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Thursday, November 30, 2017

Pudsey Recon


TML Towers will be making the exhausting 5-minute journey to Recon this Saturday; to put on a little game of Dragon Rampant.

 

https://wdwgamers.weebly.com/recon-2017.html


The following miniatures should all be appearing....

 

 

 

 

Feel free to pop by and say hi; anyone who can convince me my time in this hobby is worthwhile will be appreciated!

;

Wednesday, November 15, 2017

Small-town Thinking


It's not all doom and gloom.

Preparations for the new project continue at a slow pace.  A handful more models are nearly finished, and the rules and campaign map are started.  But the biggest effort was put into enough buildings to create a small town on a battlefield. 

Given some of the early games may lean towards skirmishes rather than full blown battles, I wanted enough houses available to allow for street fighting or city square based scenarios.  Thus I started to knock a few buildings up:

 
 It's my usual foamcore construction technique here.  The roofs are an ingenious short cut as I didn't fancy making hundreds of little tiles and gluing them on individually.  Instead I trawled a DIY store for a suitably textured wallpaper, and took a foot wide strip off the sample roll (in fact, three or four different ones, so I at least looked like I wanted to do some comparison at home!).  This was simply cut to shape and glued to the roofs; a doddle!

So I had four cottages, a barn and a church, in a generically central European style.  Good stuff.

Then I got carried away...

 

 

 

 
I've ended up with 13 houses, a handy little collection, including a couple of town houses, a 'Gasthaus' (German style regional manor) and a stable block.  A good little town.  Moreover, whilst all the buildings are suitable for the 18th & 19th century - so working for my Imagi-nations and my Napoleonic Austrians - all but three will work well enough with my English Civil War forces too.

And being 15mm and unbased, they fit quite neatly in one small box that stores inside my terrain box.

Anything that takes up no additional space is a win for me at the minute.

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Tuesday, November 07, 2017

Which mean sales


I've decided to move on my most sensitive collections, mainly as I simply don't use them anymore, and have no desire to put them to table again, or add to them.

In the light of my previous post this may come as no surprise; but I am not getting out of the hobby; just rationalising what I have and getting some space back.

It's my 'Ultra-Moderns' collection that is going now.

I have a large collection of Yugoslav Civil War miniatures, that I'll admit feeling increasingly uncomfortable about playing with.  Additionally a few leftovers of my old, old Iran-Iraq War troops turned out amongst them, It runs up to a good 15 or more lots so they are going up at very reasonable prices on eBay now.

Dean_AKI_UK's eBay Sales

The initial sales include:

Croat Tiger Battalion

Kurdish Peshmerga 

Serbian tanks

Serbian Regulars

Iraqi militias

Croat ZNC armour
It is always the sure sign I am ok for the sale of something when I feel no urge to make use of the models again whilst sorting them for sale; it is simply a case of arranging them into sensible selections that should appeal.

There are plenty more bits to go up when I get the time, but if you want to start a new period or expand one you are cool with where I'm not so fussed anymore, grab yourself a bargain.

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Wednesday, November 01, 2017

On the doubts one has

Some days I question my involvement in this hobby; whether it is worth the time I put in.

Assembling six Warlord Games Orcs (nee Wargames Factory models) last night brought on the latest existential crisis.
A previous set of the little bastards
Let me go on record now as saying I've concluded these are horrible models, the seven or so pieces needed for each figure require so much effort to assemble, and come with no indication of which parts assemble different basic poses.  Ninety minutes of effort to assemble six models is not my idea of fun or a useful investment of time.

But the real question was, 'why am I even doing this?'

Certainly, it's not as if I need the extra models.  I have thousands, painted and unpainted.  Moreover, Jesus Christ, I'm a grown man with thousands of toy soldiers.  Some days I have doubts about what I'm choosing to do with my time.  Why is that?

I've talked about the dilemma of hobbies before, Wargaming is not the most expensive thing I do, but it is the one that causes me most doubt, despite being the one that with its' associated activities - board games, assembling and painting models - takes up the most of my time.  I'm old enough to be from a time when this sort of activity simply wasn't cool in any form, and I think I'm scarred by that.  However overall I think I just go through phases of, well...

Disliking my hobby.

Which is weird, as it has definitely helped keep me sane.  And I really mean, sane.

There's been long periods of pretty shitty times in my past where the only escape was burying myself in a 12 hour painting session of impossible Napoleonic uniforms, day-long games with friends, solo-games at home, reading up on background/history; it was always something that could block the awful side of the brain from getting a word in edge-ways.

But other days; when you are surrounded by your tribe at its' most ugly, least charitable, and see the rest of the world going about its' business; the days when you don't feel you are personally fighting off the grasping spirits of beyond.  Those occasions at the end of a dreadful three hour game of torture with a pedantic, win-at-any-costs, netlist, rules-as-written, neckbeard whose unpainted army of scarcely assembled broken-rules filth has permitted him the entire time to gloat in an orgy of destruction of your own thematically/historically crafted force; before proceeding to tell you in the most patronising way possible how you could've done better.  Those days when you've given yourself a bad back and a dozen cuts from assembling shitty plastic figures, dizzy on the fumes of a chemical lab's-worth of noxious glues, only to realise you now have the paint the little sods as well.

On those days, I want out.

But I don't, I sell a few things, go quiet for a while, find other things to do.  It isn't quite an addiction, but eventually like an old friend it is there for you when you need it.  And you pick up where you left off somehow.

Despite how much I can hate my hobby.  It has a place in my life.

I still need it.

It is just difficult to see why sometimes.



Normal service will resume next time people....