The Weasel Games

My post got multiple replies, both in the blog comments and elsewhere, so please give those a read along with my posts about my own solutions. 

The thing about nerds is that if you vocalise any sort of problem you have, you will get 10 guys posting suggestions. Then you can filter through which of those suggestions are relevant to your position. But someone else with a similar-but-not-identical problem may find one of the solutions you did not use, and it turns out to be exactly what they needed. 

I am going to divide up my solutions into multiple posts to avoid them getting overlong: One for collecting, one for painting, one for gaming. I should be clear that these are what at the moment appear to be the answer to the specific problems I outlined and in the way I experience those problems. They may need modifying for you or you may be better served by one of the suggestions made in the comments. 

I also formulated and began to put into place some of these solutions before I made the blog post. But I wanted to get people talking first, without biasing the answers in some manner.

Also I am talking strictly about hobby gaming. Nothing in this blog has anything to do with NWG work or plans. 

Okay, enough disclaimers, onwards!

In the original post I said that problem 1 was ending up with a lot of scattered stuff that does not actually add up to anything playable. I think that part was pretty relatable and I should add that it is not actually a problem if you enjoy just painting random minis. If sitting down and painting something, without any worry about whether it even fits on a gaming table is part of the hobby for you, then this problem is a lot less for you. However for me, that is not really the case. I don't DISLIKE painting, but I don't LOVE it either. I enjoy the process, but only when it is part of leading to a game. (or at least a possible game). 

I said on the Discord that sometimes when you write a problem out, the answer becomes self-evident, but it isn't always that way until the moment you sit down and articulate it. The answer here of course is to narrow down projects considerably. 

In part, it is sorting out which projects I actually am invested in, versus which ones are a passing fancy. I do not have the time or space to do black powder and medievals and another black powder period and balkan wars and and and.

When I lean back, there are three topics that have always been on my mind gaming wise: WW1, WW2 and Science Fiction of a fairly generic nature. WW1 has been my passion in history ever since I realised that history was a thing you could be interested in, WW2 is the big, classic gaming period (well one of the two big classic ones) and scifi is both a lifelong interest, but also what really got me into independent miniatures gaming. 

They also supplement each other pretty well. Obviously piles of rubble are pretty generic terrain and a lot of farm houses and such can do double duty for both world wars. (In fact it may be the literal same farm house!). 

At this particular moment, doing three periods is probably going to be too much. I should mention that when we moved, I got rid of a fair amount of stuff, which means that in some ways I've been "starting over" collection wise. 

So I am going to push ww2 out until a later point, and instead for right now focus on what I really burn for, which is generic scifi and WW1. This means that everything painted and built will be for those two periods and thus help contribute to "playable armies" faster. It also hopefully means getting more variety on the table quicker. 

The second part is that I am going to go back to basics: When I started getting into stuff that was not the glossy-book-games, I went with 15mm and for quite a while, I only really collected 15mm stuff. So we are going back to this. 15mm and nothing else. I am not getting rid of f.x. my 20mm ww2 stuff, but they are just going to remain as they are right now. Any new stuff will be 15s. 

As a secondary factor here, I am going to just say F it and not worry about scale compatibility. If it is marketed as 15mm, then it goes on the table potentially. Yes, this means some guys will have much bigger helmets or whatever but I suspect the differences fade pretty quickly in play. 

The hope with all of this is to get to a state where everything I buy and everything I paint goes directly into collections that are then playable immediately. If I see some cool minis and paint a pack of them, they are immediately usable because they are being added to an existing collection of stuff and they just become one more option to pick from. 

I am going to be focusing on skirmish games (once again, the true love) so everything can be based individually and this means that very small games can be playable. I don't have to paint 40 French infantry in one go, I can paint 8 and then play a raid or patrol scenario. 

The mantra:

Only buy and paint 15mm

Only buy and paint things if they are WW1 or generic scifi. WW2 to follow later.

Base everything individually (except some MG teams probably)

Ive had quite a bit of time to think about this lately. Like a lot of people, I felt kind of stuck in my tabletop hobbying and realised it had been quite a while since I had done any painting. 

I wanted to solve that, in part due to also wanting to spend less time online and more time doing actual stuff. Which I suppose is also part of the solution in that spending less time online means more time to do hobby things :) In particular, I realised that it'd easily been over a year since I actually painted anything for fun. I am not bothered about shifting hobbies for periods: Sometimes I am more interested in board games for example, but I AM bothered when it is something I WANT to do and have not been doing. 

But I also wanted to take a moment to examine what ends up causing problems with getting stuff both painted but also on to the table. I am in the peculiar position that a lot of what I do ends up being playtesting, but we are setting that side. I am talking strictly about hobby gaming for fun. 

So I sat down and had a think. And then another. And a third. It was a lot of think's actually. And I think after iterating on my think's, I came to some conclusions and some possible solutions. A few folks were interested in hearing what I came up with, so I thought I would write it up as a couple of blog posts. This first post then is about identifying the problems.

Problem number 1: Too many things that do not add up to a game. 

One squad of something in 7.5mm. A couple of figures for the Westphalian third war of the sausage. A single vehicle for something. I am really prone to ending up with a bunch of stuff that cost money, takes up space and takes time to finish, only to realise that you have nothing that resembles a playable army of anything, let alone two. And since I am playing solo half the time and providing both armies the other half, I need two armies. 

Problem number 2: Aiming too big

Trying to build "armies" is a problem in itself because there is a big mental difference between painting 10 guys and saying that you completed a part, versus looking at a pile of 50 or 100 guys and saying you painted 10% of it. This is ultimately about willpower I suppose but it is the same effect as in problem 1: Spending time and effort and then realising it isn't usable in a game yet. 

Problem number 3: Too much fuss in setting things up

Having to dig out the paint stuff, clear off a space and so on adds a bit of friction compared to just being able to sit down and get started. And since one cat is a thief, I cannot leave things sitting for multi-part sessions, it has to be packed up after a couple of hours. (He still steals paint brushes out of the box).

This also means that multi-session painting is kind of a problem, because if it is going to take me three sittings to complete something, that greatly increases the chances of it taking forever or not getting finished. 

Problem number 4: Too much futzing around to actually get started on playing

Too much futzing makes the game feel like work and if it feels like work, I might as well just be working. 

Futzing includes deciding on which rules to use today, remembering how morale works in this one, realising that these rules expect to have 4 truck models which I don't have or that the scenario really ought to have a company of guys but I am 2 stands short, stopping mid game to look up what exactly happens when two guys with bazookas face in opposite directions and fire exactly simultaneously with their backs to each other. 

There is an additional element here in that the people I game with are newer to miniatures, so rules inconsistency can be a real issue here as well.

Problem 4.5 here is trying to adapt my miniatures collection to the scenario and treating the scenario as the most important part. 

Problem number 5: Sir Higgins is AWOL

The set up problem applies to gaming as well: At the moment, I have to be able to finish the game in one sitting because thief-cat will try to make off with the battalion commander.

Problem number 6: Not very metal is it?

This is sort of a meta-problem, or maybe it is the conclusion, but I also realised that I had gotten caught up in a lot of what is expected of a wargames table or what I thought would be expected. Which of course makes no sense because as I said, half my gaming is solo anyways. But I had fallen prone to thinking that you must be painting big armies for large games and trying to do certain things in certain ways to get certain results, which I think subconsciously I also realise was not actually what I really WANTED to do. 

Ironically, I knew all along what it was, because it is what I started on when I got into "indie" miniatures gaming after we moved to Oregon.

The conclusion to part 1

I think that is all of them. I would also like to note the unfavourable rotation of the Earth, particularly strong solar winds and a general unbalance of the Ethereal Void. 

Part 2 will be about tackling the collecting problems, part 3 will be about painting and part 4 will be about gaming. Those will be a bit more speculative since they are what I am planning to do (or have started to do). So stay tuned. 

If you have your own wargaming blog, please drop a link in the comments, I am also trying to get back into the bloggosphere of wargamers.