2024 and all that



So, I’ve been looking back over my first full year back in the hobby and figured it would be good to have a summary to look back on this time next year.

As a reminder, this time last year I had painted up four armies (Vikings, Narnian, Lord Foul, and Undead) and had played three games of Saga Age of Magic.  Not bad going from a standing start in October, but how did that translate to a full 12 months?  Pretty damn amazing really.  I guess I can get a bit compulsive when I put my mind to it.  I’m struggling to think of a single weekend when I didn’t paint, model or play.

So that included a Reptile and a Dragonkin army for Saga, and playing the remaining games for the Baldr the Unfortunate campaign.  I got into Five Leagues from the Borderlands in a huge way, adding to my models to be able to field a representation of pretty much everything mentioned in the book and playing almost 30 games.

I have been involved with two great developers, Ivan Sorensen (Nordic Weasel), has introduced me to a wide range of Skirmish rulesets and got me hooked on Narrative Solo Tabletop gaming. Which in turn has lead to my taking his upcoming EKPS and creating my own solo campaign, The Defence of Dernland, and a great excuse for building out a full Gnoll army, plus a good deal of Orcs. 

Graham Davey (Grey For Now) has been kind enough to let me play with his upcoming new baby, The Guards of Traitor’s Toll, which is so different to anything else I’ve played or even read about.  It also gave me a great excuse to get even more miniatures and build my own foam buildings.

I’ve shopped around for minis, to the extent that I spend as much time looking for stuff as I do playing games!  I've worked with metal (love the detail and the weight), soft plastic (ugh, never again!), hard plastic kits (which I love working on and will do a separate post about), and 3D printed resin (there are some fantastic designers out there and some of my armies would not have been possible otherwise, but my hit rate for people doing a great job on the printing has been a story in itself that I might also document later - I will shout out to ParagonStar, RumandResin, and 3Den though, fabulous service time after time).  I have no idea how many, I’m afraid to count them, but pride myself on not having anything yet that has been left unpainted (apart from aforementioned 3D prints that were so bad I binned them).

I’ve made my own trees, hedges, hills, and even houses.  Yes I’ve bought terrain pieces and painted them up, but making it myself has been really fun and I now consider it part of the whole tabletop hobby experience.

So that was 2024, amazing to think this all started 15 months ago with me moaning that I don’t have a hobby.

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