With painting, I'm pretty pleased with my output for the year - I've tried some new things with my painting and (I think!) improved in some important ways. Just for fun, here's a dump of all my output:
First is Blackstone Fortress, which was actually huge for me in learning to enjoy painting one or two models at a time to a (pretty) high standard. Also, despite some rather pointed jabs from Primarch at the last games day
I have played it a bunch, just mostly not at the Nagoya games days.Heroes (for some definition of "hero" at any rate):
And enemies:
The other big output this year was Underworlds, which again is small batches of very different models, perfect for keeping my interest. This also definitely shaped up as my big game for the year - I've been playing a lot up in Ichinomiya - and has pretty strongly solidified into my favorite game, full stop.
Then some bits and bobs for 40K, basically an Inquisitor I'd bought the previous year and my Space Marine Heroes 3 plague marine kill team:
I've kind of been pulling (or been pulled) away from 40K post-NagoyaHammer, partly because I just like being able to play a bunch of easy-to-transport skirmish games in one sitting and partly because of my well-documented Ideas About Scale (to wit, that 28mm is fantastic for skirmishing but gets clunkier the more you try and scale it up). But I still have the smallmarine force I collected for Advanced Space Crusade, so playing is still on the table, as it were.
Age of Sigmar, too, was mostly focused on skirmishing (through WarCry) although I did get my Stormcast up to a solid 1000 points. I don't have a picture of the 5 stormcast I had to paint to get the latter, but here's what I did with WarCry in mind:
(These guys plus the Goblin warband for Underworlds make my go-to WarCry warband.)
Plus the terrain:
And some chaotic beasties:
And finally is Titanicus, which I was initially cool on because it invalidates / ignores my rather large and well-loved Epic collection, but the sheer awesomeness of the models and the really high quality of the game have brought me around.
So altogether that's, as my signature says, 59 models for the 28mm-scale 40K-iverse, 62 models for Sigmar, and 5 titans and 6 knights for Titanicus, plus odds and ends like terrain and spare weapons and such. I had a couple painting slump months, and titans require (but also reward) lots of careful effort which slowed me down a bit, but overall I'm extremely pleased with my output. On the other hand, I had a bit more spending money this year thanks to picking up some part-time lessons, which led to my backlog ballooning quite a bit. I'm trying to get that under control, and working through said backlog while limiting purchases is one of my goals for at least the first part of 2020.
I'm also pleased with how gaming went this year. I've been doing a bunch of gaming at a bunch of different venues (jus living right nearby helped
) and have found some games I really enjoy both painting and playing, and (importantly) other people who also want to play them. There are a couple games I might have liked to have played more, but that's the nature of how this hobby works as an adult with only monthly meetups. Shikata ga nai! Overall, a good year in hobby for Dave.
