It was high time I got organized, so I recently stripped everything off my painting desk and did that. I’m so proud of this I took a picture.

In setting things up, I realized I have a shitload of paints, many of which I use infrequently at best. Many bottles have never even been opened, and many are duplicates purchased because either I thought I would need a replacement sooner than I did, or (more likely) because I forgot I had the color in the first place. I also suffer from the compulsion to always have the right tool for the job, even if it’s a job I will perform once and never again. For example, if I watch a painting tutorial that I like, I will slavishly buy the paint brand and color used rather than seek or mix an alternative. (This isn’t limited to my hobby; it’s why I bought an angle grinder to hone an axe.)

I have a clean area to the left to hold the projects I’m working on, and to the right to hold painted miniatures awaiting Dull Cote (I do my priming and sealing in another room). I bought an office organizer to hold my sculpting tools, my green stuff, my glue, my basing tufts and my brushes, because prior to this they were scattered all over my desk. My paints were always grouped (I won’t say organized) by color; but now they are arranged in logical color progression, i.e. dark-light. We’ll see how long that lasts.

In fact, take a good look now because I give this about 3 painted miniatures before it’s utter chaos again.

In preparation for this post, I was going to count all the unassembled plastic troops I still have on sprues for various armies/projects I have yet to start. I meant to count just 28mm foot soldiers, not vehicles and/or other models (like terrain). I came to my senses and decided not to, both because it was too much effort and because the number would be quite depressing..

Put simply, most of the unassembled plastic currently awaiting my attentions is never getting assembled, at least not by me.

Like many wargamers, I have put together more than my share of plastic soldiers over the years, most (but certainly not all) from the manufactorums (manufactora?) of Games Workshop. I have also put together Wargames Factory zombies and shock troopers, Mantic dwarfs and Dreadball teams, and most recently, Modiphius Star Trek miniatures, among others. Plastic figures (unless made by GW or Modiphius) often cost less than metal or resin; most hold detail quite well; and they’re light and easy to transport and repair, should that become necessary.

And yet…I now realize with absolute clarity that I fucking hate putting together plastic models. As I get older, I simply don’t have the patience for it any more. “Well, gee, Piper,” you may be saying, “you sure picked the wrong hobby.” To which I reply: “Hunh.”

As you may recall, Santa brought me the TANKS game for Christmas last year. This week (at work), I finally got around to assembling the three tanks (2 Sherman, 1 Jagdpanther) that came in the starter set. (Being self-employed has many disadvantages; sleepless nights, probable alcoholism and a crippling sense of responsibility for those I employ, to name but a few. But one of the good things about being my own boss is that no one can tell me that I can’t put together my toys at work.) It took me about an hour and a half, just long enough for me to realize a couple of things.

First, the tanks are small, about the scale of a Matchbox car. Which means you could easily buy any number of painted, ready-to play tank variants  without the need to assemble and paint anything, simply by visiting the toy car aisle of your local dollar store. (From left-right, Sherman 76mm, Sherman 75mm and Jagdpanther, all from the TANKS game; a Corgi Panzer from the toy aisle, which cost $3.00, no painting or assembly necessary.)

Second, as evidenced by games such as Space Hulk, high-quality, single-piece sculpting is possible. If they can sculpt a Terminator that looks like this and mold it out of a single lump of plastic, I’m 100% positive they can sculpt a tank that requires ZERO assembly.

This is vastly preferable to me at this stage of life.

Let me be clear: I don’t hate plastic models. I just hate assembling them, which is not the same thing. I don’t know if it was ever fun, exactly; but it’s definitely not fun for me anymore. As I get older, I just don’t have the time or inclination to clip, file, sand, fill, fit and glue miniatures together, especially if (as in the case of the Modiphius Star Trek miniatures) they’re fiddly as hell and don’t seem to WANT to fit together. I just don’t enjoy the headache of countless hours of assembly, along with the glued-together fingers I will certainly have to endure.

The point is certainly valid that model-building is part and parcel of the miniatures wargaming hobby, as much as collecting, painting and playing games is. It’s just not the part I enjoy anymore. I think I might have enjoyed it once upon a time, but nowadays the inverse correlation between my age and my overall patience level has made that no longer true. (I also can’t see shit anymore, which has made the wearing of reading glasses a necessity for painting and, well, reading.)

Painting, as opposed to gaming, has now become my primary hobby. I play far fewer games today than I used to (like when I regularly assembled plastic armies). While there are exceptions, I am unlikely to ever use most of my miniatures for gaming anymore. Am I really going to ever build and paint an entire 40K Ork army, at this point in my life? Probably not. What would be the point? It might be fun to paint them, but it certainly won’t be fun putting them together first.

I guess at this point I prefer my miniatures to require as little assembly as possible, and I prefer my games require fewer miniatures to play. This is why I prefer skirmish games, and why sprues of plastic soldiers are becoming less and less attractive to me.

If only I could bring myself to part with them…

I thought I would be able to get a few more Star Trek miniatures painted this month, but I’ve been playing a lot of Horizon: Zero Dawn, and my painting time has suffered somewhat. Instead, I thought I’d post something without pictures and see how that goes…

I subscribe to Uncle Atom’s YouTube channel, Tabletop Minions, because he often has an interesting point of view about hobby stuff. Recently, he delved into his Biggest Wargaming Regrets, from buying the wrong army to not buying an airbrush early enough. His video got me thinking about my own gaming regrets; what do I wish I hadn’t done, or what would I do differently if I had the time and hindsight to start over?

Uncle Atom and I share some of the same regrets, although not buying an airbrush isn’t one of mine. Here, in no particular order, are my top seven regrets about gaming:

I don’t make enough terrain. (This is also Uncle Atom’s first big regret.) When I started wargaming, most of my games took place at the FLGS where I bought my stuff. There was plenty of terrain available, albeit of dubious quality: ruins made of Styrofoam trays, rock piles and scatter brush, printed cardboard terrain (like the walkways in the original Necromunda box) and the like. It wouldn’t win any awards, but it provided an adequate setting for some fun games.

Nowadays, any gaming I do is in my own home, and the friends I play with are not wargamers themselves. Thus, any and all terrain must be supplied by me, whether it is purchased or constructed. I would much rather paint miniatures than build terrain, as I consider the former to be fun and the latter to be work. There are some exceptions, but to be honest, terrain-building isn’t really my strong suit, so I often buy a lot of it (which can get expensive). There’s also the problem of storage; I have difficulty figuring out where the hell to put the stuff when I’m not using it (which, given how often I actually play, is most of the time).

I wish I had discovered smaller games sooner. Like many folks, my first introduction to wargaming was through Games Workshop and Warhammer 40K, with Warhammer Fantasy Battle soon to follow. As an AD&D player, I had collected and painted fantasy miniatures for years prior to my “discovery” of wargaming, so miniatures weren’t new to me. Gaming with them, though, was a new concept.

I soon fell in love with GW and the Warhammer world, and still have many fond memories of playing throughout my college years. The cost of GW gaming, while not as ridiculous as it is currently, was high even back then. I’m still amazed that I managed to put together the armies I had, given my budget. As a student I had very little money to spare. When Necromunda and Mordheim came out (GW’s skirmish games) , I pretty much ignored them in favor of the bigger games because I already had the armies and didn’t want to spend money on anything new. I couldn’t really afford to, anyway.

The only alternative to Warhammer, as far as I knew, was historical wargaming. I didn’t have much interest in historical gaming (I like wizards and dragons over Spartans and triremes). If I had only discovered (non-GW) skirmish wargaming sooner, I would have likely played a lot more games, and would have probably found more people to game with. Many of these would be the same folks who were put off by the entry cost (in both time and money) of GW gaming, as well as GW’s insistence on using only “official” miniatures in their games. Today, the market is flooded with smaller scale games by independent publishers. Many don’t require a specific line of miniatures. I wish I was aware of other wargaming options like these back then.

I didn’t really give a shit about basing my miniatures until it was way past time to give a shit about basing my miniatures. The Ral Partha and Grenadier miniatures I painted during my early years in the hobby all came on their own bases. I never really bothered to paint bases anything other than a glossy (!) grey or green until I discovered flocked slotta bases when I started playing Warhammer 40K. When I moved on to Warhammer Fantasy, I never bothered to fill the slots on the bases, even if the tabs on the bottom of the miniatures on them didn’t fill the slots completely. Now I have many old GW miniatures with open slots on their bases that look like shit. I suppose I could go back and rebase them, but I just don’t have  the time or the inclination. Instead, I just get annoyed whenever I look at them.

Nowadays I consider basing to be an important part of painting any miniature, and a lot of thought generally goes into which base I use. Just as a good base can turn a mediocre-looking miniature into a good-looking miniature, poor basing can really bring the overall aesthetic of a miniature down. I’m a fan of sculpted scenic bases, but these can get expensive. The availability of ready-to-use tufts and basing effects is a good thing.

I was ignorant of using the right tools for the job for far too long. I didn’t discover acrylic paint until I started painting space marines and they came with a set of five Citadel paints. Up until then, I painted everything with Testor’s gloss enamels, which are horrible to work with and are very limited in color palette. Green stuff? WTF was green stuff? Instead I used Squadron modelling putty to fill gaps because I thought it was better than Testor’s modelling putty (and trust me, it is).

I didn’t own a pair of nippy cutters until about 2006, when I was in the middle of a period when I had stopped painting and playing games regularly. Until then, I cut everything off a sprue or made any modifications to metal miniatures using only an X-acto knife. (It’s a wonder I didn’t cut my fingertips off.)

When gluing models together I never pinned anything because I didn’t have a drill other than a pin vise, and cutting pinning wire with an X-acto knife was too much of a pain to make me want to try. I opted to use copious amounts of putty instead, which rarely worked well, considering the quality of the putty I was using.

As you can see, I often “improvised”, even when I didn’t know I was improvising. That sucked. Nowadays, I am a big proponent of using the right tool for the job, whatever that job might be, and regardless of whether or not I’ll ever need a particular tool again. (Example: About five years ago, I bought an angle grinder to sharpen an axe blade because I didn’t want to hone it by hand. I used it once and haven’t needed to use it again, because my axe is still sharp, seeing how I’ve only used the axe about 3 times since I bought it.) This is especially true of my hobby tools; if something will make my life easier, I’m likely to buy it even if it’s only to use it once. I’m lazy like that.

Now I own clippers and a Dremel and green stuff, and I have more acrylic paints than I ever thought possible, which really isn’t anything to brag about considering these things (with the possible exception of the Dremel) and others like them are pretty much basic supplies anyone in the hobby should own. Took me long enough to figure that out.

Uncle Atom says he waited too long to buy an airbrush and suggests that if I buy one I’ll use it all the time. He may be right, but I haven’t felt the need to buy one of those yet. I don’t paint many large, flat surfaces, and those I do have occasion to paint are easily done with the right paintbrush. We’ll see if that changes. I’m mainly put off by the knowledge that airbrush maintenance is more time-consuming than cleaning a paintbrush. Who needs that?

I don’t know how to sculpt. This one is pretty self-explanatory. I wish I knew how to sculpt, as working with green stuff is the bane of my hobby existence. I can handle filling gaps and sculpting things that take minimal skill (like entrails), but that’s about the extent of my abilities. I don’t want to be Sandra Garrity or Mark Copplestone, but it would be nice to be able to sculpt a hat or a cape; or perhaps some hair.

I have asked good sculptors for their advice and even attempted to follow it, but with poor results. I even changed my sculpting medium from green stuff to magic sculpt with equally poor results. I know sculpting, like painting, is a skill that gets better over time and with practice. I just lack the patience and wish I had learned the basics sooner.

I have a hard time saying goodbye to things I know I will never use. I am a collector of many things,  miniatures first among them. I’ve collected a lot of miniatures over the years. Some date back to my earliest days as a Dungeons and Dragons player. Many are from my early wargaming days. Still more, however, have been purchased in the last 15 years or so for any number of games or projects that I know (now) that I will never get to.

It’s tough to get rid of any of my things, especially miniatures. I never understood people who can labor for a year on an army and then sell it when they get tired of playing it. I could never easily sell any of my painted miniatures. To me, they are an investment of time where the results can be clearly seen. Are they all masterpieces? Certainly not. But they’re something I did for no other reason than I wanted to, and looking at them makes me happy and brings back fond memories (most of the time).

I have given much morbid thought to the fact that I won’t be here forever, and barring unforeseen catastrophe, my miniatures are likely to survive me. When that happens, they will become someone else’s problem. I feel like I should take steps to minimize that problem while I’m still here, especially if I care about the someone else in question. Yet somewhere in my mind I still think it’s possible that I’ll paint those two complete Clan War armies I’ve had languishing in a box since 1998, learn the rules for this unsupported and OOP game, get some friends interested in playing, and play regularly.

It could happen. Best not to get rid of them just yet.

I don’t play games often enough. My biggest regret, to be sure. I have no good excuse for not being able to play games. I have a perfect space for it and I have more leisure time than most people I know.

That being said, I have blogged (whined, really) elsewhere that any miniatures and terrain used in my games would have to be supplied by me and me alone. I am also quite particular about who I invite into my home. Even so, I do not live particularly close to my gaming buddies, who are always welcome, of course. But they’re mainly roleplayers, not wargamers.

As I said above, I used to play at the FLGS, but that store is long gone. All the ones that took its place cater to the GW and Privateer Press crowd, so small-scale, small press games have no real home there. And that’s what I’m interested in playing nowadays.

The problem with retailer-based gaming  (to me, at least) is that the retailer has little, if any, incentive to offer or promote games other than what sells best. That’s why here in the US you rarely see anything other than GW or Privateer Press games being played in game stores. There may be exceptions, but if so, they’re not around me. I guess the answer is to start a club of my own. I think I’m going to try to do something akin to the “European” model, i.e. not being affiliated with or based in a retail establishment. I have no real idea how to go about getting something like this started, but I am going to try to figure it out.

Next time, I hope to have the TNG bridge crew completed, with Kirk and Co. soon to follow.