Forgone Miniatures - No more Warhammer!
A small part of my miniature collection, mainly Massive Darkness with some Death Guard and Astra Militarum.
It’s been nearly a year since I started my blog, a year into the pandemic and bored out of my mind it seemed like a good creative outlet. I’ve learnt a lot in that time, I’ve learnt how to properly take photos of my miniatures, I’ve learnt more than I thought I would have to learn about social media and hashtags, I’ve learnt about search engine optimisation.
So where are we at ten months into the blogging game? I’ve published thirty-nine articles totalling over thirty-four thousand words (not including the one you’re reading). That’s a lot of words and honestly I’m a bit annoyed it’s not forty-thousand. But it’s still a decent word count, even if it is mostly gushing over new releases to be honest; and it’s probably more words than George RR Martin has written this year. The longest article, at 1457 words, was the Plagueburst Crawler; clearly I had lots to talk about painting this foul vehicle. It’s not all about the words either, since starting this blog I have painted a respectable 45 miniatures. Which doesn’t sound like much for a year of painting but a lot of them were single characters or terrain. The majority of them, unsurprisingly, being Warhammer models.
As far as page views go, since starting my blog has been visited 1320 times (as of 24th December). Which is insane, I figured I would get maybe a couple hundred people poke around, certainly not over a thousand!
If an article gets too popular then SquareSpace sends me worrying emails about “anomalies”.
The spikes in August were when I posted links to my articles directly to Reddit, rather than posting an image and putting a link in a comment. This approach was great for generating page views but no one really stuck around to read the article; which is why I stopped posting direct links. My most engaging article was the Azyrite Ruined Chapel which had less than a hundred page views but the average time on page was just over 12 minutes. By comparison, my most popular article, Putrid Blightkings assembly, has an average time on page of just a minute and a half. Clearly me muddling my way through using milliput and bluestuff wasn’t all that interesting!
Which neatly brings me onto my plans for the next year, which some of you could probably guess from the title of this article. Over the last year I’ve done pretty well to keep on top of my Warhammer purchases, for the most part only buying new models once I’ve painted the ones I already have. The trouble is I have way more models than just Warhammer, my wife and I are keen boardgamers and as is the trend these days, a lot of those games come with a mountain of plastic. For example, I painted most of the CMON board game Massive Darkness a few years ago which has about 150 models. I’m very slowly working my way through Village Attacks (by Grimlord Games) which has around 185 models, and to make matters worse we also backed its expansion Grim Dynasty which has another 63 models. Then of course being the absolute BatNerd that I am I went all in on backing Monolith's Gotham City Chronicles which boasts an eye-watering 273 models. For sheer model count however, it was only just pipped to the post by CMON’s Zombie Invader which has 285 models. All in all I have around seven hundred and fifty board game miniatures that I need to paint. And more on the way, as mentioned Village Attacks Grim Dynasty could be shipping next year. Massive Darkness 2: Hellscape looks like it could be shipping very soon. Frosthaven is also looking like it’s getting closer to release. Oh and speaking of Cephalofair Games, they recently announced they would soon be launching crowdfunding for Gloomhaven miniatures, and I’m definitely all over that.
I have quite a few boardgames it turns out
So you can see the problem, I already have a literal pile of miniatures to paint but for the past year or so I’ve pretty much just continually bought and painted models from Games Workshop. That ends this year. It is time to focus on my board game miniatures so in 2022 I will not be buying anymore Warhammer. Apart from anything else, I could do with saving some money for my wedding at the end of the year. It is time to make a dent in my board gaming pile of shame. Here is a breakdown of each game that have miniatures for, the number of models is given in brackets:
Zombicide: Invader (285)
Batman: Gotham City Chronicles (273)
Village Attacks (185)
Mansions of Madness (32)
Kingdom Rush: Rift in Time (26)
Gloomhaven (23)
The City of Kings (10)
Where to begin? Well, I have actually already done 65 models from Village Attacks so it makes sense to see if I can finish that off. Additionally, I have the starting classes from Gloomhaven and its expansion Jaws of the Lion primed so I feel that I could get them done in short order. After that? I’ll see where the winds take me. The City of Kings' small model count has me intrigued. Although, I think a lot of Zombicide’s model count are the xenos enemies that might be fairly easy to blast through with an airbrush.
Including a lot of unopened Batman…
The keen eyed may also note that I said I wasn’t going to buy any more Warhammer. I have some Blightkings and Wurmspat that are about halfway painted that I would like to get finished next year. And if I really have to build some Warhammer then I have Grashrak's Ravagers, Sacristan Forgeshrine and the limited edition Necron models that are all still in boxes. As far as new releases are concerned, I should be alright; there’s rumours of a Siege of Terra box but they won’t be Space Wolves so I doubt there will be much interest from me. To be honest, with Games Workshop’s strategy of new releases primarily being boxsets before releasing individual models a year or so later I feel like I should be fairly safe from temptation. The most temptation I’ll face is Cursed City being rereleased to be honest, I came pretty close to buying it the first time round. The only reason I held off was because I hadn’t finished Blackstone Fortress yet. Which is still true, I’ve not even finished the base game yet let alone the expansions.
Whatever happens next year, it looks like 2022 is going to be an exciting year for miniature painting. Even with all the Kickstarter fulfilments I should be getting next year, let’s hope I can make a dent in the numbers. By my reckoning, I will have to paint a couple of hundred at least to break even. A worthy challenge if ever there was one. And to help me stay on track, I’ll keep a running total in each of my articles.
Boardgame miniatures left to paint: 766
Boardgame miniatures painted this year: 0
Bring it on!