The year in review, and the year ahead

Failure is important. Failure makes us stronger. And it is for that reason that I took the important step of failing to achieve any of my 2015 resolutions. Well ok, with regards to Goal 6, "collect more McDeath miniatures", I did buy a couple more and I've even painted up Arka Zargul and a handful of miners:

But the progress other people have made on their McDeath projects puts my slowly slowly approach to shame. (And have you seen the stupid prices McDeath stuff is going for nowadays?)

I have a reasonably good excuse for my failure, as excuses go. A lot of my new years resolutions were tied up with going to BOYL in the summer - and then it turned out that I wasn't able to make it. Instead, I went to work in Mongolia - and even managed to get a couple of games in out there with my son!

More generally, though, I got a fair bit of gaming in during 2015. My gnomes got their first outing just after the new year; 3 games of the "Warlord Paul presents..." series of adventures in Albion (see battle reports here and here), and even a couple of games in November and December that I haven't had the chance to write up yet. In terms of painting, what I lack in terms of quantity of output, I made up for with a lot more diversity in previous years: humans, gnomes, dwarves, elves, undead, fimir, and even an Ambull.

As I was just saying in the comments section, one of the nicest things about this kind of narrative gaming is the opportunity it gives to collect and paint up a range of quirky figures. If you're just collecting 2,000 point armies, or whatever, there's no room in your plans for the wandering monster, or the sobbing peasant wiping tears from his eyes with a dirty hankie. Whereas since I've got into this style of gaming, I've massively diversified my collection.

So I'm going to go for a streamlined set of new years resolutions. Just 3 in fact:

1) Get my Sea Elf army into shape

This was my number one goal last year, because the sea elves were what I was planning on taking to BOYL for the nautical fun and games there. No BOYL, no motivation for progress. But I really want to have this army ready for me to use, it would give me a lot more flexibility for future gaming. So this will be the year I get it done. Honest.

2) Play more games with my son

My son seems ready for a few more games with toy soldiers, and we want to continue the story we started at Labger. He's instructed me on what he wants painted up for the next game, so watch this space. Might get him doing some painting too.

3) Paint up a Frostgrave warband and play some frostgrave with OGRE

Frostgrave seems to be spreading around the oldhammer community like an outbreak of norovirus. I got a copy of Frostgrave for Christmas, and I'm very excited. I've chatted with Whiskey Priest and he's putting together a warband too, so we hope to get started with a campaign relatively early in the new year. I'll be posting on the oldhammer forum in the next few days to try and make plans with the rest of the OGRE.gamers.

Happy new year to all, and best of luck with your plans in the year ahead!