2025 Year in Review

 I retired as of the 1st of January 2025, so I have been fortunate enough to have some extra time on my hands this year, as planned.  My wargaming goal going into the year was not to turn down any offer of a game unless absolutely necessary.  The HAWKs have had a regular retirees group for some years now, and I was happy to be part of it, starting with the first meeting in January. I’ve also gotten games days with my sons, and made it to a few conventions this year.  As a result, as of the 15th of December, I’ve logged 67 game sessions this year, with only a slender chance of getting any more in before the 1st of January.  That is a new record, and has been the best part of the hobby year.

A Fantastic Battles Game with My “Myzantine” Forces

As gleaned from my log, which I keep on paper in a notebook, being somewhat old school, here is a complete list of those games, arranged by frequency:

Miniatures Games of 2025

9 x Combat Patrol (7 20mm WWII, 2 25mm WWI)

6 x DBA (20mm)

5 x Fantastic Battles (4 6mm*, 1 25mm*)

4 x Dragon Rampant (3 20mm*, 1 25mm*)

4 x Look Sarge, No Charts (10mm WWI)

4 x 15mm Napoleonics home rules (3 different sets)

3 x To the Strongest (10mm ancients)

3 x Fistful of Lead (F&IW, 2 40mm*, 1 25mm)

2 x Fantasy home rules (1 25mm, 1 wooden “crafties”)

2 x Charge! (40mm NQSYW*)

2 x Square Bashing (25mm WWI)

2 x Chain of Command (20mm WWII)

2 x Medieval home rules (54mm*)

2 x Neil Thomas 19th Century Europe (20mm)

2 x Chosen Men (25mm Napoleonics)

1 x Rebels and Patriots (40mm NQSYW*)

1 x Turnip 28

1 x WWI home rules (10mm)

1 x British colonial home rules (25mm)

1 x Vauban’s Wars (15mm SYW siege)

1 x Don’t Give Up the Ship (Napoleonic Naval)

1 x Fistful of Lead Bigger Battles (25mm British colonials)

1 x This is Not a Test (25mm post-apocalyptic)

1 x Star Schlock (25mm SF)

1 x Thalassa (1/300 ancient naval)

1 x Battletech Alpha Strike (1/300 SF)

1 x De Bellis Fantasiae (20mm fantasy)

1 x Lion Rampant (54mm medieval*)

1 x Blood and Swash (25mm early American)

1 x Tanks for the Apocalypse (20mm post-apocalyptic)

——-

67 games

30 (+) different sets of rules

*17 games involving my own figures; 50 not involving my figures

Someone asked me recently on a hobby Discord what I typically play.  This year, there really was no “typically” about it.  Due to my acceptance of whatever was on offer, the most frequently played game was Combat Patrol, one of the many games designed by club member Buck Surdu. I played it both in the standard WWII version and modified for WWI. I personally only have one 20th century project in my collection at this time, a 6mm Spanish Civil War set which, according to my records, has not been used in a game since April 2005, over 20 years ago.  Due to club interests, I suppose I do end up playing a lot of WWI and WWII, but I enjoy the opportunity to play something without having to build up a collection myself.

Only 17 games involved any of my own figures this year using figures from 6 projects.  By my count, I have 16 projects that have “playable” levels of figures. I would have to say that my figure collection was a bit underused this year.

With 30+ sets of rules played this year (the uncertainty being how to count the home rules Napoleonics) it has been difficult to gain proficiency with any new sets of rules, and I have a stack of rules that haven’t been tried yet, particularly Hobgoblin and Midgard for some fantasy mass battles.

Some 40mm Prince August Infantry for the Not Quite Seven Years War

It has been a bad year for painting overall. I have scarcely picked up a brush since I finished a few Prince August semi-flats for the NQSYW in September. Other than that, I finished about 10 stands of various 6mm troops for Fantastic Battles and a handful of 25mm fantasy figures (also Prince August home cast).

I have been wanting to get back into blogging more regularly, and I can’t really say that this year was a success.  It took until September to actually buckle down and write something, and I did not match that pace for the rest of the year.  However, I did do some blogging, and I had three times as many posts as last year, so perhaps we’ll call that a draw.

I have usually done some solo gaming in the course of a year, and I have a solo campaign in progress, although it has been stalled since I played out the Battle of Newkeep in January of 2022. I know why the solo campaign is pending: I am stalled on building some buildings I want for the next scenario. However, I have not done a single solo game this year. I could have tried either of the new fantasy rules mentioned above solo, or done any number of other one-shots.  I would suppose that the availability of opponents this year has reduced my craving for more games, at least a bit.

Overall, though, it’s been a really good year for the hobby, even if some areas could be improved.

I haven’t actually written down my goals for 2026 yet, and I hope to blog a bit when I do. There are several ideas on my mind. March 2026 is the 50th anniversary of my involvement with Dungeons & Dragons, and I would really like to dust off the original rules for some retro-gaming. August will be

the 30th anniversary of the first NQSYW game, which is an occasion I will certainly wish to mark. I also want to play some games with some vintage rules. I haven’t had Knights and Magick (Heritage Models, 1980, review minus pictures here) on the table in a few years. We have always played K&M as 

“miniatures agnostic”, but a couple of years ago I thought that it might be fun to see if I couldn’t assemble a couple of forces using contemporary Heritage figures (currently available from Classic Miniatures), either vintage or new castings, and I have acquired more miniatures for this recently. I acquired a set of

Warhammer (1st edition) rules during the pandemic which I still haven’t tried, despite the recent release of a video series on the topic. I’ve been accumulating Citadel Dark Ages figures to provide a couple of appropriate armies, just for fun.  Never having been a Games Workshop fan, the Dark Ages figures and the early Citadel ranges such as Fantasy Adventurers and Fiend Factory, which were licensed to Ral Partha for production in the US, are the only Citadel minis in my collection, so I decided I’d try to build on that a bit.  And…if I’m going to dig into Warhammer, it might be fun to break out Warhammer Ancient Battles for a Dark Ages game or two. More to follow on those ideas…

Meanwhile, I wish all of you a merry Christmas and a happy New Year!

Reflections on 2022

 My brother and I had a chance to play a couple of games during our family Christmas visit.  We had agreed that the game this year would be Dragon Rampant, and that the theme would be “No Ral Partha”.  I certainly have nothing against Ral Partha, but we have been playing a lot of Ral Partha Chaos Wars in a demo game context, and we usually feel obliged to stick to Ral Partha figures when we do. We thought it would be nice to allow some of the other figures a chance to shine on the table.

My 1977 Minifig NS spearmen fend off my brother’s Archive wolfriders

1974 vintage Minfig ME Gondorian spearmen face some Adina hobgoblins

As you can see, we were restricted to a small space

We had intended to set up on a larger table at the local games store, but they have not yet re-opened their gaming tables post pandemic, so we made do with a space of about 4’ by 3’ at our parents’ house.  It was good to see all the very vintage figures on the table.  We had each brought two warbands, and, apparently inspired by the same thought, each had a warband of orcs and a warband of humans.  It was a bad day for orcs all around; my humans defeated his orcs, and my orcs were defeated by his humans.

While there are a few days left in the year, and while I do have a Five Leagues from the Borderlands solo skirmish game pending, it is likely that this will have been the final game for the year. (In my counting, I generally count multiple sessions of a single rules set played back to back as a single log entry.) If so, it was number 40 for the year. While short of the 52 games that are my notional goal each year, it is still a respectable total, and one that I am pretty happy with. Similarly, I might get another miniature or two painted, but if I don’t, I finished about 173 figures of 1/72 scale or larger this year, plus a handful of 6mm ancients which can’t be counted in the same way as larger figures.  It’s a few more than I completed in 2021, but it is a number which should prompt me to a bit of caution when it comes to taking on new projects.  

There was a thread on the Lead Adventure Forum recently, and someone was musing about whether the new projects that we are all prone to take on would ever see the table, and, if so, how many times.  I realized that I had some actual data on that.  Being a very Old School gamer, my logs are hand written, and contained in a series of notebooks.  I dug them all out, and was interested to note that I have been doing this for longer that I remembered, with the first year logged being 1999.  So I have 24 years of data (less the balance of December after the 5th when I did the counting) covering 805 games.  With an average of 33+ games per year, this year’s 40 is solidly above average.

Attempting to answer the question of which of my collections of figures had been on the table more frequently, I might be off by a few games here or there.  The results were tallied by hand, and the data was spread across about 15 different notebooks.  Sometimes it’s hard to decide whether a 25mm fantasy game played in 2003, say, had any of my own figures in it.  These counts are divided by the miniatures, and most of them represent the same collection being used with multiple sets of rules.

As you can see, the 25mm fantasy collection takes the top prize with about 96 appearances on the table, followed by the Not Quite Seven Years War collection with 74 appearances.  By the time you get down to a tie for 6th place by 25mm Dark Ages and 40mm Renaissance at about 21 games each, one might note that those projects have been on the table less than once a year on the average, and with a frequency less than a quarter of that of first place. I should note that both of those projects have been in a playable state since before 1999, when the records start.  Two of the most frequently played projects, 1/72 scale fantasy/medieval/ancients and 54mm medieval, are younger than the records, both having been started around 2003.  I was also interested to note that the French and Indian War project is still solidly in 4th place, despite not having been on the table since 2016.  There were a lot of F&IW games early on in the records.

When you put all those numbers together, I think that I am coming to the conclusion that it would make sense to try to concentrate on doing more with the top projects.  I would like to work on one side project which isn’t yet playable, with the main candidates being 54mm medieval/fantasy flats and 40mm 19th century/Franco-Prussian War from Schneider and other vintage German molds.  This is where this year’s painting numbers are a caution flag; even a simple One Hour Wargames pair of armies would amount to 10 units of 2 stands each per side (well, not the artillery), with 4-6 figures per unit, or something like 88 foot, 16 horse, and 4 guns with crew total, which would represent somewhat more than two thirds of the total I painted last year.  That’s not unthinkable, but would be a major commitment.  I suppose it’s time to paint a few of them and see what I really think about working with them.

2021: A Gaming Year in Review

 We’re almost to the end of another year.  As with most everyone else, it’s been an odd year, and not at all what I would have planned.

First a few numbers: According to my log, I was in 28 miniatures games this year, a combination of refereeing, playing and solo games.  I finished painting 160 miniatures, which were (as usual) scattered over seven projects (and sub-projects).  These included individually based 25mm Prince August fantasy figures, 54mm Russian flats, vintage 25mm Minifigs MEs for a Tolkien game, figures for a Stargrave crew, 1/72 fantasy/medieval figures for the Portable Fantasy Campaign, 1/72 historical Bronze Age figures for DBA, and a small group of 25mm Ral Partha orcs for miscellaneous fantasy work.

The year started still under stay-at-home mandates, for the most part, so I set up a few remote games. I was vaccinated in April and ready to get back to some face-to-face gaming.  The HAWKs started meeting again in late May or early June (my first meeting was in June).   All of the early year conventions were cancelled, although we did have a virtual ScrumCon in April.  Gen Con eventually made the decision to reschedule from August to September, which put it on a week that I was already committed to a major work event.  As it turned out, Barrage in September was my sole live convention for the year.  

January NQSYW Remote Game

Things got busy as the year drew to a close, and it looks like my last logged miniatures game will be the Stargrave game we had on the 30th of October.  On the other hand, I managed to finish an average of one (plus) miniature per day for September, October, November, and December, so the end of the year was good for painting.

Ups and Downs  

The “ups” for the year included a return to face-to-face gaming, a (solo) game played entirely with stuff built or painted during lockdown, a few games for the 1/72 scale solo fantasy campaign, a fair amount of painting done, and getting involved in a D&D5e game run by fellow HAWKs member Kurt Schlegel.   

The “downs” for the year include buying three new projects (1/72 DBA Dark Ages, 54mm Russian flat medieval/fantasy, and 54mm English Civil War) when my goal was zero, not firing up the melting pot and casting anything, not painting anything for the Not Quite Seven Years War, not finishing a DBA Bronze Age army, and doing no work toward getting a formal NQSYW campaign on the table.

54mm ECW cached for the future

I could have blogged a bit more, commented on other people’s blogs, played a few more solo games, gotten my own D&D revival game on the table, and done more toward miniatures campaigns.

However, under the circumstances, I’ll close out the record books, and call it a good year.  

Thoughts about 2022 objectives will hopefully be done soon…

Dungeons & Digressions

It was brought to my attention this morning that yesterday was an important day in D&D history, since Dave Arneson (according to his club zine) scheduled the first Blackmoor game, described as a “medieval Braunstein”, on 17 April 1971.  With that in mind, I hope that this digression from miniatures for a bit of personal D&D history is of some interest.

As I have mentioned before, I was a wargamer with both miniatures and board games before D&D was published, though a young one without too many opponents available to me.  There is a long-running Original D&D discussion forum of which I have been a member for some time, and there is often a lively discussion about how we managed to play the game back in the day, given that the rules (at the beginning) were somewhat in the nature of some broad open-ended suggestions.

Here’s what D&D Book III, The Underworld and Wilderness Adventures, has to say about setting up your campaign:

The so-called Wilderness really consists of unexplored land, cities and castles, not to mention the area immediately surrounding the castle (ruined or otherwise) which housed the dungeons. The referee must do several things in order to conduct wil-derness adventure games. First, he must have a ground level map of his dungeons, a map of the terrain immediately surrounding this, and finally a map of the town or village closest to the dungeons (where adventurers will be most likely to base themselves).

There was a discussion about whether there were actually towns, so I pulled out my binder of preserved campaign material from my original game.  I knew that I had a map of the town of Stoneharrow, drawn pretty early in the campaign preparations.  Given that the example campaigns mentioned in the rules, Blackmoor and Greyhawk, both had names in the form of “adjective noun”, I did the same in coming up with the name of my town, which then lent its name to the campaign.

So there we have the palisaded town of Stoneharrow, with quite a bit of open space within the walls where the peasents (sic) could grow vegetables in peace.  In retrospect, except for peculiarities in urban planning (a subject which I researched in much greater depth much later), I am not dissatisfied with it even now.  There are two named taverns, where mysterious hooded strangers might helpfully lurk in corners to hand out quests (though we didn’t actually do that at the time), boarding houses for adventurers segregated by class, a stable for their beasts, an adventure supply store for all your dungeon outfitting needs, an alchemist, and a temple of the local patriarch (in case you might need to be raised from the dead). I don’t know that the characters ever spent much time wandering around there, but the roots of adventure are there, should they be needed.  I am considering a retro game once the pandemic has ended, and I think that I will go ahead and build on this, by adding a few more non-player characters, and giving the poor patriarch a name. 

My favorite writing tool at the time was the Bic 4-color pen, and all of the early material was drawn on 10 square to the inch graph paper.  (I wish that I was getting a sponsorship reward, but I might note that I am still a fan of multi-pens, thought my favorite these days is this fine point Jetstream pen, which also includes a 0.5mm lead pencil.)

Since I was leafing through the binder, I also took a look at the dungeon.  Level 1 (below) is the actual carefully preserved first dungeon map I drew, in which the first dungeon expedition was undertaken by my brother, probably in April 1976.

Like the town map, it was drawn on 10 square to the inch graph paper with the 4-color pen.  I have heard assertions over the years that the early dungeons were intended to be mapped so that you could deduce the existence of secret rooms and such, but the 10/inch paper gave me plenty of room to draw, and I had a lot of solid rock in between rooms and corridors. 

There was quite a bit of space on the sheet of paper when I was done. Later, as the levels were elaborated, I added a level 1.5(B) to the same sheet, and using the same color conventions (black walls, blue secret doors, green room numbers).  Within a few levels, I shifted my color conventions, and eventually habitually drew levels with blue corridors, black cross-hatching marking solid interstitial rock, and red room numbers, like this later level:

For all of the elaborate labyrinth drawing, the actual key was pretty rudimentary.  Here’s an excerpt from the original level 1, down in the lower right corner:

Elsewhere, the book shows evidence of room contents being crossed out as the rooms were entered and cleared. The presence of an unguarded treasure including a pair of Gauntlets of Ogre Power in Room 62 would indicate that nobody ever got to that particular corner of the dungeon, probably because they had found a stairway down to deeper levels. From some of the discussions on rpg.net, I get the impression that modern players have a tendency to clean out levels entirely.  

I did my best to stack my dungeon levels in such a way as to try to avoid overlapping them in theoretical three-dimensional space.  So I did have a diagram on a large sheet of 10/inch graph paper with the relative position of all the entrances laid out.  There was one set of stairs, and a selection of shafts, mostly leading directly to deeper levels.  What there was NOT was any indication of what the surface terrain looked like. When I go back to this, I think that there will be a fence around the entrances, and a set of guards who will collect your entry fee and log your names and, for an extra fee, be ready to send notice to your next of kin if you don’t return.  The local lord will also demand a cut of your plunder, in proper medieval style.  But, back in the day, we were pretty casual about getting to the dungeon entrance.

My wilderness map evolved over time. The rules books refer you to Avalon Hill’s Outdoor Survival for “offhand” wilderness adventures, and the monster encounter tables are keyed to the Outdoor Survival terrain types.  I did not personally have a copy of the game, but one of the other group members did, so it seemed obvious to me that the expectation was that you would draw your own map. Hex paper was not easy to come by in 1976.  My first tiny section of the area around Stoneharrow and the dungeon was drawn on “hex paper” made by drawing circles around a coin in a hexagonally close-packed configuration. That map does not survive.  It was replaced by a second map, which also does not survive, which was drawn on a copy of an 8.5x11” blank hex sheet which we scavenged from someone’s copy of Fact and Fantasy Game’s Siege! (in fact, the blank sheet can be seen on the linked Noble Knight illustration of the game).  I attempted to fit several of these copies together, and they were not quite regular, so I had corners that didn’t match up.  After that, I bit the bullet and ordered a package of 6 blank hex paper sheets from SPI, the size of a standard SPI wargame map, and transferred the earlier map. Since the players hadn’t wandered around much, I’m not sure that they would have noticed any transcription errors anyway.

Here is a closeup of the area.  The dungeon entrance is in hex 1933, across the Great River from Stoneharrow (hex 2231), and Lord Harmon’s castle is between, in hex 2132.  All of this was considered to be at the standard recommended 5 miles per hex.  If I were running a game in this region today, Harmon (or his heirs—it’s been 45 years, after all) would certainly be monitoring the comings and goings of adventurers, and making sure that he collected his cut.  

Eventually the wilderness map was elaborated onto all six sheets of the hex paper, of which this one, the Stoneharrow map, was originally the upper right corner in a 2 wide by 3 high array.  Additionally, several of the original players advanced in level to the point where they built their own castles, which were duly drawn onto the map, generally north of the area including Stoneharrow.

I don’t recall how long it took, but I eventually added three more packs of paper, for a total of 24 sheets in a 3 wide/8 high array. In our house today, there is no room large enough to lay it all out at once, but here is the northern half.  The Stoneharrow segment is now the second map from the top in the right hand column.

There are a few geographical peculiarities that are partly the result of my earlier lack of a sense of geography, and partly a result of usually only being able to deploy one map at a time for drawing.  I can remember that I occasionally set them up in the lounge of the dormitory I lived in during my first two years in college (fall 1978 to spring 1980), and that I was still drawing the southern half up until graduation in 1981. By then, we had shifted over to the AD&D rules for the actual game.  I went through a lot of blue, brown, and green magic markers.  Each map is 32” wide by 21” tall, so the whole array laid out would be 96” wide by 168” tall, or 8 feet by 14 feet.  At 60 hexes wide by 32 hexes tall per sheet, that’s a total theoretical area about 900 miles by 1280 miles.  Let’s just say that this was seriously a lot more than was needed to play the game, and most of it was only very lightly described.  

With this year marking the 45th anniversary of my own D&D game, I am still hoping to stage a little revival, and send a party or two back into the Great Dungeon of Stoneharrow, using the original rules as first acquired, without Greyhawk or any of the later supplements.  We might even dig out (recently painted) examples of the early Minifigs lines (Mythical Earth and Sword & Sorcery) to represent the adventurers and their opponents. 

I did a brief revival campaign back in 2015 or so, and advanced the official timeline the forty years since the original game had begun.  The original characters were occasionally alluded to as the local lords whose neglect of the current situation was allowing goblins to menace the local village.  When I go back to this, I’ll probably continue on from there.

My first campaign ran from 1976 to 1979 using the original rules.  We shifted over to the AD&D rules (at least theoretically) following the publication of the vital excerpts from the Dungeon Masters Guide in Dragon #22 (February 1979) but before the actual DMG was available late that summer.  We continued to play until I moved to Maryland in 1982, but have dusted off the characters during occasional reunions, most recently in 2013 (although we did fight a theoretically linked mass battle using Chaos Wars in 2017).

My second campaign, in Maryland, ran from 1982 to 1985 or so, and was based down in the southwest corner of the overall map, so some of that drawing was eventually put to use.  Eventually other games edged out D&D for play time, and I got back into historical miniatures as my main hobby outlet, but, as you can see, D&D was carefully preserved and stored away, awaiting a return.

So, thanks to Dave Arneson and all the Blackmoor crew, for originating this pleasantly all-consuming activity that has given me so many friends and so much pleasure for three quarters of my life (so far). 

 

A Significant Birthday

I was going to post something about this earlier this weekend, but got caught up in events.  As I mentioned in my 2020 retrospective, my 60th birthday is this year, or, more specifically, last week...

While I don’t remember exactly when I was introduced to rules for wargaming in the spring of 1971, 50 years ago, I do remember that I received my original Dungeons & Dragons for my birthday in 1976, 45 years ago.  So, thank you, Mom and Dad! I’m not sure what I would have been doing without games and the friends I’ve made gaming all of these years.

As you can see, my D&D set is still in playable condition.  Since it’s worn and has my notes (mostly pencil) scattered throughout, I had no particular qualms about reinforcing weak covers and rebuilding the box with library tape last year.  Sometime this year, I’d like to get at least a short campaign on the table for old times sake.

When I do, I’m considering staffing it with the vintage miniatures I’ve been collecting more recently. I probably will not restrict things to just the Minifigs that I started with, more recently painted examples of which are shown below:

More on that when it occurs...

The End is Nigh ... of 2020, at least

We are finally almost to the end of this annus horribilis.  The year end is traditionally a time to reflect on how things went, and consider how one might improve things in the year to come.  I should note that I am grateful that I have remained employed this whole time, and that we have had what we needed.

My plan for the year had included several conventions which were cancelled, of course, and my effort to get back to regularly attending club meetings failed due to the lack of club meetings. Irene and I had been planning a wedding, too, but that did get done, albeit in an appropriately down-sized and socially distant format.  

Some people managed to get additional miniatures painted and additional games (solo or played with remote players), but I ended up taking advantage of my former commute time to brush up on my baking skills, and to learn how to make sourdough bread.

At the beginning of the year, I had been working on the Bronze Age project with my son, using the DBA 3.0 rules everyone got for Christmas last year.  I had also planned to be working on French Revolutionary Wars figures for a joint game with Ross Macfarlane at Huzzah, but the cancellation of Huzzah! for this year pushed that project to the back burner. 

Norman and I had a test game with DBA 3.0 in February, the most recent time that we have been able to play face to face.  We’ve gotten in a couple of remote games of DBA this year, although we dusted off the old HaT Punic Wars figures for one of them.  My painting time was more limited than I had expected, but I did finish up my Bronze Age Libyan army. My son is much farther along with his painting.

Instead of the French Revolution, I ended up working on scenery improvement, on Prince August home cast fantasy figures, and on 1/72 scale plastic figures for the Portable Fantasy Campaign.  Without regard to size, which ranged from 1/72 scale sheep to medium-sized 28mm resin buildings,  I will have finished about 165 miniatures for the year. That’s not too bad (I’ve certainly had slower years, especially when I was a sports parent), but it doesn’t support too many new projects...

Here is my thinking.  Most of the “battle” rules I gravitate toward have units of 12 infantry or 6 cavalry (which are about as hard to paint as 12 infantry). Examples would include Chaos Wars, Dragon/Lion Rampant,  and A Gentleman’s War.  All else being equal, 12 units is a good force size, allowing for some variety in scenarios. Years back, Brent Oman advocated for the 12 unit army in the pages of MWAN, and I thought that made good sense and have adopted the idea for planning purposes. I usually anticipate that I will need to provide both sides of a project. Put all of that together, and a completely new project is approximately the equivalent of painting about 12 x 12 x 2 (or 288) infantry.  At this year’s painting rate, that would make a new project the equivalent of a little less than two years’ worth of painting. That’s not impossible, but it does suggest that these things should be considered carefully, and not started on a whim. (My record years, by the way, back around the turn of the century, ran closer to 600 figures; starting a new project when it amounted to less than half a year of painting was a bit more casual.)

Of course, all of my painting is seldom concentrated on one project for more than a few months.  Smaller projects would be a possible answer, I suppose.  With DBA becoming the house standard for ancients gaming, army sizes seldom top 80 figures, but, on the other hand, project planning tends toward three or four or five armies instead of two.  I am intermittantly working on some sort of urban fantasy skirmish game, which will most likely not exceed fifty figures, but which will need some scenery.  That’s the sort of thing which is a nice break from ranked units.  

As of right now, I have three potential new projects that look interesting.  The first was mentioned recently, the potential 19th century project using home cast figurs of one sort or another.  The second was alluded to in an earlier post as well and is some level of DBA classical Greeks and Persians using 1/72 scale figures.  The third would be a completely new start, a portable Not Quite Seven Years War for conventions, using 1/72 scale Zvezda plastic figures for the Great Northern War as the basis for imagi-nation armies.  The rules would probably be A Gentleman’s War.

Ongoing projects that keep getting paint include the French Revolution expansion, the Not Quite Seven Years War, the 1/72 scale Portable Fantasy Campaign, and the 25mm vintage fantasy collection (in which I have been primarily working on a Middle Earth collection using the original Minifigs range from 1974). 

So, there is a lot to do in 2021, and I’m sure that by March I will be totally derailed into something else...

According to my gaming log, I was involved in 24 miniatures games in 2020.  After March, of course, they were all solo or played remotely.  Somewhere in the summer I ran low on enthusiasm for remote games, and the lack of a space to leave a solo game set up for a week or two has made it more challenging to use solo gaming to make up for the lack of conventions.  Nevertheless, I did play a couple of games generated by the Portable Fantasy Campaign this year, most recently an encounter between the humans and the orcs, and will be keeping that going.  To encourage solo gaming in general, I joined the Solo Wargamer’s Assocation early on in the lockdown, and have been gradually reading through back issues of The Lone Warrior to try to collect some inspiration.

Another PFC game, played remotely with Chris Palmer
 

Back in April, I went through my projects list and noted that I had 16 projects that were available to play at home (i.e. had at least two forces and scenery), of which 7 had not been on the table in over two years.  We were able to address one of those project with some remote 2nd Punic War DBA,  and one project was 

thanked for its service and sent on its way (28mm colonials).  So I will be entering 2021 with 5 projects which haven’t seen service in over two years, three of which are 6mm portable projects, and one of which (French Revolution) is being worked on, however slowly. (The 5th is the 40mm French and Indian War project; I’d like to try that with A Gentleman’s War sometime soon.)

Going forward into 2021, I have hope that we will see conventions again by the fall.  I still want to do more with solo games while waiting for the world to open up again, especially games that advance the solo campaign.  I am also looking through material I started preparing recently (ok, 2013 still feels somewhat recent) for an NQSYW campaign.  I’m sure there will be more on that as it develops.

2021 holds three significant anniversaries; I will be 60 in March, and my introduction to Dungeons and Dragons will also be a multiple-of-five at the same time, since it will be 45 years since I was given the game for my 15th birthday.  Even more significantly from a miniatures point of view, though, at some unremembered date in early 1971 I was introduced to the idea of rules for toy soldiers when a friend lent me a copy of Terrence Wise’s Introduction to Battle Gaming.  Since I don’t have a specific date, the whole year will be a celebration of 50 years in the hobby.  I think that it would be fun to put a small game on the table using these original rules, however odd they might seem to be by modern standards.  Perhaps an updated version of the 2nd Punic War as demonstrated in the ancients section would be the most appropriate. It would only be updated in the limited sense of needing a tweak or two to use the multiple-based figures I already have, and, of course, being fought with HaT figures instead of Airfix Romans facing Carthaginians improvised from Robin Hood figures.

 

 

End of the Year Review

With the Christmas season upon us, I have been busier with baking than with painting. While the Christmas cookies aren't entirely done, here's a sampling of this year's types...





While I have a few quiet days between now and the end of the year, it's probably close enough to have a look at this year's numbers.

I have painted, according to my notes, 37 25/28mm figures (including some large fantasy monsters) for the fantasy skirmish project and for the Dux Bellorum Dark Ages project. I have also painted 62 1/72 foot figures and 4 1/72 scale mounted figures, almost all for the Portable Fantasy Game project.
Most of them have been blogged here over the course of the year.

I've been involved in running or playing 26 miniatures games (or sessions in the case of some days that saw multiple short games using the same rules back-to-back). The average of one game every two weeks isn't bad, but I should note that the distribution isn't anywhere near that even, due to the concentration of events during conventions. While that's below my theoretical goal of 52 games, I might also note that I was in 21 sessions of roleplaying games this year, in a major revival of one of my other gaming interests, which has been dormant for a number of years. Added together, that would come a lot closer to the goal of a game per week.

I made it to four multiple-day game conventions this year, Cold Wars, Huzzah, Historicon, and Gencon, which is a comfortable level.

Behind the numbers, it turned out to be a bad year for Charge! and the Not Quite Seven Years War. I haven't been in a Charge game last fall, and the attempts to schedule a Skype game with Ross have been disrupted by a variety of life events. It was also a bad year for blogging, with time beyond that devoted to actually painting and playing being a little hard to come by.

On the brighter side, it was a good year for old friends, with the convention visits being an opportunity to spend some time with them. It was also a good year for the Portable Fantasy Game project, as shown below, which got assembled to a solidly usable point before my Gencon goal.




My goals for next year, as I see them now, are to continue work on the Dux Bellorum project, get back to the NQSYW with both games and a few new units, and to decide on a path forward for the mass of fantasy figures which Kickstarter has kicked out at me the past two years...

Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics, Part 2

	54h	54f	40h	40f	25h	25f	20h	20f	15v	15h	15f	6h	6f
95	-	26	-	2	6	22	-	41	-	12	-	-	-
96	-	40	31	75	30	266	8	84				124	335
97		48	16	59	23	422		130	13			123	533
98		25	25	123	8	300		173	7		62	2	85
99		33		62	20	236						30
0			1	56	8	129
1		7	1	49	3	425	12	166
2		30		23		86		16				26	110
3	4	97				17	44	418
4	1	19	2	19		25	4	24
5						5		4
6	2	3	8	5		5		8
7		3	1	21				20
8			17			3	(4)	16
9	1	4	13	2			(6)	48					36
10		1	12
11		3	1			5	(4)	12
12		3	2	58		17		24
13				7		73	(4)	16

So, with a little effort, it looks like I have successfully loaded a summary chart of my painting completions, going back to the last quarter of 1995.  I think I started keeping this log during the previous government shutdown.  

Years are on the left; the computer helpfully (?) truncated my dates.

h=horse f=foot v=vehicle

I haven't touched a 15 in a long time.  I tried 15mm WWII for a brief period of time, so there's a vehicle column.

1997 to 2001 were good years.  They got me my Dark Ages, Darkest Africa, and much of my massed fantasy armies.  2003 was a busy year.  I finished my 2nd Punic War project, and also got 54mm medieval skirmish on the table for the first time.  By 2005, my 2nd son and I were skating, which took up a lot of time, and I'm still recovering.