Major Ballsup's Hobby Shed

Last year was the first time that I’d tried the Ovelist approach from The Hobby Support Group.  I found it really helped to focus and keep me from disappearing down too many rabbit holes, so I’m doing it again.  Once again I've split it into gaming and doing ( here ). You’ll notice that I've gone for periods rather than specific rules.  I agree with the Too Fat Lardies maxim of “playing the period not the rules”.  I also have so many rule sets that I don’t know what I may use 😄  All those listed are ready to play and as with last year it's about getting those unused collections onto the table.  Here’s a few notes behind each choice: Fantasy Skirmish - I love Sword Weirdos and it's an easy game to set up and play in a short time,  As I don't have a dedicated gaming space that's an important factor for me.  It also lets me get those figures out that I don't use with their "parent" system anymore like Warmachine/Hordes and Celtos and the handful of...

After a successful 2024 using the Ovelist approach I’ve been mulling over what to do this year.  Strangely this has been quite difficult as I cleared far more than I bought and haven’t got too much to work on.  As before I've split out the doing from the gaming ( here ).  Here's the 2025 doing Ovelist: The starting balance is: 28mm - 43 figures (21 Norse Age, 8 Verrotwood, 10 WW2, 4 Burrows & Badgers) 20mm - 26 figures (26 WW2) 15mm - 2 afvs (2 WW2) 6mm - 44 figures (11 WW2, 331980s, ; 9 1980s afvs) There's a square each to cover off all the above.   I’ve also got the perennial Terrain square.  I like fiddling around making terrain and my tables sorely need improvement.  While the outstanding figure count is so low I want to try and spend more time on terrain and produce or improve at least one item each month.  Another square has been allocated to getting my 16th Century collection ship-shape and ready to game with.  I’ve looked at ...

The last figures I completed in 2024 were a quartet of Victrix Dark Age Archers.  These were my oldest outstanding 28mm miniatures purchased in late 2022.   After completing these I thought it would be interesting to look at all the different figures I made using the Dark Age Archers bodies as the basis.  You get 36 bodies (one piece legs and torso) in each set.  Four are meant as archers, two as slingers.  There are numerous heads, arms and bits.  I sold one spruce which left me with 30 to do.  In reality I only did 28 as I used the legs from two of the archers with some Oathmark Elves. As with all plastic kits some bits work better together than others and Victrix do give instructions as to what bits fit certain bodies.  If you were doing these all as archers for the same army, you’d inevitably end up with some quite similar figures which in my eyes defeats the purpose of using plastics but that's just me.     When you’ve worked o...

Well here we are another year done.  All in all its been a good one for hobbying. My Ovelist updates with summaries of the year for gaming and doing can be seen here and here respectively.  Let's hope 2025 is a good year in all ways for all of us. Completed There was a few things I really wanted to get finished before the end of the year.  Miniatures wise I’ve worked in four scales this month: First of all in 15mm I completed the Cromarty Forge Village Defenders.  This was the last of my 15mm.  Readers will know how much I've enjoyed working on these.  If I had my own 3D printer I'd probably have bought all their STLs and have printed so many figures that they'd never get painted, which is one of the many reasons I won't get my own printer!   Then I rebased a 32mm Sci-Fi figure.  This was one of the figures I completed in the summer, only to discover that the base was skewed and not truly round.  This jarred with my pedantic ways so I rebased...