2019 - Year in Review (or should it be a decade?)

Every year around this time I take a moment to look back on what I accomplish over the course of the past year and attempt to make some type of goal for the coming year. Inevitably, it’s a little bit of a let down to see that you failed in so many “goals.” The real question I ave to ask myself is did I actually “fail” or did my priorities change over the course of 365 days. What happened that I wasn’t able to complete my Night Lords, play a game of Batman, make a dent in my Space Marines or complete my Genestealer Cult? Well, my table was pretty full this year with commissions; rules changes and point cost changes make a “complete” Warhammer 40,000 army a carrot on a stick that you’ll never catch; and well Knight Models if “going back to Gotham” with a third ruleset making the stuff I bought last year maybe still legal to play? What these “excuses” amount to is that each December I make a list with what seems important to me at the time and by the next December things have changed and I’m left staring at a crazy list of stuff I didn’t finish. This year I’m going to do something a little different.

First for the year in review. In 2019 I painted a grand total of 1,350 models. Not quite double what I did is 2018 but real close. This year I’ve had a pretty diverse amount of models cross my table from tiny board game pieces to massive titans I’ve painted a little bit of everything. I think this yearBoardgames may have eclipsed Warhammer 40,000 as the bulk of models painted. Malifaux, Relic Knights and Super Dungeon saw no love this year which I can understand since Soda Pop Miniatures fell hard into the make another kickstarter to fund the last one we didn’t deliver trap and as such has bad blood and nothing driving people to play their games. Malifaux was a bit of a surprise for me though, locally it’s fallen out of favor, but I usually have clients from different regions track me down to paint crews or additions to existing crews, I really liked the world they were building with the first edition. I have’t looked at the third edition but I really hope they’ve managed to clean up the mess their second edition was, because the models are more amazing than ever.

For my personal projects I made less progress. My primary focus this year has been n GW games and the terrain needed for them. Because of the near constant state of flux Warhammer 40,000 has been in I haven’t been able to stay focused on one thing ling enough to put a dent in my personal painting queue. I have managed to get a bunch of stuff assembled and anything I put on the table has at least a three color base coat so I supposed I’ve actually made quite a bit of progress on my own models but I REALLY want to get them done, sealed and off my list. Starting mid-January I’m supposed to be participating in a once a month Necromunda campaign, so I’m going to focus on getting a gang built up and painted before that kicks off. I’m still undecided about which gang to run but at the moment I’m leaning toward the enforcers and a color scheme that echoes the look of the Karl Urban Dredd movie. As a back up I’m painting the Corpse Grinder Cult up to match my Night Lords, If I don’t use them in Necromunda than they might see play as cultists, as I’m looking at focusing on the Night Lords again for the first part of 2020.

2019 also saw this site cross its first decade, It’s hard to believe that in August of 2009 I started this site. At the time I was focusing primarily on Malifaux as it was the new hotness and Games Workshop games were kinda trash at that time. It’s crazy to think of how much things have changed in the last ten years.

We saw the rise and fall of the Kickstarter as the launching place of new mini-games. Skirmish miniature games became super popular and then not so much as Games Workshop’s industry dominance waxed and waned. After essentially “loosing” an IP Battle, the gaming giant killed off one of their biggest properties and from its ashes arose the miserable failure that was Age of Sigmar First Edition. Lacking point costs and featuring “fun” rules that appear to be based on a Monty Python skit, it appeared the Games Workshop was caught in a downward spiral of their own making. Warhammer 40K 6th/7th edition were bloated monstrosities released less than a year apart that saw each new release more powerful than the next. Around the same period the small scale games that rose to popularity in the first part of the decade began launching new editions, some of which hit the mark while others failed to stay true to what made them so popular and began to lose shelf space. 2016 things were looking grim…

From the darkness Games Workshop released 8th Edition Warhammer 40,000. With a completely revamped ruleset, new codex books for every faction and a new open to suggestion attitude the company shifted back to feel more like the thing gamers remembered and less like the corporate bully suing anyone that mentioned Space Marine in any context. (which is still hilarious to me given that almost everything they’ve ever produced is paying heavy “homage” to something that came before). After the positive reception for Warhammer 40K they release a book with point values for Age of Sigmar and suddenly the game begins to catch on. Riding the wave of success, they begin pumping out reboots of all their hits like a Hollywood Studio cashing in on gamers and their remember-berries. As the decade begins to close the first grumblings of new editions begin.

That was a pretty limited recap of the last decade from a miniatures gamer’s perspective and I totally left out the rise of “miniature board games,” Disney taking over everything I love, Hasbro making not so good movies about my childhood toys, the disappearance of compact disks and DVDs, the cloud and streaming.

Thankfully the last Star Wars film of the decade was able capture a little of that magic I remember seeing Jedi for the first time and bring it all home.