We at Tangiblia collect games, action figures, D&D books, and comics — the stuff that fills shelves and boxes and (if we're honest) a couple of rooms — and we're writing it all down. What came out, when it came out, what the variants are, and where one can still be found.
The name is two words stuck together, tangible and memorabilia, because that's the whole idea: if you can hold it in your hand, it counts. We started this because the checklists we were using kept turning out to be half-finished, or wrong, or full of links to listings that died in 2019. So every entry here gets checked against at least two sources before we call it verified. When the sources disagree — and they do, constantly — both readings go on the page and you can watch us pick a side, or not.
Tangiblia is the physical side of the house. Our sister paper, the Voynich Times, covers the other sort: manuscripts, treasure hunts, things nobody can touch.
Fair warning, and we'd rather print it up front than bury it: Tangiblia is a few weeks of work pretending to be a website. There is exactly one finished catalog here (the D&D one) and one finished toy line. The rest of the shelves are empty, and they'll fill slowly, because a line doesn't go up when we've copied a checklist from somewhere — it goes up when the research is done.
So no, there isn't a ton here yet. There will be. It'll just be true when it arrives, which is a slower way to build a website and the only way we know how.
Fifty years of Dungeons & Dragons, every edition and era, 657 products with their store and marketplace links checked one by one. The eBay column alone needed a second pass, because the search indexes turned out to be blind to 242 live listings that were sitting right there (we know, we opened them). It starts with three little brown books and ends, for now, with the revised 5e hardcovers. dnd.tangiblia.com
Start with Star Wars, because everybody starts with Star Wars. Wave 0 is finished: 180 vintage Kenner items in the shared catalog, numbered in release order (R2-D2 is three different products, so he gets three numbers — that's the rule, take it up with Kenner). The other 37 registered lines are being built oldest to newest, the order the shelves actually filled up in.
The physical game catalog: cartridges and discs by system and generation, variants, print runs, sealed copies, the magazines that covered it all. It's being built here from the first row, on the same machinery as the D&D site — partly because that machinery works, and partly because we just finished moving a site once and that was plenty.
The paper branch, and the one that ties the other three together (half the toy lines above started as comics, and the other half ended up as them). Registered, argued about, and scheduled after the first three are standing.
Counts pulled from the catalogs themselves each time this page is built. If a number here ever disagrees with a catalog, the catalog is right and the page gets rebuilt.
| Branches (video games · tabletop · action figures · comics) | 4 |
| Items cataloged so far, all branches | 837 |
| D&D products in The Tabletop Caller | 657 |
| …of those, with a store PDF/VTT link checked and working | 623 |
| …of those, with a live eBay listing confirmed by opening it | 655 |
| Vintage Kenner Star Wars items (Wave 0) | 180 |
| Accessory codes in the Star Wars master list | 112 |
| Action-figure lines registered, across 7 eras (1964–present) | 38 |
Hasbro's GI Joe starts it. Boys wouldn't buy a "doll," so Hasbro invents a word — action figure — and, accidentally, this entire website.
Dungeons & Dragons, three little brown books in a woodgrain box. The game is mostly imagination, but the books (and the dice, and the modules, and the Dragon magazines) pile up fast.
The Atari 2600 puts cartridges on the shelf. A game stops being something a machine does and becomes a thing you own, trade, and lose the box for.
Kenner's Star Wars line. Ninety-six figures by 1985 at 3.75 inches, vehicles outselling the heroes, and one empty Early Bird box that people bought anyway — a certificate, a promise, and the founding artifact of modern collecting.
Masters of the Universe and GI Joe: A Real American Hero, the same year. Saturday-morning cartoons become the engine and the toy aisle becomes an arms race.
Transformers. Half the collecting arguments since are just this one repeated: is it the robot, or is it the truck?
The Nintendo Entertainment System hauls the American console market out of the crash. The cartridge shelf comes back with it.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, out of a self-published comic with a print run you could carry. It outlives almost everything else in this list.
McFarlane's Spawn, sculpted like a statue and posed like a warning. Kids had been aging out for years; this is the moment the industry admits the collectors are the customers.
The Black Series moves Star Wars to six inches and adult prices. The 1978 line, still setting the terms thirty-five years on.
HasLab's Sail Barge: $500, crowdfunded, 8,000-odd backers. The deepest cuts in the catalog now get made only when collectors order them in advance — which, if you think about it, is the Early Bird box again, with better paperwork.
Our D&D catalog — all 657 products of it — now lives at dnd.tangiblia.com. The old address forwards here path for path (we checked /worlds by hand, because of course we did). Nothing about the catalog changed; it's the same research under a roof that makes more sense.
The vintage Kenner line went into the shared catalog format — 180 items, counting the vehicles, playsets, and mini-rigs, plus a 112-code accessory master (the numbering doc said 111; its own lists add up to 112, so 112 it is, and the argument is written on the record). Then we rendered the same dataset as a cabinet and as a timeline and compared the item lists. Identical. That's the proof the rest of the lines get built on.
The Collector's Cabinet — the action-figure side of the house — now wears the open-box mark, same as this page. One house, one box, everything tangible goes in it.
Before cataloging anything else we wrote down the whole history of action figures as we mean to cover it, GI Joe (1964) to the crowdfunding era, and registered the lines. Cataloging starts at the old end of that list and works forward.
Tangiblia is a made-up word, which turns out to be harder than it sounds — most made-up words are taken. This one wasn't, anywhere we could find: no brand, no trademark, no social account. tangiblia.com was registered the same afternoon, $10.46, in case you were wondering what a name costs.