was going to fund casting and packaging was in my mind as I worked, but I thought that perhaps Kickstarter might come in handy with that. I went over and did a search for Cthulhu stuff, glancing over the search results. The search reveals a bunch of stuff: a boardgame; cthulhu themed wrapping paper; stickers, a book, a figurine. No minis however. This just gets better and better!

The weeks went by and I got a bunch of stuff nearing completion. I started to think about how exactly I was going to do the kickstarter stuff and so I head back to the site and open the page for the boardgame to see how they did theirs.

I literally felt my blood run cold.

This boardgame was a miniature based game, with a full range of minis; minis that looked better than mine. And do you know how much money they got from the kickstarter? 1.5 million!!! And here's the real kicker (no pun), they aren't a new business. They're a long time, vetted company with hit board and computer games going back decades. Civilization, Arkham Horror, Quake, Age of Empires, the list goes on and on. Hell the guy is so well known that his name is included in the games title. And they have the balls to say on their page that they are a just three guys working out of a garage. Must be one hell of a garage considering THEY ARE ****ING MILLIONAIRES!!! They've got a PR department promoting their product on every geeky website on the web, they've got concept artists and booths at conventions. They can offer published books of concept art as incentive while all I can do is offer novelty minis wearing top hats. Basically these guys have got it made! So why the hell are they on kickstarter? Surely the site is for people such as myself who need, well... a kickstart. And now here I am, trying to pick up the leavings of the fat cats, but not really standing much chance of any real success because these greedy assholes need to take a bite of every pie.