That was the year that wasn’t

Well, that’s not been great. A full year without posts is a pretty accurate reflection of my hobby life in 2024. No games, no shows, no purchases and not much painting. Why? Nothing too dramatic, just all the components of IRL conspired to make it a monumentally crappy year. No need to be alarmed: I still have my health, food on the table, a roof over my head and Mrs Dog continues to tolerate me.

In amongst the never-ending nonsense, I did manage to squeeze in the odd 10 minutes of painting here and there (when my mojo wasn’t completely AWOL). Almost exclusively devoted to preparing the terrain and figures for Scenario 14, which given that the last one played was number 8 suggests either impressive preparedness or an unhinged level of optimism.

The Syldavian Women’s Militia Battalion (commanded, obvs, by the Syldavian Women’s Militia Battalion Officer…ask your parents).

So I completed a couple of battalions of Syldavian militia, some Bordurian recce troops on motorcycle-sidecar combinations, an infantry gun for my WWII Germans (assembled from dozens of fiddly parts without any instructions, and yes, there were a few parts left over when I had ‘finished’) and some Frontline civilian trucks for scatter terrain.

In between these I assembled and painted a bunch of Italeri buildings.

All those buildings got me thinking about the issue of terrain scale. The sharp-eyed (and elephantine memoried) amongst you might have noticed that in Scenario 8 my 15mm Sassanians fought over a 1/300 scale bridge. I only noticed what I had done when I looked at the pictures later. My Freudian slip makes sense in a game scale where each base or unit represents a much larger number of soldiers, so that terrain in a smaller scale is more aesthetically consistent.

As I am planning on using Triumph of the Will for my next interwar games, where each base is a company, maybe I should have expended all this effort on 15mm buildings rather than all these lovely 1/72 scale Italeri structures? Too late now, and they will obviously be perfect for a 1:1 figure scale game like Chain of Command. Instead, I will just remind myself that each building represents a built-up area, so the behemoth below is actually the entire administrative quarter, and the fact that its floor plan can accommodate three or four battalions makes perfect sense.

After the travails of 2024, I’m loath to make any predictions for 2025. Suffice to say, with no games played in Year 3, the expected duration of this project now runs well into Year 20! To bring that down I will have to play 3 or more games in the year.

Next up on the schedule are a couple of games of Sharp Practice followed by another Chain of Command outing for the 20mm Second World War chaps. Meanwhile, any painting time will actually be occupied by a very different type of project (for me at least). Here’s a clue.