2024 in review

 

Slightly delayed, but here is my annual look back at the previous year, and comparing it to the plans that I made at the start of the year…

Tally

As Christmas was technically happening after my last scheduled post, the Tally took one final hit before the end of the year. My brother-in-law emigrated to the states last year, and so came through with (among other things) some beautiful Boot Hill Alamo minis (as my limited Hobby budget usually doesn’t stretch to the shipping costs from Brigade to the UK - why oh why didn’t I get into the Alamo when those minis first came out and they were available in the UK?!):

Also pictured is the 3d printed space pirate that the stl for was a freebie at Salute, as he also has a 3d printer.

With this last hit, the final Tally for 2024 looks like:

62 vs 204 (one of the space pirates isn’t for me) = -142

And adds to the long running set of yearly stats:

2024: -142 (62 painted)

2023: -194 (33 painted)

2022: 0 (85 painted)

2021: +16 (52 painted)

2020: -100 (47 painted)

2019: +3 (46 painted)

2018: +52 (52 painted)

2017: -14 (47 painted)

2016: -287 (56 painted)

2015: -96 (59 painted)

2014: 0 (80 painted)

2013: -416 (25 painted)

2012: -103 (68 painted)

2011: -173 (122 painted)

So technically, it was my fifth most productive year in terms of figures painted…

Posts

39 posts this year, with at least a single post every month. The year started off with the usual random selection of things as and when they took my fancy, but then I fell into grooves of things I needed for games, like monsters for Frostgrave, or my late in the year start working my way through the Umbrella Academy board game.

Last years challenge

• Finish at least one playable force for a game (whether that be my 500 point Skaven army, my Silver bayonet unit, or something else entirely…)

I very nearly finished off my Silver Bayonet unit, but am still one model short from having a playable force, so maybe this year…

• Play at least 12 games in 2024 

I only managed two games of Frostgrave and a single game of Super Mission Force, so that’s another fail. I have the bit of terrain that I need for the next Frostgrave scenario undercoated though, so if I can drybrush that grey the adventures of Tim the Necromancer can continue in 2025…

• Prep all the monkeys in the monkey box (I mean I couldn’t delete this one after so many years)

You all know I haven’t done this.

• Convert at least one miniature

Two converted miniatures for the Silver Bayonet unit, so I get to cross something off! Generally what happens is I write the challenge, then largely forget all about it for most of the year.

• Add to the Monstrous Alphabet project

Several monsters painted this year, but R and T were newly completed entries, so that’s another challenge ticked off

• Do Zomtober posts

Four posts managed - I had some extra bits planned this year, but unfortunately ran out of time, so they’re still sat half-finished on my painting tile. Until next year…

• Do a May the Fourth post

Tiny Grogu to go with the Mandalorain I painted for May the Fourth 2021

• Do a festive post

Again, the secret to success it seems is setting myself a challenge that involves painting a single miniature, with several months notice…

• Average at least a miniature a week (so at least 52 completed miniatures across the year)

62 painted miniatures this year mean I succeeded at this one!

• End the year with the Tally in the positive

I did not in fact succeed at this one though. Any year where I start a project that involves buying several boxes of plastic miniatures at Salute tends to end with me in the red on the Tally…

Projects (according to the last end of year post)

Warhammer

Unfortunately, no movement on my Skaven, although I did manage to add some minis to the Undead army thanks to Zomtober. Although that still doesn’t make for a legal unit of zombies yet, but there will always be another Zomtober…

The Silver Bayonet

While looking at my gaming bookshelf the other day, I realised that The Silver Bayonet is actually the game that I own the most expansions for, despite not having a finished playable unit. I managed to get most of the way there this year (and actually did paint the monsters that I needed for the first solo scenario), but need at least one more mini to get to that point. Conventional wisdom seems to be that I should probably actually take a couple of monks to make up numbers rather than another specialist soldier, but what can I say, I’m a sucker for cool stuff…

Frostgrave

The adventures of Tim the Necromancer did actually continue this last year, as I made and painted some oozes to stand in for Vapour Snakes, and a tiny closet so that I could also play the second scenario in that particular chain.

Rangers of Shadow Deep

No movement last year, alas. The next scenario is somewhat scenery heavy, and building a river, bridge, ford, rocks as well as a bandit camp, which never seems to get to the top of my priority list when the next shiny thing is hogging all of my attention…then again, I do have the tents built and undercoated for this, so maybe I can sneak in a little progress in the near future…

Nothing for Ronin of Shadow Deep either - I have a couple of minis prepped, but didn’t get as far as finishing any of them…

 

Battletech

Two mechs are half finished. Painting differently scaled miniatures to what I’m used to is weird, so I tried some other techniques that I’d usually use when modelling Gunpla, and it didn’t work out quite how I’d planned, so I took a breather that has lasted about a year now.

Zombies

Zomtober technically counts for this and Warhammer, right? Since I was no longer playing my monthly Last Days campaign, I didn’t have a burning need to paint anything zombie related. Plans for building the Farm home base stayed just that, with a pile of cut out wall pieces not having found their way back onto my cutting mat after we moved house.

Star Wars

Aforementioned Tiny Grogu! 

 Cowboys

I painted a single drunk cowboy last year. What you didn’t see though, was that I also half-painted an entire Legends of the Old West Lawmen Posse, which got put to one side in favour of other things, and never got taken over that finish line.

 Board Games

This one was an actual success, I managed to paint enough miniatures to actually play a game of the Umbrella Academy board game using entirely painted miniatures! There’s still a bunch more to do, but I’m hoping to be able to repeat that feat this year…

Acolyte

No progress this year.

Until I played a few hours of Inquisitor Martyr right at the end of the year, and then all of a sudden we’re back on, and I’ve started work on my Acolyte:

It took as many days to carefully cut through that metal neck as it did searching through boxes looking for the replacement head I wanted to use (spoilers: it was two days).

2025 projects

Board games

If I can just paint the rest of the core members of the Umbrella Academy, and the other Allies, then I’ll have a fully painted base set of the game I think? Plus, if we manage to actually win a game, then I’d need to move onto painting the next set of enemies…

Frostgrave

I need to paint a single piece of scenery (that is currently sat built and mostly undercoated) to be able to play the next scenario, which is hopefully eminently doable. The next scenario story wise would be the only set in the library, but rather than having to make a million tiny bookshelves, I’ve seen people use dungeon tiles for this, which I handily have a bunch of for D&D…

Acolyte

I’d like to convert and paint my Acolyte! My friend has already painted his entire war and as well as the majority of the enemies needed, so if I can scrape together a warband from my painted minis and bits box then [hushed voice] we could actually play a game…

The Silver Bayonet

Again, just need to finish the Unit to be able to start the solo campaign, and actually have the two minis that I need for the scenario after that prepped and undercoated already…

Zombies

I’ll do Zomtober, at the very least. Unless Ash Barker releases the Evolutions expansion for Last Days, that might spur some modern zombie painting…

Star Wars

I’ll do a May the Fourth post, at the very least. Who knows though, the Andor sequel will maybe drag us back to watching Star Wars (having lost some of our enthusiasm for them a while back) and in turn, painting Star Wars more than once a year…

Cowboys and The Alamo

If the wind blows that way, I have an entire Lawmen Posse that’s half finished, and a bunch of converted Mexicans for the Alamo just waiting for some paintbrush attention…

Superheroes

Back on the projects list, as it’s nice to have something that I can play with my children! I had an urge to do something X-Men related, but unfortunately that only produced half painted miniatures last year, maybe this year I can change that…

Cyberpunk

Another one returning to the list - I got Cyberpunk 2077 for Christmas (having bought a PS5 on Black Friday), and due to my usual sickness of thinking about everything in terms of how I could do it in 28mm, was soon digging through boxes to pull out some suitable miniatures:

In terms of rules, I’m not sure what I’d use. I own Reality’s Edge, but that’s a very thick rule book. I wonder if I could use Stargrave, as that has guns and computers and encroaching enemies (which I assume I could easily re-skin to be the future police closing in), but wonder how much I’d lose not using any spaceship based things (and doubly wondering, wouldn’t I rather be using those rules for something Firefly themed?)

Back burner:

Warhammer, Rangers, Battletech

They’re not off the list, but realistically they’re not going to be top of my priority lists. Which is usual,y a sure fire way to have my attention swing back that way. And thinking about it, I was at a children’s birthday party last month and spotted that the Dad had a load of Battletech box sets on his games shelf, so who knows. Then again, if my children decide they want to start watching Doctor Who again, it’s just as likely that will jump back onto the list…

2025 Challenge

• Finish at least one playable force for a game
• Play at least 4 games in 2025
• Prep all the monkeys in the monkey box
• Convert at least one miniature
• Add to the Monstrous Alphabet project
• Do Zomtober posts
• Do a May the Fourth post
• Do a Festive post
• Average at least a miniatures week (so at least 52 completed miniatures)
• Finish more miniatures than I did in 2024 (so at least 63)
• End the year with the Tally in the positive (hey, I’m an optimist, what can I say)

Fairly similar to last year’s, but with a couple of tweaks! Honestly though, after all these years if I actually get round to prepping all the monkeys in the monkey box, it’s probably a cry for help, and someone should come and check that I’m okay. 

Ronin of Ronin of Shadow Deep

Here are the first two miniatures for my Ronin of Shadow Deep project:

These were painted about a month ago, as unfortunately I listened to a podcast about the game Battletech and found myself with the urge to replay Front Mission 3, which took up the majority of my very limited evening time in the following weeks. They were also painted about 4000 miles away from where I currently am, so I haven’t been able to take less washed out pictures!

This is going to be Rei Togarashi, my Ronin (Ranger) and an as-yet unnamed archer. For the name, I chose Rei as a generic Asian sounding name, and Togarashi, because he’s a bit of a firey character:

Coming soon, a mage called lemon pepper.

But I digress. His shirt is my attempt at recreating this pattern from memory: 

It looks about half-way between that and him looking like he should be in Baz Luhrman’s Romeo and Juliet, which I’m not entirely unhappy about, truth be told.

As well as sporadically painting things, I’ve also been acquiring things. Games Workshop announced a new Clan Pestilens warband for whatever their skirmish game is, which got me thinking that a couple of them would make nice Plague Censer bearers, one of the only options in the Skaven army book that I don’t own any of. Not enough to make a unit though, so I had a browse on eBay and found myself the proud owner of these two lovely rats not much later:

Not long after, we found out we need to find a new place to live, so not the best time to keep buying vintage metal, so they might be on their lonesome for a little while longer. 

Also not ideal timing, as we were about to travel 4000 miles for my brother in law’s wedding. Which I took as an opportunity to save on shipping and placed a little Khurasan order:

(Shipping saving aside, it’s mostly the customs charges that I was keen to avoid)

I grabbed some Kappa to stand in for gnolls in my Ronin of Shadow Deep project, and also the mini that looks a lot like Torchwood head Yvonne Hartmann, so all I need now is a Genesis Ark and I have all the minis I need to play through the Battle for Canary Wharf booklet that Crooked Dice put out way back when.

All in, the Tally now stands at:

27 vs 64 = -37

We’re two thirds of the way through the year, and getting busier all the time, so the chances of the Tally getting back into the black by the end of the year are getting slimmer and slimmer…

Speaking of being 4000 miles away, I had a nose in Barnes and Noble and was jealous of their selection of exclusive games…

I kinda wish I’d picked up the Battletech box, but I haven’t even got a starter set yet so have no idea whether I’d have any use for them (that’s waiting until I can get to a lTarget to grab the exclusive Essentials set)

Mustering for the Silver Bayonet

Currently the queue of miniatures on my painting tile is a hodgepodge of projects, that I’m picking off here and there as they take my fancy - I figure that it’s better to paint what I’m inspired to on any given evening rather than trying to do something based on a prioritised list and burn myself out.

So the next thing to make it’s way from half-painted to finished is this pair, the start of my Silver Bayonet unit:

They’re Perry miniatures that my wife bought me for Christmas I believe, and will be my Officer and a rifleman. Especial thanks to Tim in Saskatoon for sending me pictures of his painted officer so that I could work out which bits of uniform were supposed to be which!

I’m not really sure why I haven’t ever gotten into historical gaming - I grew up watching Sharpe, and remember being really excited when some reenactors came to the village I lived in when I was 8 or 9 and planned to run away with them. Playtimes were spent going through the motions of reloading an imaginary rifle, the steps to which we’d learned from Sharpe (which was why you’d see children in the 90’s standing in fields and graveyards miming biting the end off of a paper cartridge, where I grew up at least). I guess it’s that my route into wargaming was via Warhammer, and so I pretty much stuck to fantasy and sci-fi for the next two and a half decades.

Brief aside, ‘how I got into wargaming’: I was in primary school, and the friend of my friend’s older brother had done something so naughty that he had been removed from his class and sent to sit in the back of ours. And he had a copy of White Dwarf, with a glorious picture of painted miniatures on the back (probably around the 170s or 180s). I asked what it was, and that was that.

Jumping back to the present, then came the Silver Bayonet, which I got a copy of when it was first released and re-watched some Sharpe, and was thankful that it was just as good as I remembered. It’s a great bridge between historical and fantasy Wargames (the Silver Batonet, I mean, not Sharpe), letting you dip a toe in cool Napoleonic stuff without being worried about exact uniforms, or there not being enough werewolves.

The premise for my unit isn’t the same as almost everyone else’s (essentially Sharpe in all but name), but it’s not a million miles away: my Officer and Rifleman are the only survivors of the massacre of their unit by unknown forces. Upon their return to Blighty, they are inducted into the Silver Bayonet, and told that there is a much bigger war going on than that they were previously aware of, and that their unit was the victim of a vampire attack. Their contact, one Van Helsing (an ancestor of the more famous one - we’re going more movie than literary Van Helsing, where he’s a vampire hunter rather than just a likely chap who knows about odd ailments) then introduces them to their new charge: a Dhampir armed with a pair of pistols and a fierce desire to destroy the undead. They are warned that although he is a powerful tool in their fight, they are as much his minders as his comrades, and that if it comes to it, they may find themselves in a position where they have to destroy him.

So, Sharpe meets Hellsing, essentially! Ideas started percolating in my head when I read the Dhampir entry in the rulebook, and I figured I could use the mini I use for my D&D character.

It’s not just up that the Tally goes though, as Northstar has been having weekend long special offers on specific ranges, and there came one that I couldn’t resist (as it included some of my favourite words, including ‘discount’, ‘free’, and ‘ninja’) so I treated myself to something off my birthday list and got the Ronin Bandit buntai:

My plan is to use bandits in place of gnolls when I run through Ronin of Shadow Deep, but more on that in a future blog post.

Tally:

25 vs 53 = -28

One last thing: em4 put out a call asking if anyone had pictures of their painted miniatures for them to spruce up their website, and three of the pictures I submitted are now being used on their website!

Part of me thinks it’s a shame that only the simple paint jobs from 2011 are the ones that got used, but the other part of me is just excited, as that still counts! 

Insert joke about head here

Finished not long after the last guy, is this pair of terrors:

Penanggalans are a type of Asian vampire wherein as far as I have gathered they soak in a bath of vinegar until their body dissolves, leaving them as a floating evil head trailing its lungs and guts behind it - delightful!

I’m not sure where they’ll fit into my Ronin of Shadow Deep project, but I’ve wanted a penanggalan miniature for ages (in fact, until recently the oldest open tab on my iPad was a google search for “penanggalan miniature”) and finding this pair in a bargain bin at Salute was serendipitous! 

Finishing them brings the Tally to:

23 vs 42 = -19

I should probably paint some heroic figures now, right?

2020 in review

Happy New Year, and welcome to ten years of Dead Lead Project! I'd like to say that so much has changed since that very first post, but alas I'm still flitting from project to project painting what I fancy and then badly photographing them to show you all!

So, as is tradition, we analyse the year that was:

Tally:

47 vs 147 = -100

Looking on the bright side - that's one more painted than the previous year!

I had such hopes that I'd be able to pull my usual last minute eleventh hour hail mary to push that painted total up to 52 to hit that Challenge target, but having been burning the candle at both ends since being furloughed the week before Christmas, my 'evening painting time' often turned into 'falling asleep putting the toddler to bed and then blearily stumbling downstairs to make a cup of tea and try to dab paint at miniatures for twenty minutes'. But honestly, of all years this one is the one where we shouldn't be beating ourselves up for what we have achieved.

So, ten years of stats!

2020: -100 (47 painted)

2019: +3 (46 painted)

2018: +52 (52 painted)

2017: -14 (47 painted)

2016: -287 (56 painted)

2015: -96 (59 painted)

2014: 0 (80 painted)

2013: -416 (25 painted)

2012: -103 (68 painted)

2011: -173 (122 painted)

Here’s a graph of that, added the day after this post went live:

I've no idea how 24 year old me managed to paint 122 miniatures in a year. He had fewer hobbies and no children vying for his attention, which might have something to do with it!

Posts:

25 this year, unusually quite evenly spread throughout the months rather than the usual summer drought (although lockdown might have had something to do with that, as my making terrain for Rangers of Shadow Deep kept posts going even when painting was sparse!). Nowhere near the dizzying heights of 2014 where I managed 69 posts, but the secret to that was that I got a lot of painting done while my heavily pregnant wife napped!

Last Year's Challenge:

• Finish something  old
• Finish a piece of terrain
• Prep all of the monkeys in the monkey box
• Paint all of the miniatures in a boxed game
• Play a board game with fully painted miniatures
• Finish a complete skirmish force for a project (at least 16 miniatures, unless it's for a much smaller scale game like Batman)
• Repaint something (either a miniature that I have previously painted, or one that was received painted

• Convert a miniature and show WIP pic

• Finish the last member of the Nextwave team
• Complete the classes project (potentially adding the races from the Players Handbook to the mix)
• Add at least 4 entries to the Monstrous Alphabet Project
• Average at least a miniature a week by the end of the year (so, paint 52 miniatures)
• End the year with the Tally in the positive!

The less said about this this year the better I think! A few things were half done (there's an unfinished conversion I was hoping to polish off and post, for example), but as previously stated, this isn't the year for anyone to beat themselves up over what they did and didn't achieve... Even if not for the ongoing global pandemic, the Challenge has always been something to hopefully guide me if I'm looking for some direction, rather than a stick to beat myself with!

Projects (according to the last end of year post):

Warhammer Quest Blackstone Fortress

Nothing painted in 2020, as so many other things took my focus! In hindsight, this could also work perfectly well as a solo project, so here's to hoping 2021 sees more BSF love!

D&D

I saw myself painting a lot more D&D miniatures this year than I actually did, truth be told! With the pandemic and various lockdowns though, solo war gaming was my main focus (not that any actually has happened yet) instead. Having not played D&D since March though, I’ve got a bit of a craving for it, enough that I’ve worked out the basis of a campaign to run at some point when the world rights itself. Who knows when I’ll find the time to actually play it though, but that’s a problem for future Olly...

ASOIAF 

Nothing added this year. Got some character miniatures for Christmas though, so who knows what next year will bring...

Hellboy

Nothing painted, nothing played. I think the thing stopping me getting started on this is that absolutely everything is unpainted, which is a bit daunting when you aim to do it all, and there are other projects on the go that use existing painted miniatures that you can add a little to, or a small project that you can paint a handful of miniatures for and call it good...

Star Wars

May the Fourth completed, but nothing else. I’ll always love Star Wars though, so it’s likely to continue on as a main project even if nothing major gets added to it for long stretches of time!

Zombies

Zomtober successfully completed again this year, and added more to the positive Tally than anything else, truth be told! With Salute’s cancellation (well, technically delay I guess) there were no Walking Dead bargains to be had, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing given my existing backlog of unpainted miniatures...

The Thing

I still need to find a suitable dog head, as converting the dog thing is the mental roadblock between me and polishing off the rest of this project.

Reality's Edge

I painted a Cyberpunk! I have a couple of other bits in the painting queue, but they haven’t made their way to finished yet. Probably not helped by the troubling launch of Cyberpunk 2077, which I’ve held off on getting until they have a chance to fix it a bit (which was a bit of an awkward conversation with my wife, having to ask if she’d bought it for me and telling her not to if not!)

Backburner:

40K - I was sure I'd painted a Howling Banshee in the last year, but apparently that was in 2019!

Necromunda - nada

Fallout - nada

ROTPOTA - At this point it’s almost a joke keeping this on the project list, but one day, one day I’ll come back to you my sweet monkeys...

This year was mostly zombies, peasants to play RoSD, and very random odds and ends that caught my fancy!

Before we set the projects list for 2021, let's have a look back at the projects list from my very fist post and see how much progress has been made over the course of a decade?

Primary Projects:

Zombies



Not necessarily my main project these days, but every year I strive to complete Zomtober and add some more miniatures to the collection! Rules are half done, but whenever I work on them I tend to end up having new ideas that involve redoing whole chunks of what has already been written, and I start to wonder if it's the best choice or just me being excited at thinking of a new mechanic, and I walk away for a bit...

Three Kingdoms

I have finished exactly one miniature for this in the last ten years. There is a unit of 24 half painted chaps sat on my desk (and has been for around seven years), but it turns out I'm not the hugest fan of large batch painting!

Firefly/Serenity

The odd miniature painted here and there. 

Strange Aeons

Apparently I haven't finished anything for this project in the last 8 years, which feels wrong but is alas backed up by hard data! 

Doctor Who

We've gone off Doctor Who a bit, the last episode we watched being I think the first Capaldi episode, and so not many miniatures painted for this! I'd like to go back and start watching from the beginning again, as I hear god things about the current Doctor, but it's the sort of thing I'd like to watch with my daughter, but I don't think at five she's ready for some of the mild peril yet...

Secondary projects:

VSF

A couple of miniatures painted - any day now Northstar will release their VSF ruleset and I'll be galvanized to convert some more martians and paint the ones I've already made! I bought a pot of special GW Mars basing paint this year so that I could try it out on a test miniature at some point, so who knows where the future will take us...

AEWWII

The game that got me back into miniatures after some teenage time away, but alas, it's dead on the project radar. 

Warmachine

I finally got around to painting Alexia and the Risen! There are also some Cygnar bits having a nice soak in my stripping pot after I rediscovered Warmachine largely for the fluff...

Anima Tactics

Despite only needing a couple of miniatures painted to call it finished, I never did! 

Evil Genius/7TV

One day I'll get around to painting up a horde of hard hat wearing minions! In other news, I believe they're releasing a sequel to the videogame Evil Genius, which would be exciting news if not for the fact that my laptop is dead as a dodo! 

Marvel Superheroes

One of the projects that has actually had things added to it multiple times over the last ten years - in fact, one of the miniatures that was part of my desperate push to get the Tally up between Christmas and New Year's was a Heroclix repaint!



GW:

Fantasy

• Night Goblins - with Warhammer dead, I've not had much motivation to paint for it! 
• Skaven - same. We could still play an old edition, I know, but there are so many other games vying for our attention these days!
• Dwarves - I managed to paint Gotrek and Felix, but again, with Warhammer dead I've not been particularly motivated to paint any Slayers, which is a shame because I'm still inordinately fond of the little orange haired psychopaths!
• Mordheim - during the first Lockdown, I was struck with a sudden urge to dig out my old Mordheim stuff, so I started working out some warbands to build and paint, but then a chum pointed me towards Rangers of Shadow Deep as a solo game, which then took all of my attention...

40k

• Witch hunters - I'm so far out of the loop these days that I don't even know what the rules are for these any more. I still have vague plans to convert the occasional Inq28 figure, but no sweeping plans for adding to the army...
• Chaos - have I really had Huron Blackheart undercoated for ten years? I've been building and undercoating stuff, but that's mostly as far as they get!
• Space Marines - I made some nerdmarines!
• Orks - My claims that 'I'll probably come back to them one day though' didn't come to fruition. 
• Blood Pact - that squad and a half of converted guardsmen with grotesques made from cut down goblin faces are still sat unpainted in a drawer. Looking back, the conversions are a bit clunky, but I'd like to get some paint on them one day regardless..

Discussing this with my wife, she suggested that so many of my old projects making no real headway suggests that we should stop buying my miniatures, but I disagree, it's just that I've started new projects since then! To whit, the projects list of ten years ago looks very different to this one:

2021 Projects

Rangers of Shadow Deep

I want to get my 2020 Lockdown project to the point where I can play some solo games! Last time I checked (back at the end of August), this would mean making:

• Mystery additional structure
• Trees
• Cart
• Well
• Woodpile
• Crates and barrels
• a playing surface!
• Treasure tokens 

The trees are underway, as is the woodpile. I’ve got some food supplies undercoated, but I think I want some more general crates and barrels too (2021: the year of scatter terrain?). The mystery structure, cart and well would all be self contained mini projects, and treasure tokens shouldn’t be too much hassle to knock up...

Frostgrave

Again, solo play is the target, although I’m not nearly as close to being ready to go with this as I am Rangers. In order to play through Dark Alchemy and Perilous Dark, I’d need some generic fantasy ruins, scatter terrain, wandering monsters, and although I could probably scrounge up a serviceable warband from my already painted miniatures, I'd probably want to paint up a few fresh bits for the occasion!

Stargrave

It’s not out yet, so who knows what I’d need! However, some more generic sci-fi terrain will surely be needed, and once the book is out I can start painting up a crew! I'm dissolving the old Firefly/Serenity project, half of the miniatures will work neatly for Stargrave, whilst the rest will go towards the Cyberpunk project.

Blackstone Fortress

Paint and play, same as ever. While I missed out on the majority of the smaller expansions, even the base game (plus the White Dwarf content) is a decent amount to be getting on with! I've got a copy of Escalation of backorder, which will make a dent in the Tally when it finally arrives...

Current progress on having the base game painted:

Explorers: 0/9

Enemies: 8/35

Mordheim

This should really be a back burner project, but here we are - I’ve got enough miniatures to make a couple of warbands, and I’d like to do that. I kinda want the Sartosan pirate vampire miniature for my Undead warband, but he’s pretty expensive on eBay...

A Song of Ice and Fire

I’d like to expand my Lannisters up to the point where I could fill some War of the Ring bases, so up to 8s of each troop type at the very least (mostly because I love the look of ranks of pikemen that I keep seeing on the Never Mind the Billhooks Facebook group). 

Japanese Fantasy

We showed our daughter Princess Mononoke (brief aside - I did not remember it being that violent until I showed it to a five year old) while I was reading the Rangers of Shadow Deep rulebook, and the wheels in my head started turning... No definite plans per se, beyond the temptation to call it Ronin of Shadow Deep, and take inspiration from everything from the aforementioned Princess Mononoke to Ninja Scroll! I’ve had a dig through my drawers of unpainted miniatures and come up with a few suitable minis to get this project started, time and attention span willing... In doing so, I'm dissolving the old Afro Samurai project that I'd been stashing miniatures for - half fit neatly into this project, whilst the other half will get folded into the cyberpunk project.

The Witcher

Yet another Rangers of Shadow Deep based project (because low model count projects seem to be the way my attention falls more often than not), I have some nice Brother Vinni miniatures that cover the named characters, with the potential to then expand the project out to include scrappy mobs of Redanians, Temerians and so on...

Zombies

I’ll do Zomtober at the very least!

Star Wars

I’ll do May the Fourth, anything beyond that is a bonus! Some minis may get painted that have cross project appeal between Star Wars and Stargrave...

Dungeons & Dragons

I still want to paint some more generic fantasy beasties, especially as not being able to play for the better part of a year has left me with such a craving for it that I've plotted out my own campaign to run at some point in the future...

Back burner:

40k - odds and ends for Inquisitorial warbands, as and when they catch my fancy. There are also some Black Legion miniatures undercoated in the basement, in case my attention swings towards the pointier end of the scale...

Cyberpunk - not a main project, as I have no particular plans for it, but I may well add a mini here and there to it. As previously mentioned, some older projects have been dissolved and their miniatures offered up to this project instead, so it's entirely possible that I'll get distracted and accidentally paint for this like it's a main project!

Zona Alfa - my enthusiasm for this project waned a little when a deal to get hold of the gas mask heads I needed for a couple of conversions fell through, but I've got both scenery and miniatures prepped for this, so may well add to it in the year to come. 

Mass Effect - there’s a remaster of the original trilogy of games as well as a new one coming, so maybe I’ll finally find some heads I like to convert some Cerberus troops? I think I bought minis I planned to use for those conversions when my daughter was born, and she turns six soon...

Rise of the Planet of the Apes: because it just wouldn’t be a year in review post without including this!

Next Year’s Challenge:

• Finish something old
• Finish a piece of terrain
• Finish some scatter terrain (0/3)
• Prep all of the monkeys in the monkey box
• Paint all of the miniatures in a boxed game
• Play a game with fully painted miniatures
• Finish a complete skirmish force for a project (at least 16 miniatures, unless it's for a much smaller scale game like Frostgrave)
• Repaint something (either a miniature that I have previously painted, or one that was received painted

• Convert a miniature and show WIP pics

• Finish the last member of the Nextwave team
• Complete the classes project (and when I do that, start a project to have painted miniatures to represent all of the Races in the Players Handbook)
• Add at least 3 entries to the Monstrous Alphabet Project
• Average at least a miniature a week by the end of the year (so, paint 52 miniatures)
• End the year with the Tally in the positive!

I also have a sort of secret challenge, to try to keep the Tally in the positive by not buying new miniatures until I've painted existing ones (this is why I'm digging out old miniatures for the Japanese fantasy project rather than going on a spree and ordering myself some lovely new miniatures), but sod's law is my backordered copy of Blackstone Fortress Escalation will turn up before I manage to finish anything and sink that straight away!