Im a little later than usual with my end of year hobby review post, but at least I'm here now. Welcome to my annual hobby ramble!
I actually had a really good hobby year in 2023. I joined a new gaming group at the start of the year, so I've been gaming a lot more than I normally do.
They're a great bunch of guys and I've had some really fun games, including participating in a 40k League and trying to introduce them to smaller games like Middle Earth and Heresy.
On the whole it's been pretty successful and I've had a blast. It's also given me a huge boost to my mental health and a good excuse to get out and be more sociable, so I consider that a win all round.
I'm honestly little shocked at just how much I've been playing. I've always been far more of a hobbyist than a gamer, but it's been rather excellent getting out and getting some serious gaming in. In previous years I was able to get one game a month if I was lucky. 2023 saw me play 55 games. That's an average of more than one a week!
It did feel like I'd gotten less stuff painted as a result though, as I've been playing instead of painting on my main night off every week. Turns out though that when I gathered everything together for a photo, I was very wrong:
That's a pretty massive chunk of hobby progress!
I still thought it was a bit less than previous years, but it turns out I'd pulled out 454 points of hobby progress, which was actually a few points up on last year. I guess I'm just really crap at judging these things!
I guess I was a little fooled by the fact I've been working on a lot of points-heavy big things, but I certainly won't complain. All hobby progress is good progress!
It has helped that I've been trying to only game with fully painted models whenever possible. There's nothing like wanting to try something new to give me the push to crank out some fresh models!
So moving on, where am I going in 2024? Well I've decided to keep it simple this year. At least to begin with I want to get a few existing projects finished, like my 30k Emperor's Children and Imperial Fists, as well as keep working on my Old World armies.
That latter one is likely to occupy most of my immediate attention, especially with pre orders having been announced. I'm just so excited to have Warhammer Fantasy back!
I reckon most of January will be consumed with mass production of Orcs and Gobbos. I've got a good method down for them now, so I should be able to zoom through a ton of them, it's just a matter of putting in the time.
I'm kicking myself a little at having let my Old World projects slip so much, even though I've known the game is coming for four years. I was hoping to have a couple fully playable armies ready to go for launch, but now I'm running out of time, especially as I know a lot of the local players are chomping at the bit to dive in with it.
I've just got to try and play catch up as best I can. At least it'll keep me busy and motivated!
Apart from that, i just want to generally focus on getting stuff done for a while. I'm quite comfortably in positive painting points now, but my backlog is still pretty ridiculous, so a bit of a pause on model buying outside of Old World makes a lot of sense for a few months. Quite honestly, I could probably not buy a single model for the next few years and still not run out of stuff to be working on!
The first few months of the year is normally a good time for me to focus on my backlog anyway, as the hours at work go way down, so I don't have a huge amount of disposable income. It also gives me more free time for hobby, so it just makes sense to focus that for a little while.
Whatever I end up doing, I do want to try and post on here more regularly. I'm fully aware that in 2024, hobby blogs are a pretty dead form of media. Social media is definitely where it's at for online hobby. There's something very satisfying about maintaining this blog though, so I want to keep it going as long as I can, even if noone's really paying attention to it.
So that's it for this year's round up. It's a little less structured and wandering than usual, but you don't come here for concise thoughts anyway, so it's all good.
Have a fantastic 2024 and I'll catch you all soon!
