Same Again?

Well 2024 is underway so time to roughly plan out some of the things I want to get done this year as far a wargaming goes! I’m not one for yearly round-ups or planning to the nth degree (real life is far too efficient at intervening) so I’m just taking a quick look at my statistics for last year and planning this year (which may or may not take into account what did/didn’t happen last year)!

I aim to spend about an hour a day on preparing and painting models and last year I managed to put an estimated 363 hours into finished models, so not bad (in 2022 the total was 343 hours). That total is estimated from the effort I reckon has been put into finished models, so there is always some contribution from models prepared but not finished in previous years (overall it averages out about right). At the start of 2023 I said I wanted to definitely get some stuff finished for my Mexican Adventure, VSF and Balkan Wars projects, and would have liked to make some progress with Paraguayan War and colonial armies. The table below shows where I was at the beginning of 2023, with “must do’s” highlighted in amber and “like to do’s” in pink.

The table below shows the proportion of time I spent on the highlighted projects, plus scenery.

CONFLICT/SUBJECT AREA	%	NOTES
Mexican Adventure	19	Mexican Republican forces nominally completed
Victorian Science Fiction	10	Odds’n’sods
Balkan Wars	6	Extra Turkish cavalry and field gun
Paraguayan War	6	Flag bearers and some extra Uruguayans
Colonial Wars	20	Upgrading armies for use with new rules (TMWWBK)
Scenery	25	Mostly done during Season of Scenery challenge

So I did quite well with my Mexican Adventure project, finishing my Republican army, but really only made nominal progress with some of the others. Scenery stands out because of the progress I made (for the second year running) during Dave Stone’s Season of Scenery community challenge.

So I’ve now updated the overall chart of what’s stored in which box as shown below.

Nominally I’ve increased the amount of painted figures during 2023 by 89 models, but this is not quite a true picture. As I’ve been working through my colonial armies and aligning them for use with The Men Who Would Be Kings rules (TMWWBK) some older painted figures have come back into these boxes and some spare ones have moved into retirement. Changes in my colonial armies are not solely due to using a new set of rules, since the availability of the nice new Jacklex 20mm First Sino-Japanese War figures has let me add models to my 19th Century Chinese armies that were previously unavailable.

So the plan for 2024 is to proceed with a similar emphasis to last year, although I think I’d like to also make progress in other areas where I might be able to get quick wins. As far as Mexico’s concerned I want to make progress with a Mexican Imperial army. For VSF I’d like to finish the Martians/Invaders/Squids before doing any more human forces. As far as the Balkans go, finishing one or two infantry units would be good progress.

One of the few projects I’ve neglected in recent years has been WW2 naval gaming and I’m planning on trying to make some progress on that. I’m considering having a “Maritime March” month which, if it goes well or badly, could be extended to “Maritime May”! I don’t seem to plan painting my ships and vehicles well, since they live in a completely different set of boxes from figures, so allocating some time to them would no doubt be a good idea! Watch this space!