It is time for the annual retrospective on what I've played in the year and painted over the year. The wargaming stuff has been a bit hit and miss this year. We've had a few more holidays than last year, the Battlefield Society has taken up more time than anticipated, as has the new grandchild.
My plans for 2025 actually worked out. I did buy and paint figures for the First Opium War, and I did run a large refight or two in the first half of the year. I did also then order and start to paint figures for the Anglo-Sikh Wars, and good progress has been made on them. I didn't do anything further for the Northamptonshire Battlefields Society following on from the Edgcote booklet with allotted time being taken up on other things. I didn't publish any further rule sets, but I have done the first few sections of "From Pike to Bayonet", so may be we'll see them next year.
Right, lets get started on the hard data. Here's the tally of games and rules:
The numbers are down YoY, dropping from 97 to 89. I sort of expected this to happen, and it'd have been an even greater drop without that flurry of Dominion of the Spear in the last SHQ day. Perhaps I should log the actual numbers of hours spent wargaming rather than just the numbers of games.
The DBA numbers have fallen slightly:
But peaked? Probably not. If it hadn't been for the issues noted on the last blog, they'd have been slightly lower by a couple of games.
This might be because I didn't do a tournament this year, but as this chart shows the number of games as a percentage played is still rising:
Without the Dominion of the Spear games the percentage would be up again. I enjoy DBA, but I don't think I want over a third of my games to be DBA. However, it fits in with our group dynamic for now, enabling the newer members to get armies to the table without years of work. And it requires so little prep.
The percentage of games I run has fallen too, mainly because we now have two main venues and then Phil aiming to host once a month. Number of rule sets has nudged up slightly and periods are down, again slightly. For the second year in a row I'm not my favourite author, coming in second behind Phil Barker.
The painting tally shows signs of increase, although oddly for those who know me there's no soft plastics in there this year:
Nearly 500 figures! Actually, if you count the crew figures on the artillery at four each it's nearly 600, Blimey Charlie! I hadn't realised how many Opium/Sikh War figures I'd churned out this year. Really must get round to working out how I'm going to game those Sikhs. All of my reading is probably nearly a year old and has gone a bit stale. Likely to stay that way for a while as I've got to read a load of Wars of the Roses stuff for a variety of reasons.
And I need to re-read a load of early 18th century stuff for the "Pike to Bayonet" background.
Still, it's good to keep busy.
A lot of painting and a lot of gaming this year for you. Your painting totals surprised me too. Despite DBA dominance, you continue bringing much variety to the table. Well done! Do you foresee DBA continuing on as a dominant gaming theme?
ReplyDeleteI suspect that DBA will continue to dominate as long as Phil isn't fully fit. The figure painting numbers are good because most of the figures painted are simple poses and uniforms. A couple of 12 figure infantry regiments a week is easily achievable without breaking sweat if you use a simple technique and rely upon tinted varnish for the shading. Using acrylics and in 30 minutes for the previous colours to try, then back for the next bit. I've shortened the basis time too, by using hot melt glue to stick the figures on bases, so they don't need leaving overnight before using the basing material. That means the basing dries overnight, which shortens the elapsed completion time for a unit by about a day.
DeleteAn interesting read, good tallies of games and painted figures.
ReplyDeleteNot bad, was it? And I did some other stuff in the year too!
DeleteI'm impressed with the detail of your logging, very interesting. I suspect my game total thus year was also boosted by numerous Dominion games, but short of trawling back through my blog and adding everything up, I don't have any hard data.
ReplyDeleteHow do you think I compiled the numbers? I went and trawled through my blog posts. Only took an hour or so.
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