25 years of minis and counting: Hobby Year 2018 in retrospect

What a great year again!

Looking back now, I feel gratitude and joy about my hobby and actually about my life, as a whole. I have lovely family and wife, whom doesn't complain too much about my hobby time and all the hobby stuff lying around and stocked at our house, I have a job, that doesn't take all my time, but provides nicely for life and we have a great gaming club here in Helsinki - Nopat ja Taktiikka, where I can find other likeminded fellows to play with. I'm also proud to call many of them friends.

Nopat -club's annual summer trip to Kalle's summer cabin (where we naturally play a lot too)

Read on to find out what were the highlight of my hobby year 2018!

Campaigning and going international

Year 2018 was all about campaigning and my hobby or at least my contacts becoming more and more international. Campaigning is my favourite way of wargaming, so I was happy to run and participate in so many campaigns, including:

2 X Saga Limes Campaign
Age of the Wolf Saga Campaign
Warhammer Fantasy Badlands Campaign
Kingdoms in the East Campaign
Test of Honor Campaign

Kingdoms in the East -map

Going international means, that I've had the pleasure of being more connected with hobby people abroad. Besides our Nordic project with Dalauppror to run a demo game in Salute I've started co-operating with a blog-site called Sculpting, painting and Gaming and two of my articles on Samurai -gaming have been published there!

Salute with Dalauppror

During I've also had a great pleasure in getting to know and co-operating with several great people running miniature companies like Andrew aka Lord S. from Grippingbeast, Andy Hobday from Footsore / Warbanner, Paul Matthews from Sculpting, painting and Gaming and Francesco from FireForge Games.

Me and Lord S. in Warfare (2017)

Me and Francesco in Salute

Painting and Gaming during 2018

So let's get down to the hardcore numbers of my hobby during 2018...

Painted miniatures

All the miniatures I painted / finished during 2018 were 28mm and the split is as follows:

Naturally(?) painting miniatures is a continues process, at least for me it is. This means, that many of the miniatures completed during 2018, had been started before... I have a bit bad habit in painting miniatures to be able to play with them, but now quite getting them finished and that is why I have plenty of models, that are half way painted. So during 2018 I FINISHED 623 miniatures (at least half of them from scratch)... these minis also visited my painting desk, but didn't get finished:

You can see some of the minis I've painted in several blog posts like this. I'm also active in Instagram with my painting and gaming pictures, you'll find me with username wanhaherrat

Games played

During 2018 I played 86 games! As already written, campaigning was great part of my gaming 2018 and hence my number one game was clearly Saga from Studio Tomahawk. Release of it's 2nd edition also boosted it at our club with several new gamers joining in to write their own sagas.

Besides playing my "regular" favourites, like Saga and Bolt Action, 10(!!!) new games got played during 2018 - one of them is not even published yet: Rebels and Patriots is a great game soon to be published by Osprey. Other very nice new acquaintances in 2018 were Star Wars Legion (of course!), Swordpoint, Test of Honor (finally got around to play it) and a board game Rising Sun.

Fantasy also made a strong comeback (17% of games played) with Warhammer Fantasy Battle (8th edition) and the release of a new "edition" of the Middle Earth Strategy Battle Game.

Blogging

This year the milestone of 100 000 visits (total so far) to my blog was reached. Now it's already more than 130 000 visits.

Most popular blog posts during 2018 were

Unboxing FireForge's Byzantine Auxiliary, 2217 views
Bolt Action Apocalypse, 1294 views
Start of the Kingdoms in the East Campaign, 1032 views

Lot of help for these post were given by the fact, that a link for them was published on the related company's facebook page or in an international facebook page of that game.

2019?

During 2019 campaigning will continue as I'm now playing in 3 campaigns, I expect Saga to be my most played game still and I hope to play more sci-fi games, this meaning Warhammer 40K and Star Wars Legion. ME SBG will certainly continue it's strong comeback too. This year I'll be painting miniatures for "Game of Thrones" and at least a one new army for Bolt Action. And Samurais, of course.