It’s time to see how the second quarter went for my Hobby Resolutions and start thinking about what to do the second half of the year!
Boy, did I play more games! Shortly after publishing the First Quarter post, quite a few of the club members decided to leave and start our own club as we weren’t happy with some of its new policies and where it was headed. We were able to gather lots of new people too and after a busy month or so setting up the club (and with no time to game), we were ready.
A couple of us wanted to start with Malifaux, and when people saw us playing it was enough to interest them on the game. Now we have 15 Malifaux players at the club. Not bad! And it wasn’t the only new game the club is promoting. I’ve started Blood Bowl, which already had a lot of players around here who have joined the club’s league too.
I’ve also had a couple of demo games of Beyond the Gates of Antares and Liber Militum: Tercios. Both of them require quite a few miniatures, so I haven’t been able to play them again yet. But we’ve built a small group of Antares players (3 of which are going Ghar) and we’re slowly building our armies… A shame they’re not ready yet, as I wanted to play their summer campaign. As for Tercios, I’ve gone with a Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth army (husars!). It’s a pretty cool game, but in hindsight it wasn’t very clever starting another massed combat game (even if it’s 15mm), and doing it with a cavalry heavy army (mounted troops, my achiles heel!).
Besides that, I’m slowly trying to build a Kings of War community (but all the problems the spanish edition is having it’s hurting it) and after a few games of Frostgrave, there’s a few players interested in starting a campaign in September.
And lastly, almost every Friday afternoon some of us are getting together to play boardgames. This quarter I’ve played Ninja All-Stars, Mercs: Recon, Sedition Wars, Cthulhu Wars,… plus some Zombicide: Black Plague nights. So yeah, I believe I’ve got more than covered the play more games part of my new years resolution.
The painting side of the resolution hasn’t gone so well. I’ve only managed to paint 21 minis, 6 of which I had started painting last year. Not impressive at all. That being said, there are quite a few miniatures that I have almost finished but couldn’t make it on time (like the 30 models or so that are the start of my Tercios army). So the first month of the third quarter should see many finished miniatures to compensate.
And this past week, instead of painting, my hobby time went into repairing my Kings of War Undead army.
After returning from a demo game, a wayward kid jumped out of a street corner, running straight towards me while looking in the opposite direction. And he hit my bag with the army. Luckily it was mostly plastic and restic. So it required some paint touch ups and some regluing of minis, but only a couple of minis broke, which was easy to fix and hide the seams with some extra blood.
Nonetheless it was heartbreaking. And I don’t want to think what could have happened if I was carrying more metal minis with them, like the zombie trolls or if instead of KoW I was carrying the all metal and delicate 2nd Edition Infinity models.
The bought miniatures was also a massive loss. I got the Zombicide, Alien vs Predator and Deadzone kickstarters. I had to buy minis for Tercios and Blood Bowl, Warhammer Quest was released,… so yeah, this one, an absolute failure.
Regarding hobby projects, I’ve started painting the Malifaux Starter Set and also decided to finish painting the Deadzone Starter Set (yeah, the one from the previous edition). And while at first I had my doubts about joining this years ETL, I did it in the end.
Now that half a year has gone by, it’s time to start thinking on end of the year goals. I’d like to close it with both my Bolt Action Germans and KoW Undead projects finished. And even if I already have enough painted Infinity models to field a 300 point strike team, it’s not even close to my usual lists. I’d like to finish some of those half painted models. Other than that, I have too many things coming my way to be able to make long-term plans. I’ll just have to keep painting and hope that I can start next year with enough painted models for the games I play the most.