Hobby Year 2023 in retrospect and plans for 2024

 

Singing the Song of Ice and Fire

Pretty nuts... So I thought, that last year's (2022) 150 game sessions and 79 of the Song was a lot, but 2023 must be a record breaking year: I played 194 times and 134 out of those were Song!

Read on to learn about my hobby year higlights!

So, Song of Ice and Fire dominated (it's the best game I've ever played), without it, the rest as a pretty even spread:

So my focus and plans seemed to happend more or less as planned; besides Song, I wanted to play the games I played, mainly Star Wars, Saga (mainly Age of Alexander), Marvel Crisis Protocol and Bolt Action. Somewhat surpises on the menu were 40k related games, mainly Kill Team, which I find very nice, Mythic Battles, which was boosted by our visit to Hamburher Tactica in 2022 and the arrival of Mythic Battles Ragnarök kickstarter pledge(just 1,5 years late). After a long long break, RPG also reported to my agenda with Paranoia started early fall - it's been mostly great fun!

 The huge gaming activity reduced my painting outcome a bit, 599 is still a lot!

Summaries of what I have painted, can be found here for H1 and here for H2.

I was most motivated to paint more stuff for Song, specially for House Martell, since they got most play. It has also been very cool to paint stuff for Mythic Battles. Marvel and Star Wars related painting is also a pleasure, as the models are very nice. Biggest motivation to get into Star Wars Shatterpoint was exactly this!

Martell Heroes 2

Higlights of H2 

An absolute highlight of the second half of my hobby year was our visit with Antti and Pasi  to Warsaw and Song's Polish Nationals in the end of October. Read all about the tournament here. Warsaw and it's museums offered also a lot for us wargamers:

Polish Army Museum

Museum of Warsaw Uprising

Wargamer

Of course we had to visit THE GAME STORE, where most of our toys nowadays come from

Song Campaign

One of the higlights is always the annual, map based Song campaign. This time I played Targaryens with Antti as my team mate. We did pretty good (considering, that Targaryen certainly is not one of the stronger factions ATM) and ended on the second place - sharing with arch enemies during the campaign: Baratheons!

We even held the King's Lanfing in the end!

Visit to  (Battlefield) Berlin

East Side Gallery

DDR Museum

Christmas Market

Battlefield Berlin

BB is probably the best wargaming store in Europe (and I've visited a lot of them).

It has a huge selection of wargaming stuff and a decent gaming area too.

I warmly recommend visiting there, should you find yourself in Berlin.

I also played a game with Stefan there. My Martells took a hard fought vicrory from Jokin Neutrals

Plans for 2024

I will certainly keep playing my favourite games  (writing this on 13th of January and already 4 Song games played). What will change from 2023 is probably this:

• Probably not playing quite so much
• I hope, that quite a bit more Napoleonic era gaming will happen. I woud like to play it in 28mm, but will certainly need to bring out my 165mm French and paint some more of them, because most of Napoleonic enthusiasts want to play in 15mm. Coming General d'Armee 2nd edition seems to be buzz now

• I also plan to start playing Middle-Earth SBG again, after a break of couple of years
• My godson got MCP starter set as a christmas present, so I hope to play with him too!