The past year has seen something of a rebirth of my interest in the hobby—mostly due to three factors. First, I had shifted my hobby focus to the fine art of card modeling as exhibited at papermodelers.com. It is a satisfying hobby. I designed models of a pre-WWI Zeppelin (free download from the Landships II site) and have a Chesapeake Bay skipjack design in the works.
Secondly, my free time increased substantially. For the past 5 years I've been handling the financial and health care decisions of my mother who was suffering from dementia. In addition, I had been spending any spare time from that (and there wasn't much) with job hunting. In June I accepted a new position contingent upon a security clearance (at least a six month process) so that put an end to the job hunt, and then my mother passed away in August. Since I had been working only three days a week to deal with her situation I suddenly found myself with a lot of spare time with little paperwork to do while awaiting the job clearance.
The third factor in my re-engaging with historical gaming was the discovery of The Wargames Website (TWW). I enjoy the community, for the first time ever I became a sponsoring member of a web site and I find much inspiration there. In fact, I've found more satisfaction in posting my projects over there rather than on my lonely isolated blog here. Come visit. Over there I'm known as (ahem…) Autodidact-O-Saurus. Don't ask.
So what have I accomplished with my newfound time and inspiration? Earlier in the year I purchased 'Longstreet' (and cards) in preparation for playing out some ACW scenarios with 10mm figures—though that project quickly stalled.
After my visor revelation I started painting some 54mm Zulus and British redcoats. I don't have many and I'm not sure what I'll do with them but I have been reading reviews of 'The Men Who Would Be Kings' and I'm considering giving them a try. Still... "Zulus, sir, 'undreds of 'em." It may not be something I pursue. After all, I sold off several hundred 54mm English Civil War figures a few months back and while I do love a good 54, they take a lot of storage and table space. Last time I put on a 54mm game I was using an 8x24 foot table. Not sure where'd I find that these days!
In July I set up an 8x4 gaming table at home. I've hesitated for years to do this since I'm in a rental property and I keep telling myself that we'd be moving again soon. But enough! I invited two co-workers over and we played the first games I've played in over 5 years: I was introduced to 'Sails of Glory' and a month later I ran a 1/600 scale ACW naval scenario. Small games, but hey—it's a start!
That prompted me to re-based my entire collection of ACW ships—47 in total. I have a set of home-grown ironclad rules available on this site. But, I had nothing more than a generic record sheet for the ships so playing the game involved a fair amount of research to establish ship statistics. So I wrote a program to extract data and create *.pdf record sheets for over 100 Civil War vessels. Still some bugs to squash and some data to cleanse but a real advancement more than 25 years after writing the rules.
I then shifted attention (!!shiny!!) to 54mm gladiators and finished painting another 10 figures bringing my total to 17 completed figures with another 14 figures currently in the works.
I created an easily transportable craft-foam hex-mat to play gladiator games on and re-designed the action cards used for my rules. My goal here is to have a grab-and-go game. There is a gaming group that meets not too far from where I live. Once I have real weekends again (i.e., once I actually start the new job—presumably in the next couple of weeks) my intention is to introduce myself and get involved. The gladiator game is an easy, short pick-up game which I think will work well as an ice breaker. I'm not a socializer by nature so having some sort of mutually interesting activity is helpful. One of the real challenges to my gaming career is that after moving three times in the past 6 years—and having worked practically every weekend in that period—I simply haven't found compatible opponents.
Lastly, since I find so much inspiration on the Internet and recently upgraded to a phone with a decent camera, I invested (actually that is far too grand of a term!) in some small spotlights so I can photograph painted figures to share my projects. That was an excuse to paint some figures from my primary interest: 25mm ancients. While I have a small unpainted lead pile, it just felt appropriate to buy new figures for my photography experiments. Well… that's the excuse I'm going with. I think it was a successful experiment with the ancient German command stand and I'm emboldened to return to my roots.
I've got a lot of Greek hoplites, a 'Impetus' Persian army and lots and lots of Republican Romans awaiting paint. Plenty of completed Gauls, too, probably to be re-based since I don't think I'll be returning to DBx type rules.
But the Siren calling me every time I enter my hobby space is a collection of 100-ish 28mm Trojan War figures. I briefly succumbed earlier this year and based them all up singly and textured the bases even though they're not yet painted. I'm thinking about trying the chariot variation of 'Lion Rampant' but that's still tentative. Then I think I need some Hittites which will lead to Assyrians which will lead to Egyptians and then probably to Sea Peoples to complete the circle. Now that I think about it, my Romans need Parthians, too.
All in all, I'm quite happy with my gaming activities this year and I'm looking forward to being more productive and playing more games in 2018.
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