That End Of Year Post - 2024 Edition

   How do I start this review without going back to something I think I say every time, what a weird year. I knew the gaming side of this year would be a bit of a struggle with another baby under one but just as I was about to get back into my stride with evening gaming as he started to go to bed more easily and was starting to sleep through, my regular gaming venue at Wayland Games shut their games hall*. This has resulted in the lowest amount of games played since my records began. It also resulted in the size game being played being much smaller as well as we played games to fit the time we had rather than setting aside big chunk of time - which was an interesting thing to see.

   It was also my 3rd lowest count of models painted in a year since I started collecting data in 2014, as my hobby time just did not survive contact with child number 2 and day job workloads. It was also my 3rd lowest year in terms of models bought, which is a good thing for my struggling backlog. Weirdly, it was also my second lowest amount of books read as well.

*officially they plan to open their new site for gaming in April but rumours are suggesting that is incredibly ambitious, so for the moment I am a gamer without gaming space 

I plan on keeping my aim ridiculously simple for this year as I keep doing big complicated plans that inevitably fail, so this year I aim to;

1. Play 12 games - this was almost 12 wargames but ultimately I just need to keep doing some gaming - Success, but not by the sorts of numbers I've done in recent years

2. Get the unread folder on my kindle below 400 books - I built up a massive backlog on purpose but it would be good to get it to a manageable level. - This one started badly, in the first two weeks of the year I read 4 books and bought 7, and then got dramatically worse in April when 120 Battletech novels went onto Humble Bundle, so I actually ended the year with a bigger backlog than I started with

3. Buy less than I paint - that old classic that I usually fail - I actually succeeded on this one due to a technicality, however, due to presents and free sprues on magazines etc my backlog is actually higher despite me painting more figures than I actually bought

   As I've tried to do in recent years, here is a single photo from every game I've played. I quite enjoy this bit of my yearly review, and with most of my games being in the first half of this year, its been even more interesting for me.

Naval game at the start of the year using ships supplied my Neil.

This game was a test of 1. Whether I could get out in the evenings again at this point. 2. Whether I should.

Answers: 1. Yes. 2. Not really.

And yes, that's me in a world of pain in the photo.

In a last minute trip to Waylands, Steve and me played a few rounds of a game I backed on Kickstarter years ago - Nickelodeon Splatt Attack. The one in the photo was the Teenage Ninja Turtles vs the Rugrats. This turned out to be a really fun game and one that I think will be even better with 4 players.

A cheeky Saturday afternoon game in February where I took my Ultramarine Dreadnought list out for a try, earning their first win since 2019. I enjoyed this game but I'm still not a fan of Heresy 2rnd edition.

A couple of games of Dark Age Lion Rampant - Vikings vs Shieldmaidens

A couple of games in a row of Genestealer Cult vs Space Marines in combat patrol

My Deathwatch combat patrol got its first outing against Steve's Sisters

The Swarm!

A game of Bolt Action against my brother. It was meant to be in the desert but neither of us have finished that project yet.

Below are the 3 games from the 40k Combat Patrol tournament I went to at Wayland Games where I came second with my Genestealer Cult.

A 1500 point game against my brother the weekend after the tournament

A 1500 point game against Steve's Sisters of Battle

A 1000 point game after I forgot to pack a knight for Steve to borrow. Monster list.

A 3 player combat patrol game at Warhammer World with my brothers using my Eldar

Game using the new codexes (GSC and Sisters of Battle) plus a knight

Minor skirmish out side the village of Much-Wavering during the War of Three Kingdoms.

D&D at a friends house - second game in the campaign with guys who had never played a roleplay game or wargame before. Yes the Haribo are the monsters and, yes, we ate them as we killed them.

After a gap of a couple of months I then played an intro game for a mate who has been desperate to get into 40k but had no idea where to start. This ended up being my last game at the Hockley Waylands.

A game set in the Anarchy at my mate Neil's house - it was good to get this on the table.

A combat patrol game set at the start of the new campaign. More games were planned on the day but were stopped due to toddler interest.

Doubles combat patrol versus my brothers on an impromptu day off. I played an army on each side, which was complicated.

A game of TANKS round my mates house as a test for his show game next year. A really simple set of rules that we last tried in 2017 and I remember hating them, but I did enjoy them this time.

   With 2024 now done and gone, lets look at 2025. What are my plans/aims and how do I want to tackle them?

   Ultimately, I need to be realistic. Unless I can sort out my gaming space and organise some games, I'm looking at a slow year for gaming until Wayland Games Venue 2 comes online (in the summer?) and then I need to see if my old regular opponents are still interested. So my games target will be low.

   Then my backlog, this just cannot keep rising. I need to nip it in the bud and start clearing models, either selling or painting, then really slow down what I am buying to an absolute minimum. If I can clear some space, then maybe I can play games in my hobby shed?

   Scenery - this is one of the big aims I want to look at this year. I need to tidy up my boxes of scenery and add where needed. Instead of panicking before a game and grabbing stuff to make a board, lets have boxes ready to go. If I'm not going to be playing many games, lets make each as good as it can be. Thinking of giving myself 2 months per project to tidy, buy, craft and paint as needed, but knowing some projects might be quicker.

    Army backlog - I've got a lot of armies that I've painted over the years that just haven't seen the table yet, which sounds much worse now I've written it down than it did in my head. Mostly this is because since Covid and kids I've had more painting time and less gaming time, with the same few armies being used more regularly or some armies just not being completed far enough to be usable. 

1. Play 20 games - keep it low.

2. Complete 6 scenery projects - then for bonus points, play a game with each.

3. Finish the year with less models in my backlog than I started with.

4. Play games with 10 armies that I've not used.

Thanks for reading and a happy new year

The Sacrificed Sons

   One of the things I don't think gets picked up on enough my most Horus Heresy players is the wide mix of chapter markings that a heresy legion can show. While there isn't much of an ability to canonically make up your own colour scheme for a space marine legion - unlike 40k where you can go nuts and still fit the fluff - there is a fair bit of wiggle room.

   There are a few legions where the legion badge changes across the chapters - pretty sure Word Bearers and Iron Hands are good examples of this, plus loads of examples of extra badges being worn by chapters that became the basis of 40k chapters during the second founding. My 30k Ultramarines have always relied on this with the Unicorn badge on being put on all my tanks as a supplementary icon and my Sons of Horus had always been planned to have something similar.

   I've mentioned before on this blog that my Sons of Horus army is made up of the 523rd Expeditionary Fleet which itself was made up of the 56th and 84th companies. As I lost so many games and didn't use any of the elite troops allowed by my faction, it became a bit of a joke amongst my mates that my army was probably where the Warmaster sent those units that failed him as a punishment to do those jobs he didn't want to waste regular marines on - thus the name The Sacrificed Sons was born.

   I had been fishing for an idea for a badge to add to my units before I contacted a company in the US who's whole business was custom designed decals, who I had been recommended by a friend. Not having kids, I paid an extortionate amount of money for them to do the service and send me a few sheets of the design for my models and I got on with everything else. Over the course of 6 months or so I sent the odd email just to see how it was going and got something along the lines of "you are next in line, you'll get a design to check next week". Eventually emails stopped being replied to and Facebook messages were ignored before I got fed up and just asked for a refund. The last reply I got from them was them saying I was actually next in line, attached the design they had created and gave me a refund but that any future orders would just be cancelled.

   Over the next few years I tried printing them myself using various printers and just couldn't get something I was happy with. I then ordered a sheet of decals from a guy in Germany which included an image I sent him (my August Lions logo) which has applied beautifully to my model's shoulder pads. So, one day I was out and about when I had a "why not" moment and just messaged him with the logo the US company had sent and asked if he could print me a sheet of various sizes so I could test it on my models.

   The guy replied that while the design was nice, the pixel quality just wasn't good enough to print and there were some small details that just wouldn't survive, would I mind if he tweaked it. He then sent me 4 options, a fixed version of the original, then 3 where he'd tried to improve it and one of these was the one I picked.

   I've applied the logo to a couple of figures to test out the concept before I order more so I have enough to do everything I plan to use them for. I was fairly confident it would still look bright on the green of the SoH but it was the black pad of the Chaos Marine that I wasn't as confident of, but it looks bright enough to me.

I have a lot of figures to apply these decals to now

Thanks for reading

Scenery Project 1 - Fields Of White Gold

   One thing I plan to lean into heavily next year is sorting my scenery collections out. I suspect I won't be playing many games in 2025, so I'd like to get each of them to be as good as I can. The first project I'm going to focus on is my desert scenery as I have a few gaming projects that need that to be up and running.

   I'll be calling Project 1 "Desert Scenery" but that covers a lot of sins, this could be the full on deserts to arid grassland and fields, some of this scenery can work for the Mediterranean as well as Palestine and North Africa, so I want choices of items that I can place on a table to suit the area the game is supposed to be taking place.

   One thing I wanted to add was fields for those areas that aren't just sandy desert and on my list to do last time I made "desert scenery" was cotton fields. I've been trying to work out how to do this for a few years now, but recently I had an idea I wanted to test out.

This is what the internet says fields of cotton in Afghanistan look like, so I had something to work from.

   My test piece of scenery before I try to mass produce them in the new year. Material wise its just a place mat, door mat cut up and some white foliage flock but I'm pretty pleased with the outcome. I didn't want to make multiples of this so I could cover a bit area of table and then decide the idea looked terrible.

   The gap between rows is eyeballed to about right to put 25mm bases flat on the ground with some slight deviations from this. Blocks of infantry can just be sat on top.

All in all, I'm pleased with my test piece, I just need a new source of place mats as I always bought mine from Wilko . . .

Thanks for reading

The Duke Of Norfolk Arrives

   I'm all over the place at the moment with my projects* but I had a two and a bit hour drive for work and for some reason my brain decided it wanted to stress over why I hadn't started my War of the Roses Yorkists from a planned purchase in 2020(!). As I normally do for a historical period, I bought enough figures to do about 24-30 points for both sides, with a slight weight towards the army I thought I would end up using more often as I know I have an opponent who would be painting those up.

*as per

   Back in 2022, I ended up stealing some figures from this project to get my Lancastrians up to a slightly bigger than planned points size for a couple of games and while I've not replaced those figures yet, I do have enough in this backlog to get an army on the table, and the more I think about this project the more I want to get a game in in 2025**.

**Hopefully, Wayland Games 2.0 comes online asap

   I've gone back through my notebooks and collection of Freezywater flags for the Towton period of the war and it looks like I didn't have an exact plan on who I was going to painting and had a list of options. I then initally decided to paint the Earl of Essex's livery on my troops, but with it being Green and Black, it is a tad close to my main Lancastrian colours, so I've decided on the Duke of Norfolk with it's plain Red.

   This is my first batch which is a single sprue of troops made up of 8 archers and 4 billmen. There will be a couple more batches of these and then I can start on the various sprues of foot knights. Not looking forward to having to replace my mounted knights but that's a separate issue.

Thanks for reading

Sons Of Horus Legion Imperialis

   Having been given the starter box for Legion Imperialis for Christmas (2023) and then having planned to get some test games in as early in the year as I could manage, here I am towards the end of 2024 without having played any games*.

*its been a bit of a year

   I had been planning something Horus Heresy in this scale for ages - I've had a mate print some epic scale marines in the past but could never do something I was happy with. After reading the novels and playing a lot of 30k, the scale of the 32mm game just never felt right. The heresy is about companies of marines, with big support vehicles bashing it out, while the average pick up game of 30k tends to be a Primarch or Preatorian with an elite bodyguard and a squad or two in support, I've seen 3000 point games (about as big as you can do on a 6/4 table) with less than 30 figures a side. LI means you can have 100+ figures a side and still be playing a small game**

**plus multiple titans without needing to re-mortgage

  I've been painting these on and off all year without getting very far, so with Christmas coming up fast, I thought I had better get moving. It turns out they are really hard to photograph, but the green is a touch brighter in real life and matches my 28mm Sons of Horus. I'm compromised on the colour scheme slightly - I am never going to manage a brass trim on the shoulder pads with my eyesight but the big block colours are in place and I think they look about right when viewed from my 3 foot standpoint. 

   I have based to match my Adeptas Titanicus stuff as they will be used in this game as well.

Command base and Terminators

9 bases of Tactical Marines - using a spare command to bulk up

The specialists - Plasma squad, Missile squad and Assault Marines

Contemptor Dreadnoughts

Squadrons of Predators and Sicarans

   What I have painted is just the Space Marine side of the starter box and by all accounts online I need at least double the amount of infantry just to keep stuff on the board in a regular game - although the advice seems to be 3 or 4 times this really. My aim at this point is just to have two matched sides to actually play a game before I start bulking up - far better to have an achievable aim to play than unachievable and never try.

While I was at it I did a test base of trees just to fill a board quickly. While the trees are probably out of scale - possibly better suited to a 15mm figure size - I don't hate the idea and I will mass produce a few more bases of these as well as really start the buildings.

This stuff does not photograph well. . .

Thanks for reading

Big Gunned, Chaos Chicken

   While we aren't doing much in the way of gaming I wanted to try and make sure the combat patrols for the Chaos 40k campaign were ready to go at a moment's notice. Then I could start working on the stuff for bigger games knowing I had a bit more time to do them.

   The Sentinel walker was the last model I needed for my Traitor Guard, so I had to get it moving. It's been built, sprayed and washed, sitting on my painting desk for a couple of months while I tried to decide how to tackle it. In the end, I just put a picture of one on the screen and went in with my gun metal paint for the joints as this broke the big stretch of desert yellow up allowing me to get past my mind block.

   I then added loads of red decals from the Chaos Knight sheet to look like hand painted glyphs, again to break up the single colour. I did this at a much earlier stage than I normally would, again, as I just needed to not have a model in a single block of colour.

Now its been leaked that the new Guard combat patrol is completely different . . .

Thank for reading