New Year Resolutions

In time honored blogging tradition it is that time of year where I need to sum up what I achieved in 2016 and list out what I hope to accomplish in 2017.

Year to Date

I suppose the first thing is to recap what I wanted to do during the year. Not all of these were necessarily goals at the start of the year and they mainly revolved around continuing to play and trying out various games.

1. Play plenty of Warhammer Fantasy Battle (whfb)
2. Continue the Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) campaign
3. Continue to play various computer games.
4. Try out Warhammer 40k
5. Try Age of Sigmar (AoS)
6. Try Malifaux
7. Try Kings of War (KOW)
8. Try Ninth Age rules
9. Try Star Wars Armada
10. Continue to game after having a baby!

So how did I do? I’ll start with the last item on the list, namely my daughter.

10. Baby

Well unsurprisingly having a baby in January  has somewhat impacted the amount of game time i’ve managed to get in over the year. My aim had been to get to the club every other week but it probably ended up closer to every 3 weeks (though it dropped over the summer), which considering all things, isn’t too bad.

1. Warhammer

I have managed to get in a reasonable number of whfb games (8 between June and Dec), though not nearly enough for my tastes. However, if you take into account GW scrapping the gaming system that is pretty good going. Having a 2nd half of the year whfb league at the club, definitely helped things. There are signs that some players are starting to get a bit bored with 8th edition (and not being supported isn’t helping as there are no new releases/rumours etc. to sustain it). A number have already reduced their time in this system and are playing Malifaux or something else. I’m not one of these but it probably helps that I only got back into 8th just before GW canned it but at that point the edition had already been going for around 4 years. I think the club will still run a league next year but it might be reduced numbers on this year.

2. D&D

Steve, Pete, Greg, Matt and myself did manage to continue (for me, the adventures of Knoffles Silvertop in) our D&D campaign over the year. I’ve not covered this much on the blog as a 2nd group is likely to start next year so Steve asked us not to cover it in depth so that the other group won’t know what to expect. We struggled to always get together for a game, especially as Friday nights clash with swimming for Gregs kids (or child). For this reason towards the end of the year we tried out gaming during the week at houses. I thoroughly enjoyed our sessions and this will definitely continue in 2017.

3. Computer

What can I say, there were a number of computer games i’ve played a lot of hours of this year. It is just too easy to log on for a couple of games in the evening to unwind. What I have found is I rarely play multiplayer, instead it is normally single player campaigns. This may have something to do with the ‘study’ becoming a nursery and so my desktop is now in storage and instead I use a laptop in the lounge and shouting and coordinating with others doesn’t go down well with the wife when she is watching (insert reality show/cosy crime drama here). The main six games I’ve put the hours in are, Blood Bowl (1 and 2), Tom Clancy’s – The Division, X-COM, Dirt Rally and the new Total War: Warhammer. I will put up a post about this at some point. Suffice to say I love the total war games and had a fan based warhammer mod for the original Total War Rome game and this version is also brilliant.

4. 40k

Like most gamers who started out with Games Workshop (GW), it is difficult to not end up owning a number of space marines, if only due to the free figures given away in white dwarf over the years. It was a simple matter to pick up some more, pre-painted and cheaply, off eBay and I was ready to go. In true feet first fashion, my first foray into 40k was to sign up to the club competition but not being a complete masochist, I lined up a couple of practice games (to learn the rules) against Matt and Pete (who are in the D&D group). Suffice to say (and as expected), I didn’t win a game although did rank quite high in the group, only through having played more games than most of the others! Most of the 40k games were played in the first quarter of the year and so weren’t reported on the blog. The games were reasonably enjoyable. The game hasn’t grabbed me but that maybe because i’ve mainly played in the comp and I still don’t really know what i’m doing.

Will I continue with 40k? Maybe. There is a Kill-team evening due to occur in Feb (lists of 200pts) which sounds interesting and I’ll likely give that a go. The Comp this year will have restrictions and will follow a highlander style (all units from 1 book and a max of 1 of each type except troops). I still probably won’t enter, as this will potentially give me the first half of the year to try other gaming systems, but will definitely try out another game or 2.

Matt’s Tyranids

Pete’s Imperial Guard

Comp game vs Dean’s Space Wolves

5. AoS

Like most other bloggers, i’ve previously covered my thoughts on the move from whfb to AoS. As with 40k, my first games of AoS were as part of a competition, namely the 1 day AoS Smash event the club held at the start of the year as a warm up to the SCGT. It was very good fun, though this was in the main down to it being my first public competition and because everyone there was so friendly and a good crack.

6 + 7 + 8 + 9. Other Game Systems

Totally failed to try out any of these games/rules. I did have an evening set up with Matt to try out KOW and/or ninth age rules but my wife fracturing her foot meant I had to curtail gaming in October. In 2017 I am likely to not enter the 40K competition which will give me plenty of time to try out some other gaming systems (he says).

So 60% complete looking at purely the numbers. Realistically the first and last items were the most important as whfb was and is my first love, so if I were weighting the list they would be allocated a higher percentage.

As a bonus, I also purchased, put together and painted (almost) a Beastmen army, ticking off one of my long term aims.

Going forward in 2017

Well with 2016 ‘briefly’ recapped it just remains to try and commit to some bits for the new year.

1. Lose some weight.

Only joking – happy with my weight and size. It just seems to the the first thing people say they will do and then fail miserably. Who am I to break with tradition!

1. Continue with whfb but get my wood elves onto the table (and possible the high elves).
2. Finish painting my dwarves. This means around 40 miners, 16 Quarrellers, a gyrocoptor, grudge thrower and crew, 2 doomseekers and a load of characters (3 runesmiths, 4 engineers, Bugman, a dwarf lord and the white dwarf on shieldbearers – in this case Bugman and Gotrek). I’ll ignore the raft of unit fillers I have lined up. Ok after  listing them out, it’s more than I first thought, so realistically i’ll be happy with completing the miners, quarrellers and the Gyro.
3. Continue painting my wood elves (you can see where this is going). Most are painted but I definitely want to finish the 3 hunters (being used as treekin), the 10 Wild Riders and flock the bases of most of my older models.
4. Continue painting my High elves (ok, ok, so I enjoy building models and not necessarily painting them). Quite a few are painted but I definitely want to finish the Sisters of Avelorn, the remaining 10 Phoenix Guard and the Lion Chariot.
5. Finish painting the Beastmen (10 harpies, 15 Bestigor, a Beastlord and Malagor to go, so this should be easily achievable.
6. Buy a house. Not at all gaming related but may definitely impact on it through time/stress. If we find the right place, I may even be able to finally move up all my other gaming stuff from storage at my folks (especially my legion of lead/white metal orcs and gobbos).
7. Continue the D&D campaign. The first session is already booked in so I can tick this one off already!
8. Try KOW. This will definitely happen in the first 3 months. I just need to book in a date. The more I read up on this the more I want to try it. I’ll probably be shot for saying this but in some ways the mechanics are similar to AoS, if only as each unit has a fixed value that is needed to be rolled to hit or to damage (rather than looking it up on a chart). The main difference (that matters to me) is that KOW is ranked unit combat rather than skirmish and that is why I have limited interest in AoS. Mike Carter from the Blog, Until Somebody loses an eye, has written an excellent article on switching from Warhammer to KOW.
9. Possibly try out Ninth Age rules. I was very much up for trying this out but after what seems like just a year of their version 1 being released, they are again revising the rules. Changing after such a short time period is putting me off slightly as it seems that there is potentially a lack of consistency. Either that or  after the initial beta the game was still rather unbalanced. (Although I do know that one of the changes with the next version is reducing the number of magic lores substantially – which is for the best as they went overboard last time with far too many).
10. Try Malifaux. We do have an official henchman at the club, so he should be able to hook me up with a game. I may still end up buying a starter set anyway as there are a few of the models that I really like (The Viktorias, Lady Justice and Lillith). You’ll notice a theme around the masters having swords.
11. Try one of the Starwars games (Armada or X-Wing). My preference is Armada, as who doesn’t want to use a Star Destroyer, however there have been a number of starter games of X-Wing at the club and a few of the chaps have already bought into that game so it may be the easier one to try (and potentially cheaper).

For optional bonus items, I would add the following but they may not happen.

12. Finish off several of my part completed armies. These include:

• Warriors of Chaos army. This is almost done, it just needs a few purchases (namely disc lord/sorcerer), perhaps a few more warriors.
• Vampire Counts. Again a few more purchases are needed to fill out the core and to cover raising up units – so namely skeletons and zombies. These will definitely be from Mantic.

13. Actually complete/build a number of the boxes purchased during 2016!

So will I achieve any of the above. I hope so but I’ll consider most of the items as a wish list. I really prefer not to use unpainted armies so painting priorities will be associated with what army I am planning to use.