At the Year’s Midpoint!

I have read one or two blog posts by fellow bloggers outlining how their first half of the year has panned out. It’s always interesting to read other folks’ take on our wonderful hobby I find, though it’s often salutary when you realise how much more they have squeezed into their half year than I have! But, never daunted, so here for any passing reader is my take on my half time situation.
Our hobby is rightly known as wargaming, not warpainting, so it’s only right to focus first on the games played, here in GHQ and over at Phil’s, otherwise ‘Olaf’s HQ’. Phil, Jon and I have played 26 games in the first half year, all but five or six though have been against Phil. Of those I have somehow won 13, drawn 6 and lost 6, with one game petering out into no result. By my modest performances in past years that is outstanding form! No doubt that will be rectified in the second half of the year though!

Probably, no, almost certainly on reflection, I spend far more time painting stuff than I do playing games with it, but then don’t we all. So far then I’ve manages to complete the painting, basing and varnishing of 389 figures, all of them in 28mm. If you look back through my blog for this year you will find out what genres I was working in, but from memory it would mostly have been Italian Renaissance Wars, the SYW and the AWI. The Italian Wars project lead to two articles in Wargames Illustrated, the second of which I believe is due in the next issue.

Although our hobby might sometimes seem a solitary venture, in reality for most of us it is a social pastime as much as anything else. Gaming aside that encompasses visits of all sorts: to walk battlefields; to visit manufacturers or hobby shops; and to attend Wargames Shows, or Conventions as our colonial cousins grandly style them. So far this year I’ve been to six Wargames Shows: ROBIN; Hammerhead; WMMS; Partizan; Phoenix; and the small local Tabletop Sale at Penkridge. Missing from the list is obviously Salute, a vastly overrated, overpriced and overcrowded event, not to even mention the ghastly lighting and the hard floor. I would take a lot of persuading to visit that again! I’ve also been over to Foundry twice, though the second visit was very disappointing stock and paint wise. I combined my visit to Hammerhead with an overnight stay in Newark and visited Caliver Books and Battlefront on the day before the show.

I’m more than pleased with how my hobby time has enriched my life in this half year. I don’t know what dark place I might have found myself in at times without my friends in the hobby or the refuge that it’s contributing activities provide. I’m hoping for more of the same in the months and years to come, not just for me and my friends, but for all of you who visit this corner of the blogosphere from time to time.