2016 Year In Review

2016 was another great year with a lot of my hobby time focused on Wargaming and less time spent on my R/C model airplane and woodworking hobbies. All three compete for my free time and I let my passions dictate which I focus on. This was definitely a great Wargaming year. The biggest 'bounty' of the year was the games. Including the two games I haven't posted yet, I played in 26 games this year. That's down two from last year's total of 28, but still an amazing amount of gaming.

The year started off with a bang with me doing a majority of this year's painting in the winter and spring months. All of my painting and purchases were in 28mm scale with totals all improved from last year. I painted 189 28mm figures (up from last year's 176). Purchased 28mm painted figures only totaled 38 this year, so I've done very well with the painted/purchased ratio! Subject matter focused about 2/3rds on ancients early in the year and the balance WWII towards the end of the year. My favorite unit of the year hands down is the Samnite colorful legion shown to the left. I'm quite satisfied with the quality of everything I painted this year, which is not always the case! I also completed nine WWII vehicles, seven British and two German. With local interest in the Iron Cross rules building, I expect a flurry of WWII painting and gaming activity to dominate the winter months this year.

Terrain and re-basing efforts this year were modest with only 20 stands re-based and only a single terrain piece created.  The one terrain piece is one I'm very excited about, a WWII German Freya Limber Radar array. This is a project that will be continued and eventually end up being a portion of a larger objective for the tabletop. On the drawing board is a generator for it, a concrete protective surround, and probably a dedicated radio bunker. I hope to include the radio antenna shown in this photo, which was a gift, scratch-built by my uncle.

In the 'regrets' column this year was a slow-down in my progress on my computer-moderated wargaming rules, the Electronic Brigadier. I hosted only three games using my rules this year, including one at Otto Schmidt's non-conventional convention, The Weekend, and one at Huzzah! 2016. The one game I had scheduled to run at our club ended up not going off due to low attendance that month. I've come to the point where I'm very happy with how the rules work for AWI, and now am preparing to enter what I expect will be the most challenging work on the rules - Napoleonics.  Possibly my satisfaction with the AWI period caused a bit of a period where I needed to catch my breath on the project after quite a sustained effort for almost 18 months. Standing in my way of continuing to work on the Napoleonic tuning is amassing enough figures to start doing some solitaire play and then eventually enough to run some play test games. The latter is less of an issue, since the club, and most of my play testers have significant collections that match mine, thanks to us all basing for Charlie's excellent Napoleon's Rules of War rules. Also on the slate is possibly allowing some friends access to the system to run their own AWI games in order to test the game master features a bit.

For 2017 (back to the future, get it?) my hopes are to continue with the current momentum painting 28mm WWII figures and vehicles to hopefully play some fun WWII games with Iron Cross. My other big goal will be to continue hosting Electronic Brigadier games at local conventions, my club's game nights, and hopefully some Napoleonic play tests in my basement.  This second goal will most likely mean more Napoleonic figures on the painting table and purchased.

I'd like to close by wishing everyone a Happy New Year with hopes that 2017 will be a year of happiness with much gaming, lucky dice rolls and productivity at the painting table.