Hobby Navel-Gazing

With a week to go until Hotlead, I've been rummaging through all the ill-sorted boxes and bins in the basement, sifting my unpainted pile o'stuff and seeing what I can part with in order to
a) have less stuff cluttering up the basement and
b) finance the Samurai project I floated last post.

I have quite a shocking pile of random things that wandered into the basement which I have no desire to ever paint. Plus a few things which didn't suit my needs or I decided I wasn't interested in anymore. Quite a few surplus pulp characters too. I've been contemplating selling off my gangster stuff too, but the potential for some pulp games could be so much fun that I hate to part with them. I just need to rethink that collection; less Al Capone and Elliot Ness and more.... what?

I'm still having trouble parting with excess 15mm ancients and SYW, although I wonder if I will ever paint another Roman legion again. But hope springs eternal. There's next year too, so I'll think about those for 12 months.

I was talking with the Mad Padre when we last got together about how my gaming has changed. In the years pre-blog I was all into big battles, and thought of myself as primarily an ancient and medieval player. I've read my Caesar, Livy, Polybius and Ammianus. I subscribed to Slingshot. Swiss pike blocks, Roman Legions, thundering Gothic cavalry, Spanish tribesmen skirmishing down the hillsides; that's what got my imagination going. I even laboured for years on a set of Roman era specific rules called Legion and Empire.

Yet, as Mike and I played another WW2 game I realized that much of my gaming, painting and reading these past couple of years has been WW2 related. Looking at the labels on the side of the blog, it appears that WW2 posts outnumber any other period label by 19 or more posts, or almost 2:1.

Also with Sharp Practice, Chain of Command and now Ronin, it seems my games are also getting smaller in scope, and I hope a little less cumbersome. As with many older gamers, it seems I just don't have the time anymore to set up a big battle, let alone fight it out over a couple of days. A 'couple of days' of game time could take a couple of months real time!

I was, however, quite happy yesterday to discover in the lead pile some figures to make a couple of Austrian dragoon regiments for some more big battle SYW, and I'm not quite ready to part with my legions yet.