2026 in Gaming; An (almost) Mid-year Day Report

July 2nd is Mid-year day, with 182 days behind and 182 days ahead.  I didn’t really want to add a third post to the blog yesterday, but I did want to comment about how this year has been going before we get too far away from the middle of the year. While I did write up an overview of last year’s activities, I didn’t get as far as writing up anything about a plan for this year.

HAWKs Game Day on 30 May; Charge! and a ‘red book’ scenario

Schoeffen-Buschhagen and Stanzbach-Anwatsch cavalry clash on the bridge

As of this week, I have been in 27 miniatures games, so I’m somewhat behind the pace to match last year’s 67 games.  In fact, I’ve just ahead of where I’d want to be to make my goal of 52 games.  

I’ve played those 27 games with 19 different sets of rules so far this year, which may be somewhat ahead of the pace implied by the 30 sets of rules used last year. Given that I have been thinking that I am plying with too many rules to have a good grasp on any of them, this may be of concern and bears some watching.  Unfortunately for consistency, I also have an agenda item to try out some fantasy mass battle rules (particularly Midgard, Hobgoblin, Age of Fantasy Regiments, and Warhammer 1st edition) and revisit some older sets (particularly Chainmail and Knights and Magick) that haven’t been out in several years, so that may keep me from concentrating on the more frequently played rules.

By the end of the year last year I had used figures from my own collections in just 17 of those 67 games, and I resolved to spend more time this year getting my own figures on the table.  Given that I have 16 collections of figures in playable quantities, that was just an average of about once a year per collection, and most of those games didn’t come anywhere near using every figure in a collection.  It would not be hard to argue that the totality of my figure collection is underutilized.  This year, 11 of the 27 games have been with my own figures. That’s better, but there is still room for improvement. 

It has not been a good year for painting.  I did a handful of fantasy figures as a test of the Army Painter Speedpaint Pens (and might do a report on that after one more little test project) and the two dozen 18th century Indians for Armies for Kids (AfK), but that’s all I’ve finished so far.  I did get new prescription reading glasses recently, and they were helpful in the AfK painting session this week.

Muster of Minifigs ME Orcs and Goblins

Muster of Minifigs ME Free Folk

I have a lot of things I’d like to have painted, such as the retrogaming Minifigs ME (Mythical Earth) project, so I need to concentrate more on that.

So, not a bad year so far, but with room for improvement.

I’m thinking that next year’s goals are going to be to do more with less, and that will probably entail concentrating on some revisits to the gaming of the 1970s and 1980s. But more about that later …