End of the Year – Thoughts and Analysis

“Veil after veil of thin dusky gauze is lifted, and by degrees the forms and colours of things are restored to them, and we watch the dawn remaking the world in its antique pattern.”
? Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

(Sorry for the long post)

 

New Year’s closing in on us and with that comes the mandatory (and quite amusing) attempts on analyzing the past year and look at what you wanted to achieve and how many (or few) you actually managed to do.

 

Painting Count

Last year was terrible for me if you look at the number of miniatures I got and how many I managed to paint. I ended up getting around 360 miniatures more then I painted after some crazy trading with a friend.

This past year has been better but I still got more miniatures then I painted. I’ve only bought around 80 miniatures (which is very low for me) and painted around 40 so still a negative score but it’s getting there.

 

Plans For Next Year

My interest in painting has gone up quite a lot over the year and I’ve been painting more for the sake of painting instead of gaming miniatures and trying to actually improve my painting skills which I definitely will continue to do.

I do have some gaming projects that I hope I can finish next year:

• Bolt Action – Soviet – I don’t have that much left to paint but I want to add some transports, a lighter tank or two and two armoured cars.
• Bolt Action – Italy – I’ve primed one tank this far so there quite a lot to do there.
• 40k – Daemons – Once and for all finish painting the last units I have and then decide if to expand them more or not.
• 40k – Sons of Horus – First decide if I’m going to sell them or expand them and if I decide to keep them, I’m going to use them with the CSM codex combined with the latest IA book to add some fun units to them.
• 40k – Harlequins – If, and that’s a big if, the rumors are true and we’ll see a Harlequin book I’ll have to see if I can manage to paint them.

 

Last Years Resolutions

If my memory serves me right the biggest things I wanted to focus on during this past year was to:

• Do more gaming
• Buy less
• Paint more
• Enter a competition

I haven’t done more gaming this year then last which I’m not very happy with but it’s been a rough year and my energy levels have been low.

I have definitely bought less miniatures then last year which is good.

The painting one is hard to judge, number of miniatures? Number of hours spent painting? Going by the numbers I painted less then last year but looking at the time spend, I think I spent quite a lot more.

Then we have the competitions. I have entered one but it’s still going and won’t be done this year and I’m also going to enter the Massive Voodoo competition but that closes next year as well so I kinda failed it but I’m still happy that I actually dared to enter :).

 

So What Things Am I Planning For Next Year?

Gaming more for sure, I’ll try to get some gaming done more or less each weekend I’m home. Right now 40k and Bolt Action but I would like to start playing Epic again as well.

Paint more “display” miniatures and use that to push my painting and at least see some improvement at this time next year and there’s a couple of techniques I want to learn more about, TMM and getting better at glazing but I’m also going to learn the basics of lighting which is an area I’m lacking at.

I also want to paint more gaming miniatures so I can finally have a fully painted and based army. I haven’t had that for quite a long time.

 

Tournaments

I haven’t played a tournament in a couple of years now but we decided to start hosting them again at the club. We’ve had two tournaments and they have been very fun, the first one was more of a normal swiss tournament, we had 8 players, which is perfect as we can only fit 4 tables without renting a bigger place for a weekend, and everything went really well.

This second one wasn’t a very serious tournament, we had some fun and weird rules for each game and it went very well. I think it actually took less time then the first one even if we increased the points from 1500 to 1750.

We had the players spread over most armies and from what I can remember we haven’t had any duplicates.
As an extra bonus for me, I actually managed to come in second place in the first and win this last one, which I’m pretty sure I haven’t done before.

Blogging

It’s always fun to get the annual “Your year in blogging” email from Jetpack. I’ve made 108 new posts over the year and had around 6000 views, which is great! It’s s bit more then last year and it’s fun to see that some people like this blog.

I’m planing to continue to post, hopefully more then this year and I have some stuff in the planning phase.

 

The Hobby

I think that for every year that passes right now, the hobby is breaking new ground. The crowd funding wave is still going strong and we as gamers have never had this insane amount of games to choose from before. I would say that there has never been a better time to be a gamer, no matter if you are into miniatures, boardgames, card games or any other type.

There’s definitely different trends coming and going maybe a bit to fast for me and some that just doesn’t work for me (personal preferences, not any wrong doing of the companies). I have a hard time with the overly complex skirmish games that has a strong focus on combos.

The biggest trend I don’t like is the artistic style of GW and PP, for me most of their bigger kits look to much like something from a kids tv-show but then at the same time, looking at FW’s releases, they are releasing kit after kit that looks absolutely brilliant.

Highlight

I was going through the miniatures I painted this last year and there’s been some ups and some downs but the one I’m most pleased with has to be Horus from Forge World.

 

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