Review of 2019

It must be in my Presbyterian ancestry to torture myself by looking at last year's resolutions and seeing if I had actually fulfilled any.

You can find the post from January 2019 here but in summary:
1.       Finish those cuirassiers – this is the priority as there is a hard end date for these!
2.       Start planning projects – decide in advance what’s wanted and needed and to what purpose
3.       Finish projects – maybe I can break the habit of a hobby-time and finish something!
4.       Play more games.

So how did it go? Well those cuirassiers definitely got finished:

And even better used at the Great Game.

Planning hasn't really happened, still randomly pushing out stuff from Napoleonics to Ancients to both flavours of Warhammer. Naturally this plays into resolution 3 in that much remains incomplete.


But 4 has been the real surprise. Thanks to a chance meeting at Carronade in Falkirk I have played maybe 20 games this year. These have included Black Powder, Battle Group, Erehwon, Gaslands and Chain of Command. Even managed to do some retro board gaming via Escape from Colditz.


I've also done a bit of solo gaming, mainly Blackstone Fortress which has an excellent card driven AI which has thus far frustrated my attempts to discover the Fortress' secrets. Something to aspire to in 2020 (well I have to have some ambitions...)

Celts

These are from the Warlord Hail Caesar starter set. I completed the Romans sometime ago and they've been kicking their heels in a plastic box for a couple of years.
Thirty completed... another thirty to go to finish the set (I bought a load more when I visited Warlord HQ last year).

The ravening hordes

Musician

 

Warrior

 

Clearly these guys spent all their spare non-fighting time down the gym

 

Contrast Paints - Second Try

Basically I'll buy anything with Star Wars on it. Yes, I am part of that huge cadre of middle aged men who keep George Lucas's pension fund nicely topped up.

Naturally, I was quick to purchase Fantasy Flight Games' miniature skirmish game Legion. Very quick - in fact I did so from a departure lounge in Charles de Gaulle airport. The miracle of the internet where I can watch all my money dissipate from my bank account app and into the paws of Amazon execs.

Another group whose pension pots I regular contribute to.

Then the usual happened; the game arrived, sat with cellophane un-peeled for a number of months whilst I purchased the odd supplement and read about how wonderful it was on the internet.

One of these supplements were Death Troopers, the black clad, bully-boy, special forces types from Rogue One. Like the base set they sat unmolested for months, black is a hard colour to paint and rather tedious to my mind. Then the miracle of Contrast arrived; eventually GW produced enough Black Templar paint to sate initial demand and the results are below:

The full squad

NCO

Trooper with pistol

These were so easy, once primed I don't think I spent more than an hour on them. Quick splash of Black Templar, dry brush some metal on the gun; finally base the green and red lights in white and then an appropriate GW technical paint to get the reflection.

Contrast Paints - First Try

In June, the day after the Great Game finished I wandered into Games Workshop (I can't quite train my brain to think Warhammer) in Glasgow and picked up a few of the new Contrast paints to give them a go.

I've always liked the idea of Imperial Fists as a legion except for the unfortunate fact that they are yellow. Yellow and I don't get on, it has a habit of going green at the merest hint of brush contamination and even when it works it's either so dull as to be anonymous or so effervescent it dominates the pallet.

So here was a chance, not shading, no highlights just slap it on is what GW said. The result is below.

The yellows and browns are Contrast paints, the metals and red traditional acrylics and washes.

I'll have more thoughts on Contrast in a later post.