"Get Off Your Horse and Paint Your Miniatures!"

To celebrate its 20th anniversary, wargame producer Great Escape Games has released three special collections of miniatures for its bestselling Western skirmish system Dead Man's Hand over the past few months.

The most recent, Put Up Yer Dukes, came out just the other day - offering five figures that encapsulate the iconic stature of John Wayne in the Western mythos.

To be honest, I'd have snatched this up just for The Shootist miniature, it being one of my all-time favourite Westerns, but I was buying up the sets as they were released anyway.

Prior to this we had The Quick and The Lead, which gave us miniatures for eight of the main characters in Sam Raimi's excellent Western The Quick and The Dead, as well as self-contained rules for running movie-style duels.

And the first of these bonus sets was A Fistful of Clints, five miniatures depicting classic characters portrayed by Clint Eastwood.

All the sets, of course, come with the requisite cards so you can use the miniature characters as "Legends of The West" (special characters) on your table.

While I may have picked up each one of these sets when they were released, so far I have only gotten my Clints painted by Matt:

My Fistful of Clints

I'm a long way from getting an actual game of Dead Man's Hand up and running, but I'm already entertaining ideas of battles just involving the characters from these three sets.

I really like what Great Escape Games has been doing with these sets and really hope they continue with this line: I'd pay good money for a Kevin Costner-inspired set, for instance.

Clint Eastwood's Favourite (And Least Favourite) Westerns

Eastwood doesn't talk about Westerns like a critic — he talks about them like a guy who's seen it all. He'll praise a flop the studio buried, trash his own movie so hard he nearly walked away from acting, and call The Ox-Bow Incident a masterpiece after his own producers called it worthless. These are the Westerns Eastwood calls the best ever made — and two he wishes he never touched.

Ten Westerns Based On True Events

Studios twisted history into legend, then buried the stories that told the truth. A Confederate deserter who fought against the South. An Indigenous man hunted for loving the wrong woman. A real outlaw who wore a dress and armour. These aren't Hollywood myths — they actually happened. This is the list they wish you'd ignore: 10 Westerns based on true stories they tried to silence.

A really interesting selection of movies, highlighted by the Old School Cinema YouTube channel, that has helped add a few new titles to my ever-expanding wish list of Westerns I need to see.

Ten Greatest Westerns of All Time, According To The American Film Institute

The American Film Institute named the 10 greatest Westerns ever made — and left out The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. What's on the list instead? A comedy about a drunk cowboy, a freezing shootout no one watches, a brothel run by Warren Beatty, and a John Wayne performance so disturbing even Scorsese couldn't stop watching it.

There's still a few of these films I still haven't seen - including, shockingly, The Searchers, but lists like this are useful for discovering - or being reminded of - titles that I must get round to seeing as soon as possible.

As a bonus, here's a Top 10 from Wrangler of the Famous People YouTube channel, based on online rankings:

True Grit (2010)

When her father is gunned down by one of his hired hands, headstrong 14-year-old Mattie Ross (Hawkeye's Hailee Steinfeld) hires one-eyed, hard-drinking US Marshal Rooster Cogburn (Jeff Bridges) to track down the errant Tom Chaney (Jonah Hex's Josh Brolin) who has fled into the wilderness of Indian country.

On the way, they discover that Chaney is also being sought by Texas Ranger LaBoeuf (Matt Damon) and reluctantly they team-up in pursuit of the murderer and the gang of outlaws he is running with.

True Grit is the Coen brothers' retelling of the 1968 Charles Portis novel that also served as inspiration for one of John Wayne's most famous westerns.

This is a gritty (excuse the pun), unromantic view of the old west in all its magnificence, from epic, sweeping landscapes to fast, confused, violent conflicts and men driven by greed and a strange sense of honour.

Speckled with authentic-sounding dialogue and heavily accented delivery, this probably isn't a period piece for the casual viewer, but for those of us that love westerns this is one of those gems that sadly doesn't come along as often as we'd like.

Steinfeld is brilliant in the pivotal role of obstreperous Mattie, arguing with everyone and always threatening to contact her lawyer, while Damon and Bridges present two very different interpretations of classic American western archetypes (the U.S. Marshal and the Texas Ranger), with both having their moments to shine.

Cogburn - as we know from John Wayne's take on the character - is a larger-than-life and slightly unpleasant persona and Bridges delivers in spades, with the Coens' script allowing him to talk the talk for the majority of the movie, as he becomes increasingly drunk and unreliable, before he has a chance to show that he can walk the walk as well.

A classic tale of vengeance and retribution, the script and the setting also deliver on the verisimilitude, with the viewer only being yanked out of the moment by a number of close-up two-shots during Rooster's final ride with Mattie which, unfortunately, look as though they were greenscreened - even if they weren't.

Otherwise, the cinematography is flawless and the film is compelling viewing that pulls you in from the opening monologue through to its touching conclusion.

A truly magnificent movie, True Grit belongs in the DVD library of anyone who considers themselves a fan of America's old west.