2016

Final tally was 448 models:

Infantry 331, MI 26, Cavalry 12, Epic bases/vehicles 36, Monsters 7, Vehicles 7, WMs 2, Chariots 1 and Terrain 12.

Split by Game:

AoS 209, 30k 67, Saga 40, Guildball 37, Epic 36, Bolt Action 25, Darklands 24, Warmachine 6, Relic Knights 3, Bloodbowl 1.

As can be seen I’ve flitted around between games a lot this year and now have full armies for multiple systems as a result.  Despite that I’ve not actually been playing all that many games of anything.  AoS & 30k have been the two biggest and then a smattering of others.

• AoS I now have 4 different armies which I can put on the tabletop: TK, mixed chaos, Moonclan & Duardin.  A large chunk of what I did this year was the moonclan & duardin, both were existing armies from 8th which were getting updates to fit into AoS.  The mixed chaos is Skaven & Daemons, most was already painted so it was just rebasing this year but I did add a few bits (Stormfiends & Sayl).
• 30k was due to the Calth boxset, I ended up with 2750 pts of painted alpha legion.
• Saga was a club thing, I jumped in played about 4 games and fell off again due to work commitments ****** with the campaign that came out this year and I never picked it back up again.  It’s a fun enough game but didn’t utterly grab me.
• Guildball is a little misleading as there are 16 bits of terrain in that number.  I painted up 8 bits of fast ground and 8 rough ground to have available for tournaments under my guise of pundit.  Actual models I painted up 21 which was 2 new teams and a smattering of the season 2 releases for the other teams I owned.
• Epic I typically throw in as my January painting project to get me off to a good start as you can churn out a decent volume of models with minimal effort and this is despite not playing epic for over 20 years.
• Bolt Action was a purchase whilst I still wasn’t sure about AoS, I’d actually intended to pick up a fully painted army but what I got had a bunch of incomplete/unpainted models so I brought it all up to a standard but haven’t played a single game with it.
• Darklands was an early in the year interest project that has seriously waned, hopefully it’ll pick back up again when some more models arrive through the various KS’s I have outstanding.  I’ll be going for the Albainn & Erainn factions which have some lovely humans.
• The Warmachine was just finishing off a unit I started painting 5 years ago.  I quite like picking up a model and doing it every so often for old projects to see what takes my interest and the same went for relic knights, I’d hoped to get the motivation to paint all my relic knights doctorine faction just to have it done but no such luck they simply didn’t grip me this year. Finally a solitary bloodbowl figure was the start to my painting up a skaven team that I only bought because I ended up TOing an event I dropped out of due to uneven numbers and then was bored mid round!

The other significant thing about the number of models I painted this year surrounds my running total.  I’ve been tracking what I paint since 1 Jan 2011, which between then and 31 Dec 2016 is a total of 2,192 days.  In that time I have painted 2,226 models.  Which nicely works out at an average of more than 1/day over a 6 year period!

2016 Resolutions Checklist

• 30k – paint my alpha Legion – 2750 points painted and taken to a group meetup. Success
• Saga – paint warband – 6pt saga warband painted and played with/. Success
• Darklands – a lot of this is KS and has yet to turn up, that said there are a stack of models in a box which I’ve yet to do anything with.  But I did paint and play with my Khthones this year. Partial success.
• Old School Dwarfs – Rebased, played at SCGT, ruined by proposals to ban legacy (now compendium) scrolls, probably wont see the table again. Success
• Epic – paint some orks.  Instead I painted some marines but never finished the force.  Partial success
• Guildball – Paint S2 models.  I did the extra models for union, alchemists, butchers but didn’t pick up any of the new mascots and haven’t painted the second Engineer captain yet.  But I did paint 2 new guilds instead.  Success
• Rivet Wars – This one was a bit of a tack on and I’ve never found the time to put brush to model for them.  Fail.
• Frostgrave encounters – Use some of my reaper bones stuff for monsters.  Never touched them. Fail.

2017

So what’s up for this year, resolution time!

1. No not aim to paint 1/day, instead I’m going to try and paint some individual models to a higher standard, probably targeting something like 26 good quality models. (1/fortnight).  That’s not to say I won’t paint a load of other models around these but my objective will be the better stuff.

2. Stop buying tonnes of junk I’ll never play with! I’ve curbed my KS habit in the last 6 months only backing Roots of Magic (9 models) because it’s a small independent KS making some very nice models on a shoestring budget.

3. This is one I’ve not quite settled on yet – Sell off some of my armies. With the changes to AoS I basically won’t use a large chunk of my WFB stuff ever again so it doesn’t really make sense to hold onto it all.  Also there are a bunch of games I’m unlikely to actually play, do I really need to keep stuff for them or should I just get rid.

4. Paint a ‘concept army’.  For those that don’t know this is a big thing in AoS at the moment, basically it means not to paint a colour scheme but to paint a theme eg ethereal, sin city etc.  In reality what many people have done is spray one colour, wash and drybrush their models and call it done which usually just looks like a half assed rush job.  I want to do it properly.

5. Finish some projects – 30k Alphas have a few models o/s, Relic Knights, Epic Marines, various AoS armies.  I don’t want to be fully painted at the end of 2016 but I want to be able to say “I have no more of [x] to paint”.