Hobby Recap - January 2025

Alrighty then

 

In 2020, I had a monthly post called "Paint Table," where I'd put out photographic lists and musings about the mini's I'd painted that month, with the goal of hitting some high number and feeling accomplished in having a regular output of work. While working on my OWAC posts this year, I realized that I missed the structure of that format, but remembered that I wanted less of the pressure since wargame miniatures are not my only hobby, nor my only career. Because of this realization, I've thumbed through a bunch of those older posts, and while much of it makes me cringe, I'm terribly excited to start posting a "Hobby Recap," on the regular. This will be a monthly post where I do a blab about the month's finished work, make a quick headcount, and keep myself aware of my goals. While I do this for my own joy, hope it'll be fun to read too. At the very least, I promise there'll be pictures!

January 2025

OWAC VIII began, and thus the Chaos Gnomes began their next life. In the churning through old posts, I found that in January and February of 2020 I had taken my first pass at these figures and by April I was Turnip-Pilled and had mostly forgotten about the little monsters. For my first month I wanted to make a playable force in the hopes that I might do some batreps in my future OWAC blogs, and so I managed a general, 10 warriors, and 10 blunderbussers, which weigh in at about 455 points (using the 4e army list for Chaos Dwarfs.) I'm a little sad about the bases being so plain, but I think it makes the rest of their paint scheme pop. The key paints were Khorne Red, Nightlords Blue, and Sun Yellow, to harken back to the highly saturated colors of Oldhammer. Overall, I'm very pleased with this work and can't wait to continue it over the next 6 months.

At the end of last year and the beginning of this one, I wrote the playtest rules for Gobzooka, a game about goblin blowing eachother up in a scifi hijinx sort of way. The game began life as an excuse to commission some monopose goblins for a very funny Grimdark Future army list, but then became a full fledged skirmish game because you know me, I can't help myself. Its based in part on the Gnomemageddon rules, and is waiting in the playtest queue, but having watched this brilliant video by Breakfast with Bando, I have a feeling that development will be pivoting very hard to see how small a reasonable starter set can be.

As mentioned in my recent blog post for the shop, 2025 feels like the year of the Trench, and appropriately, I've fallen in. This month's new releases from Wargames Atlantic was the Fidwog plastics for Quar: a clash of rhyfles, and thanks to Nicolai's excitement, I preordered a box*. I've already cobbled it all together, but some of my favorite pieces are here; the tankette on the custom base and the marksquar with the long rilfe to the left of it. I like tanks on bases when I can help it, because it takes the guesswork out of facings and because I like smearing mud on things. Additionally, I enjoy the marksquar because its arms were taken from another quar kit, and I have a huge internal bias to kitbashing. Either way, this progress has spurred me to paint the rest of my quar, so hopefully by this time next month, you'll be seeing them in all their muppety glory.

Lastly, I have a small collection of Warhammer 40,000 3rd edition books that I'm slowly expanding, and this January I added the Chaos Space Marines Codex (the bad one from 1999) to the pile. This collection started after watching a video from DA RED WUNZ GO FASTA on which edition of 40k was the best for a static, self contained snapshot of the game, and I was won over. 

 

The other old editions I play are 40k 8th edition indexhammer (Thomas and I play the same matchup every Chanukah,), AOS 1st ed (with the no points), and 6th edition Warhammer Fantasy a la ravening hordes, and so after the video I was more or less convinced that I would like 3rd edition too, with its back full of "get you by" army lists. Its definitely of its time, but there's a chunkiness that really speaks to me, as the rules feel simpler and everybody costs an assload of points, so there isn't the same shrinkflation as we've seen in the editions since (yep, I know that the shrinkflation was there between RT, 2nd and 3rd, but I'm using my vantage point to try to appreciate something goshdarnit.) 

 

I kinda have it in my head that in the coming years, I'll make some small armies for this edition and maybe have myself a little Horus Heresy, since firstborn marines are a dime a dozen and they deserve to have a home. Plus, it means I can use templates again, which (as everyone knows) is the best part of the game.

 

xxx

 

month's models painted 21/52

 new total: 21

 

month's models sculpted 0/12 

new total: 0

 

xxx

 

So that's the post Pasta-Lovers. Thanks so much for reading, RIP David Lynch, and have an awesome Valentine's day! 

 

xxx

*out of the gate, I need to make some concessions for my "no buying models goal," and that's ok. They're goals, and not rules for a reason. For instance, sculpting all of the minis I paint doesn't make logistical sense if say I'm making an army or warband to demo a game. I don't have the luxury of time to make those minis from scratch, and neither will the players trying the game out, therefore using official minis or kitbashing acceptable minis is ok, and doesn't make me feel like a hypocrite.