State of the Tiny Tin Man: past

Yesterday was New Year's day (i.e. we have arrived at a certain arbitrary point in the orbit of the Earth around the Sun, which is customarily taken as the beginning of a new orbit and thus of a new year—enter party hats, fireworks and falling over on the front lawn hugging a Christmas ornament). This seems as good a point as any to look back to 2012 and forward to 2013 (it being dual faced January, after all) and go over my hobby accomplishments (or lack thereof :) ). This post looks back at 2012, the next will look forward to 2013 and detail the obligatory wildly unrealistic gaming plans for that year.


Two pages of my wargaming notebook, on the contents of which I based most of this post

Painting

2012 was not that good a year for painting. I totalled 210 Olley points, but fully half of them (107) were achieved in the last two months. Here's the breakdown:

January:   16 points
February:  16 points
March:     25 points
April:     12 points
May:       a vast absence of any painting
June:      a vast absence of any painting
July:      a vast ab… no wait - 2 points
August:    18 points
September: 2 points
October:   10 points
November:  50 points
December:  57 points

As a reminder, Olley Points were introduced by wargaming luminary Phil Olley as a means of tracking and predicting painting output. Classically, you assign one point to a painted infantry man, two to cavalry and extrapolate from that. For me, I more or less equate points to time, with one point being about three quarters of an hour of work—the time it takes me to paint a single 28mm infantry figure (The One True Scale) from bare metal to finished paint job.

As you can see, there was a big gap in painting output in spring and early summer. At that time, I was involved in a transition project at work which often meant working at night at home as well. And on those nights where I did not work I was usually too knackered to be bothered to paint. Luckily, Crisis in early November stoked the painting fires again, rescueing some of the year painting wise.

Games played

For wargames played 2012 was another strong year, with 20+ games of various shapes and sizes taking place, both at my place and at Phil's. Highlights include the many games with the Great Northern War and Napoleonic collections and the smash hit Antares 2401 narrative campaign at Phil's (I play Gamma Squad, Rattkopf's Jammers). We also played the first three games of the Raid on St. Michael mini campaign by CS Grant (set in the GNW), but that did not catch on as well as the Antares campaign.

Writing and blogging

I got two articles published in Battlegames Magazine (well, the first was 2011, but it was late enough to count as 2012 :) )—the Command Challenges in issues 27 (Malatitze) and 31 (By any means river crossing) are mine. The Schild en Vriend Plan for World Domination is coming along fine :). On the other hand, this blog was dying a slow death in the first part of the year, so much so that I considered retiring it. In the end, I moved the blog to its current home at Blogger which seems to have revived my post count a bit.

Projects

I did not find a blog post detailing which projects I would tackle this year, which is probably a good thing :). In 2012 I did not start a new project but steadily built up my existing ones, with more units for the Great Northern War Swedes and Russians, as well as Bavarians and Austrians for the Napoleonic collection. That last got a big boost due to the Crisis game this year, which focused on the crossing of the Stadtler Arm of the Donau during the battle of Aspern-Essling. The preparations for that game forced me to finish the basing of the existing units and paint up some new stuff. In addition to these horse and musket periods, I also worked on quite a bit of 1:300th WWII and modern scenery. But otherwise, no new projects were started, unless you count the embryonic mass battle fantasy which was kicked off with this trunk headed fellow.

On to 2013 in the next post!