2026 Goals Check

As I am waiting for my hobby funds to recharge for The Forest project, and am currently vacilitating between my remaining major painting projects - Quar/ECW/Greece/Japan - I thought I'd stocktake where I'm at with my hobby goals.

Terrain. 'Create 3 store-able terrain sets.' Exceeded - Blood Bowl pitch, dungeons, forest, 15mm WW2 ruins. Plus found and painted various ladders, barrels, fences - with some sci fi furniture out on the paint bench.

Thoughts: Terrain is a huge 'blocker' - not of line of sight, but as a preventer of projects. I.e. building sci fi terrain to allow myself to play Zone Raiders also inspired me to paint and use my 40K miniatures and launched my d12 KillFinity Team project which has been my most fun this year. Building a forest for my medieval STALKER project also unblocked my French Indian Dino Wars projects. Each time I built new terrain, it spawned a whole lot of new painting and rules projects. "If you build it they will come"

This has made me really aware of how I can unblock other unused projects. My Japanese project will probably get suitable buildings, and I'll add some cherry trees to my forest selection. I'm going to make some "Greek/Roman" columned ruins to inspire ancient projects. 

I don't super enjoy terrain building. Like buying paints and brushes it is kinda the 'job before the job' - e.g. I don't mind mowing but I do dislike changing mower blades and oil filters before I start.

But I've realized terrain (and storing it) is pretty integral to my hobby momentum - inspiring painting and working on projects - and overall enjoyment. 

 

 I try to do something hobby related each day. Today some ECW miniatures got based...

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Minis. 'Assemble 50 models or two warbands from spare/unused sprues.' Yep - easily with various 40K, ECW, fantasy and medieval minis. 'Buy minis for existing project' - yep, I bought some Dark Eldar and Mechanicus once all my old 5th ed 40K stuff was painted* for KillFinity, and some reptoids for my French Indian (+dino) Wars. *Except orks. I hate painting those guys.

Thoughts: Having a big selection of sprues (bitz box) can conversely help remove waste - by buying some new Frostgrave and WA boxes I could use their spares parts to convert previously unwanted miniatures. I cleared my backlog by buying more!

The lesson I learned was sometimes you need to spend a bit more to 'unblock' a project. Which is why I now own 25 or so Bloody Miniatures ECW - to inspire me to revive my rather bland Warlord ECW rank-and-file... 

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Rules. 'Design and play-test one new home-brew system.' Success! d12 KillFinity (a mash-up of a simplified Infinity using d12s; a flavour of old-school Kill Team with a bit of a BLKOUT vibe) was really fun to play with my kids and it's one of my favourite homebrew sets. 

One goal was to 'print out and review existing old-school OOP rulebook or free indie set.' I feel Mordheim counts so yes. Also have printed the new Quar (free) rules.  

I have not 'bought one new rule book that works for existing minis/project + one new rule book that just looks cool.' .......That's because I refuse to play $25 for a pdf or +$30 postage for a book. Wait - I did get Acolyte, Grimdark Future and Planet 28 so they must have either been cheap or free. I got Symbaroum (RPG!) - thanks Humble Bundle - as it seemed uncannily like my Forest project (I can steal ideas.)

I have not  'revised and playtest 3 out of my many sets of homebrew rules.' That's because KillFinity and The Forest projects have eaten so much time. But my son is reminding me about our "World of Tanks/Tankmunda/Tankhiem" post apocalyptic-tank-RPG which is Mortal Engines+Mad Max+WW2 tanks+Necromunda and he is asking it to be revived.

He complained: "We need to give it a name that does not sound like a rip off of another game."

"Tankwarrior?"

"No."

"Battletenk?"

"No" 

He's hard to please. 

The current 'lessons' I've learned is that RPGs generally have very clunky mechanics - I've been exploring some to see if they can be converted to wargames. In most cases, they are mechanically very poor. I'm interested in mechanics where the math is done pre-dice roll (i.e. you decide a target number, modify, then roll dice vs you roll dice then add or subtract modifiers. I'm also interested in area (abstract) terrain vs precise LoS. In one, the mini may be 'in cover' even if it is 1" or so from the actual cover - the actual location of the mini is pretty imprecise. At the far other end of the spectrum, even the model's hand position matters. Most wargames lie somewhere in between. 

I'm beginning to prep my Quar. While I'm more interested in the original skirmish SoBH spinoff Songs of Our Ancestors, I have downloaded their new (free) platoon-ish level set, Clash of Rhyfles and have begun experimenting with them. Some interesting ideas in the rules...

Blog. 'Two posts per month.' Easy so far. 

Paint. A goal was to 'paint at least 100 minis'; and ensure I've painted amount of existing minis = new purchases. Well I've painted 631 and whilst I've bought 150 or so so I've chewed through ~400 or so of my backlog. I've also painted not two but three unfinished projects (40K, Dino Wars and SOTR) and am about to embark on a fourth. 

The lesson learned so far is how important it is to paint regularly. I make a point each day to do something - it could be just basing 10 minis, or just painting on all the belts and boots.  Or just undercoating some terrain barrels. It all adds up staggeringly fast - I've painted 635 models this year and built 3 tables of terrain. Friends often relax with a glass of wine each night; what if I spent the same time painting?

 

.....even undercoating barrels with craft paint counts towards painting daily....

Budget. OK I've gone well past my $350 baseline - boxes of Frostgrave/Wargames Atlantic being the prime culprits ~$200, with some $150 in 40K boxes (Dark Eldar, Mechanicus), ECW metals ($120), French Indian Dino Wars ($100). That said, 95% of purchases have been instantly painted and played with so it's not like they are sitting around in a pile unused. 

There's no lesson here besides "it's easy to spend money online." That said, my "you must buy less than what you recently painted" rule has kept things under control. I.e. I want to buy more Frostgrave plastics but am waiting til I paint double that from my backlog.

Downsize/Storage.  'Get rid of 4+ A4 IKEA boxes of rules, minis, old terrain etc.' Yep. Despite building new terrain I'm down to 8 from 40 trays of projects, and have cleared 4 complete wall shelves in my shed.

The lesson learned here is the neater things are, the easier it is to find/use them. It's something I parrot to my kids but don't always apply to myself.  I've 'discovered' and painted quite a few random minis in weird locations. I've moved much of my materials from deep big boxes in shelves to ~20 now-vacant project trays which can be easily labelled... and thus located with less rummaging.

Overall I'm pretty content with my year so far in wargaming. I'm on track to beat my old yearly paint record (which was 800-900ish) and I'm not only clearing my backlog but completing entire projects (i.e. rules + terrain + all minis painted + games played) as well as condensing my hobby space...

Secrets of the Third Reich 2026

This is a forgotten game, in the surprisingly crowded Weird War 2 category. DUST, AT43, and now Bolt Action spinoff Konflikt 47 have all been higher profile. But SOTR is still available while the DUST and AT43 are long since defunct, although SOTR's online presence is practically nil. In fact one of the first hits was my 2015 comparison with Bolt Action.

 

I've added some female 3D print heads to appease my daughter. LOTR is one of her favourite movies which proves she doesn't need lots of girls, but there must be some.

These 2011-era minis were dug out and painted as (a) my son and I have been playing Zombie Army 4: Dead War on PC and thus I was inspired and (b) I need to paint more minis before I purchase any more - which is stalling my Forest project. +39 minis to my current 555 makes 594 this year. It also makes it easy to retort if queried."Buying more minis? Have you painted and played with the last ones?" "Yes" 

I've bought (and also promptly painted!) about 100 fantasy plastics for The Forest and 50 for the French Indian Dino Wars so I'm comfortably "in the black" eroding my lead mountain this year by over 400. 

SOTR is a 40K-a-like based on the earlier versions of 40K. Or rather 40K+ with suppression, reaction and orders which give more detail (and ironically more gritty realism than Bolt Action). It also scales down to smaller forces.

I'm halfway through with half my Soviets and 2/3rds my Germans yet to go. Hmm I notice Wargames Atlantic have generic zombies with a range of heads including WW2...

 

I suspect the Soviet chimps are instead from AE:WW2 (another Weird War game SOTR has outlasted!). While the SOTR sculpts are oldskool chunky, AE:WW2 had some weird/spindly/disproportionate ones: most have been purged from my inventory by giving them to my then 5-year-old as a "decoy/distraction" miniature. I reckon I may even have a cyborg gorilla if I hunt around a bit.

I've eyed off some Konflikt 47 models just to add some random cool stuff but so far have resisted easily enough - in Australia Warlord have equivalent pricing to GW but without the quality... *shrugs* 

The rather drab uniform nature of the minis makes them quite quick to paint, but a tad dull. I reckon I might switch  to some colourful Quar or finish my Dark Eldar as a 'palate cleanser' so I don't get bored.

Eeek it's late already so I'm signing off while there is time to watch a movie - probably a WW2 movie for paint inspiration. (I have 1500+ DVDs which are an answer to the question I posed a year or two back: How many DVDs could you afford if you cancelled all streaming services? Answer: A lot. ....Especially if you buy from charity shops...) 

EDIT: Another 37 this week means I have finished all SOTR (ticking off a goal for this year) and my 2026 paint total stands at 631

 Being pretty bland and somewhat uniform means I can get away with a lot....

 Now - on to Quar or the as-yet-undecided ECW-era project...

French Indian Dinosaur Wars - Project Complete(ish)

Well I've now got the models and terrain to play, it's just a matter of "tidy up" stuff. I've got Reptoid tribesman/dino herders, Indians (both sides), French regulars, marines and irregulars/trappers; as well as colonial militia, British regulars and Rangers - as well as civilians, log cabins and some fenced areas for farms. If budget permits later I could expand to some "nice to haves" like grenadiers, highlanders or light companies for some variety, but The Forest fantasy needs more purchases at the moment.

I painted the militia in vaguely Pennyslvania and Virginia colours so I can have two separate groups or one combined group.
 

I've also kept ~12 Reptoids unassembled as they come only with javelins and muskets and I'm hoping some future purchases (Oathmark gobbos?) may donate bows and club/axe hands to go with the spare Ungor shields I've got earmarked for them. 

I can work one rules (I have a random ideas notebook for boring car trips) but I'm simply adapting ME:SBG to keep it quick and easy. So really only: 

(a) add some Reptoid "psychic" powers to MESBG rules; telekinetic/pyrokinetic/mind control - this will be fun

(b) add in musket rules ("reload" = once fired, skip a turn to reload; denote unloaded musket with a cotton wool ball)

These 30 militia (Virginia-style pictured above) raise my paint total to 555 in 2026. The Warlord plastics do not perfectly match their metal line with much finer weapons and hands but overall size is fine. 

Dinosaurs will simply be multi-wound monsters, aligned with similarly sized ogres/trolls/etc from MESBG. I'll probably dispense with might-will tracking and replace with a "out of mana" or "out of might" token; basically you roll a second dice and if that fails, you are out of might/mana until you skip a turn to "recharge."  Right now I can fudge it enough, offhand, to play a game with my kids whenever, so we're good.

While the British got 20 of the box, I assigned 10 to the French to give them their own irregulars. They got knit wool caps and can be ceourer-de-bois or whatever they are called. 
 

I always base and assemble miniatures during downtime, so I always have some projects ready to go. I've got some ~60 Secrets of the Third Reich Soviets/Germans/British on my bench, some to receive headswaps for mages... and a few token female heads to appease my daughter (she says she 'gets' that realistically girls make a small proportion of active soldiers but she 'likes' to see the odd pigtail in amongst the troops so *shrugs* I had lots of unmistakably female heads 3D printed).

I've a solid selection of French Indian (Dino) war for skirmish games and while I'm awaiting my Forest budget to recharge I'm going to switch to a new painting target to keep up my progress.... luckily I always have 2-3 projects based and ready to go at all times...

I've also got some metal Quar under my workbench. I'm astonished they got their own WA plastic line. While they are pretty quirky - Anteaters fighting a civil war with WW1 tech, armoured tractors and featuring messenger squirrels IS fun... I just didn't think they'd sell that well?  The old rulebooks were characterful and awesome and the new ones seem quite interesting, mechanically (I may review them sometime as whilst free, they use some unusual mechanics.)

 

Reptoids, Cultists, Ungors - The Forest, Dino Wars and other projects

Project Progress

Well, I've cracked the 500 minis painted mark and it's still April. I've also 'cracked' my years budget already but less said about that the better... :-/

 These spider cultists have been blessed by the Great Many-Armed One - the sacred number is eight.

The Forest project (medieval STALKER/Chernobyl) - where mutants, spiders, cultists and mercenaries hunt and fight over warpstone  corrupting magical anomalies -  has received the majority of love as my kids are interested in this the most. We invent our own art and stories about it. 

 

You know the Narnian satyrs and fauns? If they wander into the wrong part of a blighted Forest you get GW Ungors corrupted blood-crazed goat men lead by diabolical shamans (Ok, I admit it still sounds like beastmen)....

Teething Technology = Pike & Shot

My favourite eras of combat are "teething technology" where the "optimum" or "meta" has not been found. (Actually, this reminds me - it might make a good game design discussion - how players lose interest when they have 'solved' a game - which is a good reason for GW's rules/codex churn).

An example of "cool" and "awkward" eras:

Hipster Pike & Shot/Late Medieval (we have muskets and cannon - but still cuiraissers in plate armour carrying a handful of pirate pistols; some guys with rapiers and others with ginormous pikes). 

vs

Samey Napoleonics (everyone is either a blue or a red guy with a musket. Grenadiers are merely slightly taller guys).

or what about

Quirky 1950s-60s Jets - we have designs from MiGs and Sabres with big blunt nose airscoops, to Mirage pointy delta wings. We have sleek Vulcan bombers and B36s with mixed props and jets. We have canards. Unguided nuclear rockets. Turboprops!

vs

Copy & Paste Modern Jets. What is the difference between a Su-27, F-18, MiG-29? Probably mostly the electronics. Yay, a new computer chip - how sexy!  Pointy noise, twin engines, put swept wings on it, a token gatling cannon, handful of BVR or dogfight missiles and call it a day. 

Once the design/tactics has been optimised and everyone has adopted the same style - it's so boooring. It's like a wargame day where all players choose the exact same faction and play it the same.  Copy and paste modern MBTs are boring. WW2 tanks (tankettes, Maus, Lee, B1) are quirky and cool - they hadn't worked out the meta yet....

....Anyway this is a long-winded way of saying I have revived my decades-dormant giant Warlord ECW pike+shot army box and have begun assembly/basecoating.  

But - you hate rank-and-flank games! You claim a 20-man unit is just glorified hitpoints!  

Well yes, I but ain't painting more than 30 or so each side. It's still 1:1 skirmish!  But my primary objection - the minis are bloody boring - has been solved.

Bloody Miniatures (Captain Blood from Lead Adventure forum?) only specializes in quirky poses, skirmish minis and cool models. Sick of rows of identically posed pikemen or musketeers? Why not looters, Jacobean assassins, dismounted cuiraissers (finally!); Scottish brigands, a forlorn hope, government agents, (four) musketeers all in interesting and unique poses? Heck there's even witch hunters and dog handlers.

...so what are these pike and shot for exactly? 

Now I admit I don't exactly have a project yet - I'm just reviving my unused ECW minis... ....by buying MORE stuff. There's a logic to it, I promise!  Naturally it can't be straight ECW/7YW.  Is monster and witch hunting, and heretics too generic and done to death? Maybe angels vs demons - there was a very religious feel to the wars of the era. 

At the moment I'm probably going to just do a revised MESBG (hey, Pillage did it and no one criticized them!) with my current favourite d12s and call it a day. Maybe I can revive the Helldorado theme with my own random minis. I also really enjoyed the Monarchies of God book series (Paul Kearney) which is not exactly A-tier but definitely underrated for enjoyers of grimdark/military/fantasy/pseudohistory which has werewolves and sorcerers mixed with pike and shot era tactics. He also did a trilogy loosely based on Xenophon  and I think was involved in some 40K novels(!). 

Any ideas/suggestion/inspiration welcome.  

French Indian Dino Wars

What does Last of the Mohicans, Three Musketeers (Milady); Sharpe's Rifles, and Jurassic Park Dominion have in common? Well I'm rewatching all of them for inspiration for the French Indian Dinosaur Wars. You know, how the British and French fought with Indian allies in American for the lucrative fur trade dinosaur bone/dino oil/dino skin market? But high in the dark mountains, there is another force.

These Na'vi WA Reptoid dino herders and their shamans use psychic commands to control dinosaurs in battle and perform mental pyschic attacks. Local trappers and hunters, as well as local British and French units are learning their psychic abilities and integrating them into their own battle tactics. I've already got Warlord French, British and Indians (mostly metals) but a box of ~30 Continental militia was purchased to provide more irregulars for both sides. 

 

The dinosaurs are just toys from K-Mart adorned with craft paint and placed on suitably wargame-y looking bases. 

I really do recommend the Frostgrave/WA/Fireforge plastics. They are so much fun compared to the newer monopose GW stuff - where you use 10 pieces but still only get one way to build the model. As the sprues have a generous amount of spare arms, legs and heads, I have used them to revive other unused sprues. Kitbashing is fun!

 

Fireforge, Frostgrave and WA donated spare arms and heads to these Gripping Beast warriors to make draugr.

Kitbash Heaven 

I had unused Gripping Beast saxons/vikings/peasant bodies, which when mixed with spare Frostgrave/WA arms and heads created a dozen Dark Age-era undead/draugr for encounters in The Forest. I haven't had any scale issues that have bothered me; but I am not a fan of the integral bases they are built onto. You can either snip them off around the feet or just accept they will be higher on the base than normal. I originally snipped them off but quite often I just leave them - the height variation has been acceptable. My Black Scorpion pirates and Carnevale minis however are just too big to mix in.

April Roundup

465 + 50 = 515 minis painted just as April ended. I've condensed complete shelves in my shed already, going to 10 project trays from 40. My future projects have been narrowed down a lot. From memory, I have only a few projects with significant painting (30 or so minis) involved:  Quar (based). Weird War II (incl lots mechs) (based). Samurai/feudal Japan (based). Ancient Greek (based). Modern Russian/American (based). Some random C3 fantasy (based). 15mm moderns (based). BFG (based). 

Still on sprues are Dropfleet Commander and some Dark Age saxon/vikings (from my Bernard Cornwall craze). Besides my current projects, I'd estimate ~500 minis in varying states of readiness which is definitely do-able this year - but I'm cool with just whittling away at them (I once had 1000 unpainted LOTR alone, so I feel like I've got things under control...)