Happy New Year

So 2014 rolls in and I quite glad to see the back of 2013, for various reasons that are not related to toy soldiers.

Looking ahead to gaming and painting in 2014 I seem to be looking at a bit of an odd year.

Painting wise I am looking at painting quite a lot of terrain, including finishing of my Dark Ages buildings from Grand Manner, building the walls to Balins Tomb and finally building the Amon Hen kit I bought at salute aboute seven years ago.  That will probably fill up the first half of my year.

I am also looking at doing some repair work.  My Lord of the Rings collections is a little bit worse for wear and could do with some TLC.  There are a lot of broken horses, spears and pikes that all need repaired, not to mention a large volume of sabot bases that need finished of. I ordered a large quantity of War of the Ring style sabots from Warbases when the game was first released but at some point he changed the dimensions of the bases so I will need to get a custom order of bases done at some point.  I also need to do some repair work on my recently completed Romans and Saxons. It seems that a spear falls of one of my Saxons every time I look at them, and one of the boxes of Romans had an accident and requires some work.

 

Apart from that I don't appear to have any plans. My Romans are all finished (for Impetus use anyway) and I can't see myself purchasing any more WHFB models (although you never know!).

I still have my sight set on a 15mm army for use in FOG but I seem to be unable to make any final choices about what to do so that has stalled a wee bit.  My Aliens vs Predator kickstarter will hopefully land in May and that will be a substantial set of models that will need painted so that will probably take up a good part of my painting year.  

I also always seem to keep going back to the Warlord Games Engoish Civil War Range, as ther are some very nice miniatures that I think would look very nice on the gaming table.

From a gaming point of view again there are no concrete plans.   Play some of everything really.  Top of my playing lists at the moment are Impetus, Lord of the Rings and Mordheim. Apart from that I am pretty open.  I am going to give Chain of Command a bash in January and am also looking inot teh Beta version of Koncordia from the same people that wrote Impetus.  The rules look quite interesting and will give me an excuse to dust of some of the old sci-fi miniatures that are in the loft. I would also like to play some more Dux Brittaniarum and some Saga.  I have both sets of rules but dont seem to use either as often as I would like to.

The other rule set that I would dearly like to get back into is Epic Armageddon. It is my favorite sci-fi ruleset and seems to do a much better job of recreating warfare in the 41st Millenium than 40k does. Unfortunately in a fit of madness when the game was first published I gave away two of my three epic armies (Marines and Eldar) to other club members in order to stoke the fires of the game. Unfortunately both of these people have since pretty much left the club, and with the Epic lne being discontinued by GW I am left with a rather large Imperial Guard army and on one to fight against. A very sad state of affairs.

The other thing I would like to do this year is get a bit more involved with the club.  It is an excellent club and we have done some great stuff in the past year, but I seem to manage to miss most of them. I missed the Longstreet campaign, which seems to have swallowed up half the club and looks like it is great fun. I suppose part of the problem is that model wise my collection has a very narrow focus, which can make playing other periods a bit tricky. I think I will need to start leaving some Monday nights free and just wandering in and seeing if I can join a game.   In 2012 I made a point of trying get at least one game in with every member of the club, which I really enjoyed doing. Perhaps I will make that my gaming goal for 2014.