2019 In Review & Plans for 2020

The last quarter of 2019 really has not been much of a gaming one for me. I've attended very few game nights, and only one or two tournaments. Painting has also been hit and miss, though I've gone on a bit of Games Workshop spending spree. In looking over my shelf of shame opportunity, I see a lot of unfinished projects...

Still, it hasn't been a bad year. I enjoyed Enfilade and Lock & Load, and had very few bad or boring gaming experiences on the whole. I played a lot more board games than I have, and I think that trend will continue; ease of play is very hard to argue with when I'm chronically short of time. I've very much enjoyed playing Root and Scythe on the regular, and I'm looking forward to exploring some new games.

What with the holidays, I actually played a couple games this week:

Sunday I got in my first game of Adeptus Titanicus with Dan, at the local GW store. I lost horribly (gotta pay attention to firing arcs and reactor overload!) but I enjoyed it quite a bit. The game plays at a good pace and I do love stompy robots.

Monday evening I played my first game of Warcry with some unpainted Ironjawz versus the Corvus Cabal, Nighthaunt, and Untamed Beasts in a four-way brawl. Turns out my green guys are slow and tanky, so I might bring some squishier, but faster, goblins next time. Played quick and easy.

What's next?

Gaming

I would very much like to see more gaming in 2020. To that end, I'm committing to playing a tabletop wargame at least once a week if at all possible. I'm also going to try to hit a convention or a local tournament once a month; Gamestorm, Burning Cat, Enfilade, and Lock & Load are all reasonably local, and I've no excuse for not going. The Cog Collective runs a couple tournaments a month as well, so I should be able to squeeze in a few games of Warmachine.

As for the games themselves, I look forward to playing Saga, Warmachine, Age of Sigmar, and Adeptus Titanicus. I think I'll be looking at more skirmish than big battle games; unless it's an event, two hours is about all I can spare for a game and that may include travel time.

And, of course, I'm looking forward to regular historical games with the Saturday night group. Scheduling conflicts prevented me from attending any nights over the last couple months, and I'm eager to push some ancients or Napoleonics around again.

Hobby

As usual, I have a bunch of started and unfinished projects - too many to list, really. I'm only going to plan for the next three months, instead of all of 2020. My big focus this year is going to be finishing projects and building terrain. I have a lot of figures, but no really usable terrain sets for playing on. So, my first five projects are:

• Finish my Grymkin for Hordes. I've been sitting on about forty or so unpainted figures for this collection for a few years, and once they're done I'll have it complete. 
• Bad Squiddo Shieldmaidens (for Saga). These are mostly done; just need to paint shields and do some proper basing. This is the one I should probably do first, in time for January's Saga day.
• Gloomspite Gitz. I bought hard into this, and I'm finding them a little more annoying to paint than I expected. I'm trying to do most of the army with GW's Contrast paints as an experiment.
• Adeptus Titanicus. I'm going to try printing off some decals for my own Legio (The Grave Walkers) and do some proper basing and weathering on the first four Titans, plus paint up another couple Titans so I can play around with different maniples.
• Ironjawz. This was my Christmas present to myself: a full army of elite stompy orcs orruks orcs for Age of Sigmar and Saga: Age of Magic. It's going to be a speed-painting project; I'm going to try to knock out the entire army (minus maybe the big orc on a monster) in about a week, probably in early February. It's a challenge I'm looking forward to.

Notably missing from that list is small-scale historical stuff. I still have an enormous number of 6mm Napoleonics, and I'm planning on putting those together for Blucher or other big battle games, but they aren't even begun.

After all that, though... it's time to look at throwing together some proper terrain for 28mm fantasy/dark ages, and for 6mm SF.