Twelve months, 20,- Euros – Part 4
The good news first: I found a new job and am more relaxed about that issue now. On the other hand, of course, this means that I have to concentrate on learning the routine and, at the same time, my hobby time is melting away.
So, I'm not surprised that I easily stayed within my hobby budget in April and again only painted one miniature. Since I was somehow not satisfied with the first iteration of Dromeas, I painted another model with the same background story in mind.
Twelve months, 20,- Euros – Part 3
March is always a great month because it gives me the most opportunities for excuses (yes, I know how that sounds). At the beginning of the month I turned 40 - all the more reason to throw a little money out the window. Or is it?
Last month I was thinking about what I wanted to spend my monthly budget on, and that it would probably be a play mat. I've hesitated between four mats from PWorks:
Twelve months, 20,- Euros – Part 2
February is known to be a bit shorter than the other months, so you would think that mentally there would be a bit of pressure to finish painting planned minis. Well, maybe it was like that at the beginning, because I finished the last group of skeletons for my Mortal Gods Army of Hades pretty quickly. This surprised myself so much that I just tried to finish the remaining group of zombies and managed to do so, which completed the army.
With 300 points for the Hades faction, I was satisfied. Now it was time to completely assemble another faction so that I would no longer have to play games with ugly proxies for Mortal Gods.
Miniature swap – travelling wargame box
In 2021 I participated in two travelling wargames trade boxes, and the first one, the "Kramkiste" (stuff box), arrived. A bit lighter than I expected and with the modest trades of the participants before me, I didn't really knew what to expect.
After the Brexit, right into chaos
Brexit is here, and that seems to be a bit of surprise for some. Who would have guessed, that it would actually happen and even have an impact?
It is february and after some hick-ups and problems between Calais and Dover, for the essential things like food and medical supplies, it has arrived our lovely little hobby. Some of the parcels that were sent last year didn't make it within the pre-brexit time windows and thus were lacking the document for a proper export. And many of the traders couldn't be bothered to supply these post-brexit either, resulting in all kinds of fees, additional costs and delays for the customers.
That caused some discussion, where people exchanged their experience and suggestions on how to avoid these, as you can read the experience of several wargamers on Lead Adventure or Sweetwater. For example paying 30 EUR of fees ontop of a 50-60 EUR package of miniatures. Making it more than just unappealing to order from the UK. Please keep in mind, that the majority of miniatures is produced or at least distributed from the UK. So this is going to hurt the demand of miniatures, or at least consolidate towards those who can supply. I was aware that this could happen, and so I ordered in November Empress Miniatures through a german wholetrader. A couple of emails in the old year, and guess what still hasn't arrived? I won't pay the uppricing and will probably step back from my order - if / when somebody gets in touch with me. But those are the smaller traders and shops. Some even have so ingenious suggestions like "split your orders to below 50 GBP and customs won't bother you" - yeah, that's playing russian roulette with fees and highly unprofessional. Especially from a commercial trader.
As for supply. Some traders didn't receive new stock / novelties this year, even from the larger companies. And if you remember how some of the store shelves looked in spring last year, this might be something that might happen with wargaming as well.
Bitbox-Stand In, miniature swap with Gregor / SirLeon
We hoped that we would be able to meet in some kind of way to exchange some stock within our hobby group, but due to being spread across Germany that wasn't possible. As I had some bad experience last year with DHL, I hesitated to use postal services to exchange the miniatures (especially, even if they would reimburse us for lost stuff - which they don't - with some of the OOP items that wouldn't be much help anyway).
Anyhow, as it doesn't really seem that we will have a time slot coming up, that would make a personal meeting happening and the boxes (yes, plural, in the beginning it was one box labelled with Malkränzchen, but over the months it became individual boxes for each one, to keep track who receives what) grew in size. So we had some video chats, talking about what we're looking for, what would end up in the boxes and prepared them for shipping. It is post christmas, it's national tracked packages, so the risk should be a minimum.
Gregor already wrote about some of the items that I sent him over at the German board Tabletop Welt in his project log "Jenseits des Steinbachs". But what did I receive? Some 90s goodies from Middlehammer 🙂
Twelve months, 20,- Euros – Part 1
There is hardly a hobbyist who doesn't have a certain stock of leftover minis at home. In my case, this used to be for a growing bitzbox, but since then, a whole series of unfinished projects have also come along. Since my "Pile of Shame" is already quite large, I thought of a strategy at the beginning of the year to reduce it and at the same time prevent it from growing again. The idea was simple:
Every month I have a budget of 20,- € for my hobby.
With this limit I' d like to achieve that I dedicate myself to my old projects, and at best increase them instead of starting any new ones. Long story short - fight the unpainted minis! In my annual review I already mentioned that the first thing I want to do is to finish my Mortal Gods Hades army. For this I need two squads of zombies that I've already startedn and one base with skeletons.
Kick Off 2021
I gave the indication in the holiday wishes, that I'll do another Kick-Off this year.
A few (or a lot?) of the things that were planned for 2020 had to be put on hold and are still the goals for 2021 - which was primarely having a good time. But let's talk about this in the usual format, answering a few questions.
What was the biggest challenge of 2020?
Well, yeah, the plans for the last year had a full schedule of events along with weekend trips to a couple of cities, picking up on culture and some museums. That obviously didn't happen, turning the vision of 2020 from this:
To this:
Dino’s Annual Summary 2020
As regular visitors of the Chaosbunker will have noticed, there have been rather few articles from my hand lately, which is why it's time to approach the year 2021 with a little more consistency and regularity. For many it is certainly no surprise when I say that 2020 was rather mediocre, but let's take a look at it together...
This was 2020
Basically, the year didn't start out bad at all. I went into my ongoing projects with a lot of motivation, wanting to both start a new gang for Frostgrave and finish the one I'd already started.
Happy New Year 2021!
Enjoy todays New Year's Eve and have a Happy New Year 2021!
Get out your paints and brushes, have a good meal and proper drink along with it, get out your games, consoles or lego bricks and have a good time.
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