Hobby Update 27 Mar 21

It has been a very quiet period for me in the hobby recently.  I won't lie, it has been a difficult time.  Since I am mainly a solo gamer, this hasn't been directly because of COVID and lockdown, but some of the secondary impacts have been big: less time and space around the house.  Added to that my partner returning to work, more pressure on my house as my children have gotten older, plus my own busy job, then it has been a struggle.  So, like many a gamer before me, my hobby has become more "thinking about gaming" rather than "gaming".  However, hope springs eternal and I am looking forward to that changing soon.

Unlike the first lockdown period, which was very productive for me hobby-wise, this latter period has been very slow for me.  What I have managed to achieve is:

Painting a SAGA Shieldmaiden Warband:

 

Picked these up a few months back on a real whim.  There are some really nice figures in there, which my painting definitely does not justice to, but here they are at the c.90% completed stage.

28mm Terrain Items:

Long-term readers of this blog may remember my aspirations to get my 28mm figures out more for a few more skirmish games, whether that be in Fantasy, Medievals, Napoleonics or Sci-Fi.  The main obstacle to this has been my lack of suitable terrain items beyond a few hills, trees and watercourses.  With that in mind, using some of the packaging from the bairns' Christmas presents and a very old copy of the Games Workshop Wargames Terrain book, I set about hacking together some very rough but serviceable terrain items.  I have concentrated on the SF stuff first, as you can see above.  The empty plastic bottle is used since I have vague aspirations of filling it for some games with some actual industrial-looking ooze! We shall see if that comes off...

6mm Prussians:

I noticed that there is a new 6mm figures manufactures, Grumbler Miniatures, who do Napoleonics.  I picked up some of their Prussians, and very nice they are too.  They are on the painting tray at the moment, so pictures as soon as they are finished. 

Test Games:

I have played the odd test game of this and that (this one is a WRG variant using a scenario from Just Jack's blog).  One of the takeaways from this is I must sort out some more ruined 6mm buildings, and some terrain for making better all round 'urban' environments (gardens, streets, graveyards, that kind of thing).  It wasn't really suitable for writing up into a blog post though, even by my standards!

Apart from that, tabletop gaming has been very spares, limited to a couple of Fighting Wings' air warfare games and some role-playing games - write-ups soon, insha'allah!

Going forward, I am hoping to get some more Gallic War campaign games completed in the next few days, perhaps even completing that campaign.  Then the plan would be to get some 28mm skirmishes done, and some WW2 games.  But, as ever, we shall see...