Been a while since I updated this blog so I'm going to throw out a few random musing here concerning the current state of my gaming and other stuff. Following the previous blog entry covering the big siege game last Hurricon I continued to play Warhammer Fantasy, and once the new Dark Elf book came out I dusted off my old school Citadel all-metal army and proceeded to wreck some face at the club - this is a nasty, nasty list! I even picked up some of the new (incredibly expensive, even for GW) models and assembled them but somewhere around here I lost interest in painting caused by worry over the increasingly poor health of my Dad in the UK. This situation unfortunately did not improve and my Dad passed at the end of January, which was something of an emotional hammer blow as I got my love of painting and military history from my Dad and anything I painted I always loved to show him and get his opinion and commentary.
After this no matter what I tried I couldn't generate hardly any enthusiasm to pick up a brush; this culminated in an abortive attempt to paint some 28mm Perry French Napoleonic figures using the Army Dip method in an attempt to speed things up (this has previously worked really well for both my Beastmen army and my Warlord Games ECW Royalist army). However, they looked so bad when I was done that I ended up stripping the paint off them and throwing them back in the box until such time as I feel able to break them out again (it was at this point I made the decision that whatever I painted I wanted to achieve results that "I would be proud to show my Dad"). The general lack of interest in doing anything hobby related lasted for a couple of months; I would break out some minis, look at them, ponder doing some painting then ultimately just put them away again. In an attempt to kickstart things I broke out the 40K and played a couple of games with my Imperial Fists, winning both the games I played, however I still couldn't build any enthusiasm to paint anything new to add to my armies. I also played and very much enjoyed some Flames of War, with my Late War Russians (actually Mid War Russians dragged kicking and screaming into a Late War list) beating a fairly static Late War German Panzergrenadier list. Then about three weeks ago the completely unexpected and sudden sickness of one of my dogs (who we ended up having to put to sleep after a diagnosis of a ruptured spleen) dealt us another emotional bombshell; a combination of all of the above emotional trauma, the avalanche of new printed material issuing forth from GW on a seemingly weekly basis plus the increasingly ludicrous prices being charged by GW led to me turning away from GW completely.
Since then and over the last few weeks I have found myself embracing the much more reasonably priced and unbelievably wide-ranging world of 15mm figures instead. Now, regarding 15mm figures, I'd been painting and playing with these on and off for many years over the last couple of decades, however over the last few years they had fallen into disfavor due to their perceived small size (from my own painting perspective and aging eyes) and the glitz and glamor of Games Workshop and their graphically impressive models and books. Since picking them back up, though, they've experienced something of a renaissance in my gaming life and right now I'm busy working on several 15mm (and 6mm here and there, I just love how 6mm armies LOOK on the table) different projects simultaneously. I've even managed to get some of the guys at my local club interested in doing 15mm and 6mm fantasy and there are several folks working on Flames of War armies right now.
In summary, right now GW is out of the picture for me (definitely 40K, although the possibility exists that I could be talked into a game of Fantasy again) and 15mm is in. I hope to load some pictures of some of the games described above soon and get this blog moving again....time will tell!
Bob
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