Looking back at last year

With a new year coming along it's time for yet another review of 2015.

The year was actually quite productive in the end at least when numbers are concerned with altogether 529 miniatures painted. Though most were in 15mm it was still quite a decent number with two full armies painted one for Flames of War and one for Napoleonic gaming, as well as expanding another existing Flames of War army. 43 vehicles, 406 infantry and 9 mounted models was is quite a decent tally for 15mm, but it did cause quite a bit of painting fatigue as most of the Napoleonics were painted within a 2 month frame and the Flames of War stuff was done in short bursts as well. For this year I'll really have to try put in some more varied passion projects between the monotonous army painting. I'm not really looking forward to the feeling that I just don't want to paint anything for a while.

Excellent Secret Santa gift that proved to be one of my favorite projects of 2015

Gaming wise it was a very active year with 46 games played. And that is not counting the multiple games of X-Wing and Zombicide that I've played with the missus and some mates throughout the year. Most of the gaming has unsurprisingly been Flames of War related with 31 games played. Though I feel it's actually surprisingly low considering that tournaments have accounted for 11 games straight away and there have been multiple days where I've played more than one game at the club. So might be that I've just forgot to mark some games down. Still the first two months of 2015 saw me play more games than the whole of 2014 combined. A lot of fun has been had, but it has also unfortunately taken quite a bit of the hobby time that could have been used for painting. Funny enough originally I got back into the hobby just to relax by painting, but it's been transforming more and more into a gaming hobby lately. It's something that I have to be wary of though as originally I quite the whole hobby in the mid 00's when I just got totally fed up with the tournament scene etc. and just couldn't find any joy in gaming.

Trip to the Waterloo 200 year reenactment was one of the high points of the year

The Swiss Division did give me quite a painting burnout, but it was really nice to paint up a whole Napoleonic force from start to finish in only a couple of months.

Daily life has also changed quite a bit last year with the addition of our little (not so little anymore) war hound to the family. 2-3 hours of being outdoors with him every day has really changed schedules a lot, and probably not for the worse. In addition to that the missus has ended up buying a horse, instead of paying someone else to ride. So the family has doubled in size with all the additional time consuming activities coming with it. Luckily no kids still so at least I don't have to share my toys with anyone yet :) I switched jobs as well with far less business travel required anymore, which has been quite nice.

Trip to the European Championships was great fun, even though we didn't do that well in the tournament. Got to play against what seemed like half the commonwealth that was there with opponents from New Zealand, Australia, South Africa and Wales.

Looking back into the goals I set for 2015 it seems there have been some successes as well as some epic failures. So here's a little recap of last years goals!

Goal 1 - Paint up a 15mm Early War German force for Flames of War

Done in the beginning of the year. I actually ended up painting over 2000 points worth of them instead of just the required 1550 point army for the European Team Championship. And there's still a few minis unpainted as I ended up cutting two platoons out of the list. Should have playtested more before buying minis that I though would work nicely. But it won't be the last time that I buy too much before thinking it through :)

Goal 2 - Finish the forces for Waterloo

Epic fail. I only painted 4 battalions of Middle Guard in 28mm and after that I didn't even touch a single 28mm Napoleonic miniature. One major reason is that nearly all of the players at my club have moved to 15mm and the last 28mm game has been played in 2013 if I recall correctly. It's a shame as especially the Perry miniatures are lovely sculpts. I think I'll just have to resort to painting them up as display pieces in the future.

Goal 3 -Reduce the pile of unpainted lead

Sort of successful with all my ancients miniatures sold of and only a couple of new 28mm acquisitions made. All in all I have over 200 fewer 28mm miniatures than I started the year with. In 15mm and 6mm I haven't been as successful. I bought the Swiss Napoleonics as battalions of 24, but our club standard is 18 men per battalion so a lot of them remained unpainted. So even with the massive amount of 15mm painted I still ended up with roughly 100 more 15mm minis than I started with. Still not that bad as I don't really have any new needs for Flames of War and the only new 15mm minis that I'm buying this year are Saxons. So hopefully that pile will be greatly reduced as well. My 6mm failure is of epic proportions and will be covered later on :)

Goal 4 - Sell of old projects

As said before I sold of all my ancients, and have been trying to get rid of other minis as well. It's still an ongoing project as it's surprisingly hard to get rid of old minis especially here in Finland where the scene is quite small. Success, but not as big of a success as I would have wished.

Goal 5 - Get started on 15mm Prussians for Leipzig

Didn't do anything else than put them up for sale. One clubmate ended up speed painting a whole Prussian Corps for our Waterloo game, so I figured there's no point in painting any more of them as they aren't really needed that much. Instead I decided to get rid of them and paint something that will be needed for our next campaign, namely the Saxons.

Goal 6 - Sculpt something

Sort of successful as I more or less learned to use ZBrush for digital sculpting, but it didn't really get far from a few busts and some test Sci-Fi sculpts that I did. My new job has taken me back to product development from excel wizardry and frankly after a long day of 3D design and all the work around it, I just didn't want to do anything like that at home so I've decided to just skip that. Instead I've focused more on the traditional sculpting and green stuff has seen a lot of use though with multiple conversions etc. built, but I still haven't felt confident enough to try a whole miniature.

Goal 7 - No more new projects

Fail of epic proportions, literally. Being bored in a hotel room an a business trip has never lead to anything good and after some ebay browsing I am currently the proud owner of a few Epic Armageddon armies. Probably the best game GW ever did and I already had an army from before. Well after buying a few job lots of ebay, and reinforcing those units with some extra additions I now have 2 new armies and the start of a third. Funny enough even if they are out production they are still far cheaper than buying a real 40k army. My 4000 points of Epic Space Marines cost less than a 100 euros. when a proper 40k army will probably be 4-5 times as much.

Speaking of 40k I also bought some more plastic crack from GW. Still quite minor as I only really wanted something cool to tinker with and kitbash some units. I've been slowly building renegade imperial guard and chaos marines as pass time when watching TV etc. And to be honest kitbashing those units has been some of the most fun I've had in the hobby for quite some time even if they are never going to be painted. Surpisingly therapeutic stuff.

Goal 8 - Build a scale model

Semi successful once again as I've been building a few naval models on and off throughout the year. I have a 1/125 Revell U-99 U-boat model nearly ready for paint and a Dragon 1/700 model of a US WW2 destroyer being built. Especially the 1/700 destroyer has proven to be quite time consuming as there are hundreds of parts and photoetch pieces, and most of them are less than a millimeter at their largest dimension. Still another fun therapeutic project that will slowly go forward without any real stress of actually having to reach conclusion.