2018 - That Was The Year That Was

As 2018 draws to a close its traditional to look back on what a blogger has achieved; which of the goals set in the heady days of the beginning of the year have been met and which have been missed.  And possibly most interesting, which new projects sneaked up and were done (or at least started).
Last year about this time I set myself quite modest goals.  Did I meet them?  Let's go through each goal and see.

Paint Star Saga and Dreadball minis, no.  Despite getting the final chunk of stuff for Star Saga (and very nice it is too)  I haven't done any of this (actually I began a Nameless DZ force, but gave up when I couldn't get my colour scheme to work, nothing got finished), nor have I played Dreadball, though I did get in a game of Star Saga.

Finish (the current batch of) 15mm League of Rhordia for Kings of War, yes, though they met a terrible fate when the box fell out of the loft.  Not even the best magnetic basing is going to save that.  They aren't ruined, but so far I have found it too dispiriting to do much more than look at them.  Do 15mm Varangur for KoW, no.  some have been finished in their other role as Scythians, but I don't have a working KoW army yet.

D&D and terrain building; well, if you've read any of my recent posts you'll know that the long running 4th edition D&D game has finished.  I'm writing it up starting here.  I made a fair bit of terrain for it, and also painted some minis.  I also experimented with different sorts of floor plans, and although they have been used for my 5th edition group rather than the 4E games, I have at last made a set of Wylock style dungeon tiles.  I haven't posted about these yet, but the accompanying cave tiles are shown starting here.

I did build enough 15mm cottages etc to run a 15mm Dragon Rampant version of Bloodbath at Orc's Drift, and painted the elven force for the first game.  There are a few posts about it on the blog, here is a write up of the first battle, we haven't got any further than this yet!  I hope we can finish the campaign next year.  I also got a bit of terrain built for 15mm, altogether a satisfying year for this scale (apart from unexpected army drops).

I got the Battle Companies book, though so far I've held out against the new version of the rules.  I'd really like to read a good comparison with the old rules before I buy.
I painted a new Battle Company of orcs and got a couple of games in, but against dwarves I did so badly, and other new shiny stuff cropped up, that I haven't got any further with this.

I haven't touched my exEmpire/Kingdom's of Men stuff all year.  Maybe next year?

I did manage to get in more games though.  This was a big goal for me, as I did so much RPG that I hardly ever got any other gaming done.  In 2018 I did get at least one game per month, at least on averages.  This included finishing the Nexus Psi campaign for Deadzone, a whole day of Kings of War battles to play out a short, escalating three game campaign, several games of Kings of War Historical, including our small scale variant, Clash!, games of Star Saga and Dungeon Saga, Dragon Rampant, including the first of my DR adaptations of the classic Bloodbath at Orc's Drift campaign, a couple of games of Lord of the Rings Strategy Battle Game, some Frostgrave and a game of Vanguard.  There may well have been some more games as well, but since several of the above were more than one game, I certainly managed the 'one game a month' goal.

Now for the extras.  The foray into 15mm for DR somehow ended up with me collecting and painting a decent sized 15mm Greek force for Kings of War Historical.  With Merlin, who is now a writer on this blog as well, we came up with a framework for small sized KoWH battles that we called Clash!, and we have had several games of this and some larger KoWH battles.  We looked at the lists given in the rulebook and revised them somewhat based on our understanding of the type of game we wanted.  I have yet to show off this army, I'll get a post done on them soon (UPDATE; here).  As I mentioned above, I also finished some of my Scythians.  These make a quite powerful army in KoWH, especially against a largely infantry army like the Greeks.  They will eventually do double duty as KoW Varangur, once I've sorted out some infantry and heroes for them (I already have a monster or three).
I did a bit more for Frostgrave, and played that a bit too, though nothing major.
With the imminent arrival of Mantic's Vanguard skirmish system I painted up an orc force.  I've so far played one game, and hope to get some more in in the new year.

Kickstarter wise, Dreadball landed at the start of the year.  I loved this game in its first edition, though there were some balance issues, and a tendency for 'new team power creep'.  The new edition aims to address this, but I haven't yet (in nearly a year) played it.
Terrain Crate arrived, which focused my painting on that for a while, (I should class that as painting for D&D), but I still have far more to paint than I've finished.  It is very nice stuff, and the newer sets (including the special Vanguard objectives set) look great.
The textured roller KS also completed, I have one roller printed out so far, and the results look good.
I also got the Deep Madness game.  This took a long time to complete due to the massive popularity of the game. It looks fun, though I'll admit my main reason for backing this was for the minis which I intended to use in the 4th Edition D&D campaign.  That of course has finished, and we never got to the section that required hordes of mutated citizens.  I'll give the game a go though as I think it's my sort of thing, and its got a solo mode too.

A major change is my adoption of the five box system for organising my projects.  In brief it gives me a limited number of projects to work on, and I give myself permission to switch from one to another without feeling I've abandoned anything.  So far it seems to be helping a lot.

So, a fairly busy year hobby wise.  Looking back I am surprised I kept on track with so many projects, though I'm shamefully aware of the targets I neglected.  I've also got a few projects to go back to and photograph and post and things that I've shown part done that just want a catch up post.  Something for the start of next year I think.

If you want to see 2019s targets, check them out here.