It was a nine year long, sordid tale of excess.
In 2014, I discovered Dust Tactics and became infatuated with its "Weird War Two" aesthetic. My favourite online game store had marked down their DT stock because the game was being passed from one publisher to another.
I didn’t play a minitures game, but my friends played Warhammer 40K, and that looked fun. However, the 40K narrative world was too bleak for me, and the gameplay looked fiddly. Dust Tactics, on the other hand, had a goofy, nostalgic aesthetic based on pin-up culture and pulp sci-fi, and I learned it was streamlined to simplify play.
Simpler play, cooler minis, and now relatively cheap to buy in?
I bought two armies.
I chose the Sino-Soviet Union as my Bloc (the army that I would play) and assembled a small but varied SSU force. Since no one in my area was playing DT, I also bought some Axis forces for my SSU to fight.
To form two balanced armies, and to add those units that appealed to me most, I had to locate some other retailers. Shipping costs notwithstanding, this batched online shopping was kind of fun. Ooh, they’ve got the SSU artillery unit! Now I gotta find that Axis artillery walker...
It took a few months, but this feature creep finally stopped. By that time, I’d spent more money than planned. I’d bought a lot of stuff and thought I was done.
Little did I know, this was just the beginning. The hook was set.
After my buying spree, I was sated. This let me avoid the disastrous BattleFront/Dust Studio Kickstarter that was run later that year. But in 2016, when the units from the Kickstarter wave finally hit retail, I bought a few of them. Now I had a few Mercenaries!
Kickstarter fine print: allow 2+ years for delivery. (Dodged that bullet!)
Years passed. I played a bit, but my real addiction was to the narrative world of Dust that was so well embodied by the game's miniatures. From time to time, I checked in on the game’s evolving story.
Then, in 2021, divorced from my game group and bored because of the COVID-19 pandemic, I decided to buy a few Luftwaffe units I’d long coveted. Rocket troopers!
I needed new card decks too. After the 2016 debacle, the rules of Dust Tactics had been tweaked. The game was now called Dust 1947. If I was paying shipping on the new cards, why not grab a few other units too? Some Mercs on Vespas joined those Raketentruppe units in my shopping cart.
Flying soldiers! “Look. The perfect combination of Dust units is just over there!”
So far, the additions to my original armies had been modest. But not for long. I had made a fatal mistake. I had purchased some Command units.
Until now, I had avoided Command units as extravagant. But they add a lot to play, and each Faction’s Command Squad was now ingeniously and economically bundled with a bevy of powerful heroes. I padded my new Luftwaffe force with this new (to me) Headquarters kit. As always, to provide opponent balance, I added the People’s Liberation Army Headquarters to my SSU force.
My Mercenaries got their Command Squad too, because their headquarters included the iconic Emma sculpt. What had I just done? This turned my Mercs into their own independent Bloc. Now they needed more units...
Emma Donovan, second from left. Clearly, Marilyn Monroe got her look from Emma.
I was fully back into the world of Dust. I was on a completely new acquistion spree. Fortunately for my collection (but unfortunately for my wallet) in the intervening years, many waves of new minis had been released.
For instance, the Imperial Japanese Navy had come along. With ninjas. Did I need another army? No. But who can resist lady ninjas? Close combat with stealth!
The Imperial Japanese Navy’s new Ninja Infiltration Squad. Only Dust would field female ninjas in leather. They also added a Kill Squad of Naval Cadets... katana wielding school girls in pleated skirts. Sexist? Perhaps, but also high camp. Camp makes everything better.
Next, I added an Allied Desert Commando army to my collection. Although they were foundational to Dust, the Allies never appealed to me. Their sculpts were bland, and their force underpowered. But really, I just didn’t want to play G.I. Joe.
The Allied Desert Scorpion forces, however, were different. They weren’t American. They were British, ANZAC and French. I could make some of their units Canadian! They also added more play options to my collection: transport and rapid assault.
Dodge WC51, 3/4 tonne, Light Gun Truck. A phaser cannon, a recoiless gun and three machineguns... I wonder what a heavy gun truck looks like.
All of Dust’s waves were so well designed. They always added new tactical and story dimensions to the game. And they were packaged effectively. Starter sets were cheap. Command units too. It was all too easy to rationalize adding more and more to my collection.
Then the bomb hit.
Just as I had finished expanding my collection, (and again, I thought it was now more or less complete) Dust Studio folded. It was September of 2021. Shipping and manufacturing problems caused by the COVID-19 pandemic had done in the small but creative, Hong Kong-based company.
No new Dust plastic would be cast.
A buying frenzy began online.
The only Bloc I didn’t now own, the Mythos, includes what I consider to be the most beautiful miniature sculpts ever made for any game, the Avatar of Nyarlathotep and Spawn of Cthulhu. If I didn’t buy them now, I never would. Or I’d have to pay exorbitant after-market prices for them.
And a bigger problem existed. Building a small Mythos force of units I liked would require finding all of them at once. If key units became sold out, there would be little point buying supporting units, and vice versa.
I found the units I wanted and piled them into my shopping cart. But the transaction failed for some reason. The next day, those units were sold out. Days later, I found some of them at another seller. Only some, but they included Nyarlathotep and I decided to pull the trigger.
Over the next four months, I scoured the ‘net for the Mythos units that had slipped through my fingers, mad Turks in suits and fezzes. Along the way, I picked up assorted pieces to fill some holes in my other forces. I also bought third party model kits to ‘dustify’ into Mythos vehicles to fill out that struggling army.
A Mythos light utility truck. “Because fezzes are cool.”
Finally, in February 2022, my attentiveness paid off and I found some Turks. My collection was complete!
And yet, I continued to shop and succumbed to two more purchases.
As a final flourish and farewell to Dust, one of the game's European retailers had produced a special Zombie unit for the Blutkreuz. Again, I couldn’t resist the bling and added their meat-tank to my collection.
Then, the very rare BK Command Headquarters became available, right when I was considering how to kit-bash one of my existing BK squads into the BK Command Squad. This headquarters included the critically powerful Totenmeister, a unit long out of print and much sought after. I’d long ago given up hope of ever adding this creepy hero to my Zombie forces, but here he/she was! Damn the torpedoes, I clicked buy. This would be the last $100 I’d ever have to spend on Dust. ($100 for 5 units, still not a bad price.)
The Totenmeister (left) drifts menacingly across the battlefield, resurrecting their zombie forces as they go. Experiment X-33 (much larger than the Totenmeister) thunders forward ready to irradiate enemies with his (their?) plasma gun, grapple them with his hydraulic claw, and then blast them with his panzerfaust.
When the dust had settled, ha ha, I had assembled six armies: SSU, Axis, Neutral Nations Organization (Mercenaries), Imperial Japanese Navy, United Army of the Allies, and Sacred Dawn (those humans who support the ancient Mythos monsters awakened by the endless, cataclysmic war of Dust). I had spent almost five times the amount of my initial investment in this hobby. If amortized over the nine years of collection, this was a $45 per month habit.
The average price I paid per unit (including shipping) was $29. This was higher than the $10-$17 per unit clearance prices I paid during my first round of collecting. But $29 per unit is about what I would have paid from a local hobby shop, if I’d had access to one. Maybe a bit less.
I assembled about one third of my collection in my initial round of shopping in 2014, about one third during my second wave of shopping in 2021, and the final third in late 2021/early 2022 after Dust Studio closed.
The real story, though, is how, by buying into the structure of competing armies, and the updates to those armies, I was slowly but inexhorably sucked into making more and more purchases. What a brilliant business model. Better than cigarettes. I had no intention of building six armies, but the story and features of each army dragged me along. The world of Dust is/was just that good.
My armies are small but varied and colourful. In the end, I have around 150 unique units that can be endlessly combined in skirmishes of all kinds. Now I just have to paint them all and get them to the table.
Epilogue: Dust Studio was finally defeated, not by licensing deals gone awry, or Kickstarters run out of control, but by the tiniest of foes, a virus, just like the Martians in H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds.
The next chapter of Dust planned for release would have included the return to Earth of the Vrill, the alien race whose technology was discovered at the beginning of the Dust story, the tech which now powers the fantastical weapons of Dust.
We will never see the flying scooters of the Vrill (styled after American industrial design of the 1950s), but perhaps, after devastating Earth in many fine battles, the Vrill would have met the same fate as Wells’ Martians, and ironically, Dust Studio itself.
Note: all photos are from the Dust Studio website, now discontinued. Thank you, Dust Studio, for the wild ride and the beautiful game.
The Avatar of Nyarlathotep towers above the battlefield. This model dwarfs all those shown above.
A Spawn of Cthulhu flies into battle.
Another attacks.