Some thoughts on the hobby for 2022

 2021 was a bit of a slow year for gaming.  I am hoping to have a bit more fun in 2022, and have been thinking about what that might look like.

I have been trying to separate my desire for painting from any particular “get a game ready” goals, figuring that everything that gets painted will be used sooner or later, and there are enough periods and projects that are already “table-ready” to keep me pleasantly occupied painting.  That said, it would be nice to finish up the Bronze Age Nubian DBA army I started over the summer:

I would also like to add a few units (mostly specialized troop types) to the Not Quite Seven Years War. The last unit I added was an artillery piece and crew back in 2018 (or 2019 …).

  I started a group of six Prince August figures which are intended to be a light infantry detachment (for the reduced scale rules we have been using lately), but I’m still a painting session or two from finishing them.

I also have various 1/72 plastics ready to hand to fill roles in the Portable (solo) Fantasy Campaign, and a selection of vintage 25mm fantasy figures.  So whatever gets done will be good.  I had a nice string of “one figure per day on average” months, but it does look like January is going to be a break in that chain.

I did no casting in 2021, although I bought a fair number of used molds.  I would like to start casting again, when the weather is warm enough to work outside, and figure out which of the vintage Schneider molds will cast reliably.

That will allow me to decide whether I will be doing a mostly historical toy-style Franco-Prussian War project, a 19th century imagi-nations project, or neither.  I hope that this effort will resemble my 2020 project to cast from all of my old Prince August fantasy molds.  

As far as gaming goes, I have accumulated a stack of new rules that I would like to try.

I’ve also got a few older favorites (e.g. Knights and Magick) which I would like to dust off and get on the table.

I also have the ongoing solo fantasy campaign to play with, and am considering what it would take to put together a workable campaign on some sort. I suspect that the KISS principle needs to be kept firmly in mind…

I’m currently in a Dungeons and Dragons (5th edition) game, which has been running approximately biweekly.  I have posted a few things about my interest in reviving my original D&D campaign, so it seems likely that there will more RPGs this year.  

The elephant in the room, though, is downsizing.  I’ve accumulated more than I can reasonably expect to use, as each shiny new thing flashes in front of me and captivates me briefly.  Norm, over on his Battlefields and Warriors blog, has described his downsizing, and I need to take a serious look this year at what I can get done, and get some of the excess moved on to people who might be able to make use of it.