Review of 2012

No posts since November, eh? Whoops. I didn't mean to let that happen, but Christmas turned out to be hard work! Hopefully, normal service can now resume.

So let's kick off with the post I wanted to write in December, but obviously didn't. At the start of last year I wrote some hobby resolutions, so I should see how well I managed to keep them before I set some more for this year.

I'll take them one by one and see what happened...

1) I will get Flashbang to "Triples Standard"
Well, that certainly didn't happen. I did do some terrain painting for Flashbang, but then got a bit sidetracked and moved onto other things. I'd still like to do this, but as an intermediate step I have some plans for a multiplayer Flashbang scenario I'd like to get ready for a club night.


2) I will only buy models and books when I need them (or when faced with an offer I can't refuse!)
I think I did fairly well here. Admittedly I came away from Vapnartak and Triples with a few goodies, but I think all of those either fell in the categories of "things I needed" or "offers I couldn't refuse". I went a bit wrong by buying some "not-predators" which I intended to turn into a faction for Flashbang but never actually did anything with.
To be fair though, what with the house move and baby and everything, I didn't really get much chance to make any truly foolish purchases. I'm going to try to stay sensible this year, but we'll see what happens as I start to get a bit more freedom back.

3) I won't be afraid to spend money on wargaming
Difficult one, this. I can't really say whether I was afraid to spend money on my hobby or not, because I didn't have any to spare this year! I don't think I stopped myself buying anything because of the cost, but I did shy away from quite a few things because I didn't expect to have time to get them ready to use, which is a shame. Unfortunately, time is one thing I'm not expecting to have much of in 2013, so this situation isn't likely to get much better this year.

4) I will get my Napoleonics started!
That happened even less than the Flashbang thing. I did play a game of General du Brigade at the club over Christmas though, which has given me a bit of inspiration to finally get on with this. I think I'm going to have to tackle them in small stages, but more on that later.

5) I will prepare at least two armies for each of the games I play
I still like this idea, and I didn't do terribly at it - I now have a second painted force for Saga in the form of my Normans. I really do want to use these to try to lure in some muggles into trying some wargames, so we'll see if I that works in due course.

6) I will build up a collection of terrain
This is at least underway - I've certainly bought more terrain over the last year, but a lot of it isn't ready for the table yet. I do now have space to play (smaller) games at home though, so there's more incentive to get this done, and I'd like to be able to take terrain to the club as well. The only terrain I did any work on last year was for Flashbang, so it would be good to spread my wings a bit.

7) I will keep blogging and setting targets
This one I carried on with as much as possible, but I have to admit that I stopped setting myself targets in the blog as the "Tale of Gamers" project died down. Having the targets was a nice incentive, so I'm going to go back to that, although I might approach it in a slightly different way - I'm going to have a think about that.

Overall then, hardly an unqualified success - I think there's about four out of seven that I at least did something towards. I think I was being a bit overambitious when I set these, but maybe that's a good thing. In any case, hopefully I can do better for 2013 - starting with some better resolutions, which will be posted here as soon as I decide what they are. Stay tuned!