Thoughts at the New Year

2011 has been a difficult year for wargaming. I am happy that the fortress was completed in time for Historicon, but very little else has been done. I do not foresee the time available increasing in 2012, so the real question is how to make the most out of the time that I expect to be available.

Following a suggestion by Hal Thinglum in MWAN many years ago, I have kept track of my painting completions fairly regularly now for the past 15 years. I haven't bothered adding up the results the last few years, as the numbers are so much lower than they were ten years ago. In the first few years after that, I drew up lists of the top five projects that I intended to work on in the coming year. More recently, I've listed the top three at the beginning of the year...but have then gone on to paint whatever I felt like that day without any consideration of the January 'plan'. In fact, I just advised my sons this week to paint what they felt like painting, since to do otherwise starts to feel more like work than like fun. At least they have been working quickly enough lately that such an approach would still lead to new projects appearing on the table in a reasonable amount of time.

I'm currently thinking that I should spend more time painting with other people, and having two painting sons at home should make that fairly easy. Certainly the fact of collaboration was instrumental in driving the fortress project toward completion this year. The other thing that has been successful in moving projects forward has been the formal challenge of some sort. The Medieval Mayhem skirmish project started as a challenge to create a convention game with a $100 budget limit. We've tossed around the idea of issuing a challenge for creation of a convention game that would fit in a plastic shoe box, which would be ideal for a convention that involved air travel using only carry-on baggage.

If I follow the whim of the moment in doing what seems interesting, it seems likely that this coming year is going to be a mix of 54mm medievals (which I was working on yesterday, which the kids have been working on, and which I'm committed to running at Cold Wars) and 40mm Renaissance, which Ross and I intend to run at our next meeting. Beyond that, the kids are working away diligently on 1/72 scale Hordes of the Things, my Herodotus project has been the focus of much reading, and I have some Bronze Age miniatures in two scales on the desk.