2023 Hobby Year Review

 

Hi folks,

Well, it has been awhile. This year has been a quiet one on the hobby front, if painting a 2200 point 2nd Edition army can be described as such. Participating in the Cowabunga 2nd Edition Army challenges is both awesome and utterly time consuming, taking me out of the mainstream of modern 40K for 6 months in the year and leaving me fairly burned out for the following 6 months. 

I started off the 22/23 hobby season with some palette cleanser projects, painting some Ravenwing bikes (which are about to leave the modern scene forever) and a Redemptor Dreadnought for DreadTober.

I have since dropped the bikes from my modern list, so they are left warming the shelf as a nice reminder of how waiting too long to paint stuff can come back to bite you. The dreadnought has made its way into a 2000 point list of 10th Edition Dark Angels I will be working on.

You don't have to scroll too far back to see the models I painted for the 2nd Ed. challenge. My Hive Fleet Proteus nids were fairly well received in the old school community, the paint scheme seemed to tick the boxes in terms of colour choice and overall vibe. My Termagants managed to earn me some Terminator Honours in the first month, which I am very proud of.

Towards the end of the challenge I helped write a short campaign pack for 2nd Edition: Return to Hamelia XI which takes a lot of inspiration from the Jurassic Park films. I wrote some of the terrain rules for the campaign and it was awesome to see some hobbyists really run with those ideas and create entire gaming boards to play the campaign. I managed to play a game with my son, which was his first experience playing 2nd Edition. I think he has a greater appreciation for the streamlined game we play in 10th Edition, though he misses the vortex grenades! I have also been able to connect with some 2nd Ed. players in the mountains over here, about 1.5 hours from where I live. We are hoping to play some games together to celebrate the 30th Anniversary of our favourite edition. 

 

Over the Christmas break I spent a couple of nights playing Kill Team at a local FLGS with a gaming club. The games were fun and I got along with the people pretty well, but ultimately I had trouble turning up regularly after work. When real life turned the screws, it was one of the first things I dropped, which I really regret now. I can't think of any way to change things, though. Family has to come first [shrugs sadly].

With 10th dropping recently, I have reconnected with some mates to learn the new game and throw down some dice. So far I have enjoyed the fact that stratagems are taking a back seat. The additional streamlining hasn't really effected anything that I care about, so the faster games are purely an advantage for me. I have played games with my Nids, "first born" Dark Angels and Iron Snakes, all narrow losses I can easily chalk up to army selection and bad luck (as always!). The key thing is that all the games were fun. I'll be playing more regular games from now on, so my Primaris Dark Angels will be a key feature in my To-Do list next year.

I'll finish the season with a photo from the last game that I watched; I was too tired to participate but happily played the part of rulebook checker! Here is a photo of Mephiston drinking some quality Ork brew, outside an old school Ork pub, deep in turn 5; a worthy objective if ever there was one.

See you across the table,

Marc