Quick update

The office is slowly getting repacked. The armies continue to roll through:

 

The Necrons - one of my few mostly painted armies.

 

One of the last armies I collected, the Chaos Marines. Most are unassembled.

My imperials, made up of mostly Space Wolves, a couple of Knights, and some Scions. Most of the infantry is still unbuilt.

Warhammer 40,000

So those that have been reading my blog should know that I am no great fan of Games Workshop. I used to be, mind you, I used to be a huge GW fanboi. I went from a small rogue trader force of beaky marines and a handful of eldar and squats, to owning 10+ armies going across every GW miniature game they made. In face I still own forces for necromunda, warmaster, battlefleet gothic, epic, and mordheim. That is besides the armies I own for 40K and WFB.

And then in the last few years, GW went from being a great game company, to being a delusional miniature company. Oh, they make (for the most part) amazing miniatures, but their heads are so far up their bums that they are pretty close to seeing their own tonsils.

All that being said, they did manage to create two amazing IPs. I absolutely love the world of warhammer fantasy, and the 40K universe. I simply do. That is why I still own so many miniatures. Going back to the beginning, 40K really was my gateway drug. There was nothing out there like it and it evoked this amazing imagery. It really has only gotten better as time has gone on. It is why I haven't kicked GW completely to the curb so far.

Case in point, I recently played Relic's Dawn of War II game. I have to say, for the most part, the PC games for GW's IPs have been pretty good. Relic does RTS's right, and the original Dawn of War was fantastic..and actually still going due to modders and the like. Well for some reason I just wanted to hop back into that world and I unexpectedly found that DoW2 was still going strong. I got in a half dozen games of Last Stand and had a ball playing.

That just feeds right into my love of 40K, so pretty soon I was looking over my models and reading the 7th edition rulebook in the hopes of playing soon. I'm actually going to be reaching out to friends soon who have either given up on wargaming, or who perhaps have never given it a try, and see if they wouldn't mind learning the game. They don't need to invest anything because I have plenty of armies. But I've found I just want to play. I want to put myself back into that universe.

Specifically, I've been really drawn to my orks. How can you not love orks. The 3rd edition book they got was brilliant. It was the first time GW had actually gotten my interest in orks. In rogue trader and 2nd edition, they were just too silly. Here was this dark universe and you had these clowns running around. But then in 3rd edition, the red noses and fuzzy wigs were tossed away and out came these brutal killers that loved to fight. It was fantastic. I've been smitten with them ever since. Sure, they still have their comical side, but now it is combined with a stone cold raging brute which makes them so appealing. And finally we have some great vehicle kits as well. The whole visual theme for them is amazing.

So here we are, stuck between not wanting to support a company that turned to the dark side, and yet wanting to romp around in the universe they created.

Do you even Waaaagh! Bro?

So the giant task of cataloging my collection continues into its second month. My wife's patience is waning. :)

I have about a third of it replaced into my office. I'm also not cataloging everything, just the mini collections really. Although I'm not sure if I'll do the D&D stuff or not. I have so many minis for that, dating all the way back to 70's grenadier sets to the first two Bonez kickstarter minis from Reaper. God help me if there is ever a fire in my house.

Anyways, I did recently tackle my ork horde. All said and done, it gets pretty close to 400 minis for my orks. I should really get to assembling the rest of them. Here they are:

Of course the poor boarboyz have no actual place in the army now. Boooooo. And I don't actually own any kommandos...so that will probably need to be fixed at some point. But every other unit that currently exists, I have. I do have a friend that has a small ork force, mostly made up of Mantic marauder minis...so he'll probably get some of the extras from this list.

So with the orks down, they get added to the high elves, the dwarfs, and my Brits and Germans for Bolt Action that are cataloged. Next up is the Space Wolf army. Shouldn't be as big, and I'll probably be able to get in the Necrons the same day.

I do need to start looking into a nice paint organizer for my desk. I want a nice tiered one so that it is easier to find what I want.

So no playing anything unfortunately. I have been working on my D&D 5th ed campaign, you know, just in case I find people to actually play one day. This would probably all go faster if I just unplugged my computer until it was done. :)

New Year, same gamer

Wow, I missed a whole month. And really, no excuse for it. That said, I've been busy.....busy reorganizing my office. I had a goal. I was going to catalog my GW armies....everything I had for each one, built, unbuilt, whatever. And then my wife said, "Why don't you just clean out your whole office?"

Silly me, I tried. Just to give you a sense of scale, my office resides in my basement. It roughly is about 1/6th of the total size of my basement. It has two full sized desks, a 5 shelf book rack, two wall shelving units, a built in closet, and then a side closet.

The contents of my office were able to cover over half of my remaining basement space. It really is quite something to see. While models did present a large portion, apparently I have been hording RPGs for even longer. Five editions of D&D material makes quite the stack (or stacks). Plenty of trash is also moving out, which will help. Also, there will be a good portion of models and games that are going into the "for sale" or "for free" bins.

I also found floppies and disks for games over 20 years ago. Doom anyone?

I had two weeks off for the holidays and I was able to empty and clean about 98% of the space. I still have a little left to do (and hope to finish tonight). Then I get the great task of organizing and putting back everything...while recording it all.

So then what? Well, I've got a few new priorities, or shifts in priorities as the case may be. Part of my focus will be working on a D&D campaign and forming a group to play it. If I am lucky, my search for players will turn into the finding of a group and I can just play instead of DM. But I'm not lucky.

Then, I have three games I'm going to focus on. Spartan's Planetfall will get the starter set finished and ready for play. Warlord's bolt action will hopefully get some progress as well. And then Kings of War will be played. I have armies ready to go for that one and the local community needs to keep growing. Gotta play publicly if that is going to happen.

Oh, and I need to reach out to some friends and reconnect. As you get older, it gets harder and harder to maintain friendships. Life gets pretty full and you can't expect everyone else to do the work. So I'm going to make the effort and build back that area of my life.

Hopefully, my next update will contain the words "I'm done with my office!" It will also be interesting to have an actual total to the number of GW models I own. Maybe I could open up a store....