So Many Choices - Wargaming Without Regrets

There is a moral to most stories and this one has one right at the end.

I spent a lot of time yesterday basing figures. All sorts of figures. There is no real plan at the moment as I am not working on a particular project. That is mainly down to money but a good chunk of it is about clearing up the lead mountain. I hate to think how much I have in the lead mountain. There are too many small boxes to think about and they are everywhere I look

So what to do with it all. I supposed I should think about the overall plan. Many of the figures floating around have been part of a plan. There are few figures that I buy on impulse, they are always to play a role in one project or another.

All of what you see has been caught my eye for one project or another. There have been a lot of them over the years. Some of these were brought for Conspiracy X, a variety of post apocalypses, weird war 2, Titansgrave: The Ashes of Valkana, X-Com, and many others. What is most important to me is that none of these projects really got off the ground. They stick around and keep my attention for years but never seem to get to a stage where there is enough figures to make a game of it.

Some time ago I promised myself that there would be no more gaming regrets. There have been figures that I have brought and never really used much. They were all brought for one game or another and I enjoyed painting them. What I really regret is buying figures for games other people have suggested and then, after spending the money, the games just disappeared, usually with the player who suggested it.

I got back into painting 28mm miniatures because of someone suggested doing some weird wild west in Savage Worlds in the form of Deadlands. That got me to buy some regular wild west minis. I brought about forty and only one of them has been used in a game. The ones I bought didn't all get painted. That said I enjoyed the process. I found a few of the unpainted ones last weekend and that got the juices flowing. Right now they are what I want to paint the most. Not the most expensive project but enough dead money.

Then there was Malifaux. I love the figures, I really do. I have about five sets and quite a few individual figures. Not to mention some terrain, a deck of cards, rulebooks and a lot of odds and sods. This has cost me a bit more. They are a bit bigger than most of my minis so don't really fit in with anything else. A few have made them into other games but have never been used. Again not the most expensive but perhaps the most unproductive of all of the projects. But they are so pretty. My guess is that I will be doing these in a few weeks. These will probably have a bit of work to do on they, there is quite a lot of detail, so I might go to town on them.

In 6mm there is a similar thing with Napoleonics and WW2 Americans. The Napoleonics really got to me. There was a big overall plan. We spent probably a day over the course of a few months discussing the details. I spent a load of money on rules, bases and figures for a French army. Then the rules changed so I had buy another set of rules. And bases. Then needed more figures. Then one of the players brought a pre painted French army. Then we were going to use a Board Game called the Napoleonic Wars for a base for an ongoing campaign. I heavily invested again and spent ages working on converting one set of wargame rules to work with the boardgame. Then one of the players objected to everything I did. So I gave up on that. I spent close to two hundred pounds. Painted about ten bases of figures (maybe ten percent of what I had bit probably less), never used any of them but I did actually play a couple of games. The WW2 Americans again never got used. I got talked into buying a GHQ army because they looked good. I already had a Heroics and Ross army that had seen a lot of use. I spent a load of money on bases as well. I painted the majority of the army after being sold a load of stuff by one of the other players that I didn't need. Right now I have no idea where it is. They have never been used.

This time around though I am a little more hopeful. I am paining stuff for my own games but I am also choosing to paint figures for games that other people are already playing and seem likely to keep playing. I have played in a Star Wars game recently and that made me want to go to town on that as a project. Although I started the Weird World War for myself maybe five years ago, I started priming them last year and got the urge to finish them off for a Weird War Cthulhu game someone else was running.

I said there was a moral. Gamers love stuff. Especially stuff they think is shiny. Magpies all of us. Manufacturers would have it a lot harder if we all only purchased new figures when we had completed what we started. Any plan that depends on you may well take plenty of time to come through and may well fail. It is the case though that any plans that involve anyone else are much more likely to fall flat. So to be honest there are a few regrets but nothing too major