Hi!
Well its been my day off today so we went out for a bit of a drive up north for a bit and happened on a hobby shop. I nipped in to have a peruse in hopes of finding something to buy to reboot my painting mojo but had a less than fun experience.
On entering the store, the half dozen middle aged men sat in it stopped their game and stared at me so I gave them a friendly hello only to be greeted with silence and they turned back to their game and one of them let forth with a fart.
Unsurprisingly I left without spending any more time in the store. Why oh why can't wargamers act like civilised human beings? I have noticed in several of the selection of gaming stores that I have visited over the years an astounding lack of anything resembling customer service and am totally sick of it.
I work in retail and if I treated a customer as some of the geeks in hobby shops do, I would fully expect to get the sack. Goodness knows the hobby needs to attract new gamers and the sort of crap that I experienced today leaves me totally unsurprised that people are leaving the hobby or getting their gaming gear online.
Don't get me wrong, there are some good old fashioned gaming shops out there, such as Spirit Games in Burton on Trent (I highly recommend visiting it if you get chance as it is literally bursting at the seams with great stuff and the staff are friendly and helpful) but just about every other one I have visited suffers from ignorant staff who seem to think of their customers as an inconvenience or have a shop that leaves one gagging from the stench of unwashed bodies or in the case of another store I visited up north, dog crap!
Now I am not going to name and shame the shop I visited today but I am never going to set foot in it again and suspect that if it keeps to their current level of service, it will close in the not too distant future. I must admit that I was thankful that my fiance decided to remain in the car as she would have been furious and would have given the saps in the store a piece of her mind.
I do apologise to anyone who works in a gaming store or visits any which are good but am feeling the rage for my hopes of finding something to paint being spoiled!
Hopefully I will be able to regain my composure a bit and find something to paint in the not too distant future but at present I am too busy fuming!
All the best!
Tuesday, 26 May 2015
Saturday, 16 May 2015
A Problem of Space...
Hi!
Well I still haven't regained my hobby mojo following the last few weeks of general painting malaise. Alas every time I sit down to paint anything I just can't bring myself to do anything so I took myself through to my man cave and had a peruse of my current collection and have come up with a bit of an issue.
Essentially I think that part of the problem at least is lack of anywhere to play a decent sized game. For games like 40k, Fantasy Battle, Epic or many others, you need at least a 4'x4' board and preferably a 6'x4'. Sadly I don't have anything like that and I think I am finding at least part of my painters block coming from the fact that when the miniatures are finished and painted, they just end up on the shelf gathering dust rather than being put to use.
Yes I could go out and join a gaming group but my job means that I have very little spare time and for me at least, gaming tends to be something I do in a morning before going out to work or my fiance getting up. Unsurprisingly, there aren't many groups out there who cater to this!
In the past, this has never been much of a bother as I enjoy solo gaming and my 15mm scale gubbins have kept me entertained for several years with the many exploits of the Boar Company and their adventures somewhere on the border in Aeroth or Farpoint Salvages explorations of the frontier of Imperial space.
I think that part of the issue at least seems to have been that when I stuck to 15mm scale skirmishes, I could paint up a force in a day or two and get stuck into gaming straight away and each new addition would actually see action (in the case of the Boar Company, it resulted in an ongoing campaign that seemed to give each and every character a real personality of their own)
The problem seems to have arrived when I scaled up to 28mm and ironically down to 6mm as both need larger surfaces to play satisfying games! Yes painting them was very satisfying but I haven't played a single game with them and that seems to be putting me off doing any more!
For example, a good skirmish game can be played on a 2'x3' board like the one below in 15mm:
The same cannot be said of a 28mm scale game in the same space. This has lead me to a bit of a revelation that may get me up and running again and that is the need to box up all my remaining 28mm scale stuff for the time being and concentrate on something that I know I will use. Therefore, I am going to dedicate June to a couple of projects that I have been thinking of for a while and see if I can't get a mini campaign or two played and also paint up some goodies too!
I may not be posting here much over the rest of May as I have rather a lot of work to do but watch this space as I have got a bit of a plan and will update it from the 1st of June!
Till then, All the best!
Well I still haven't regained my hobby mojo following the last few weeks of general painting malaise. Alas every time I sit down to paint anything I just can't bring myself to do anything so I took myself through to my man cave and had a peruse of my current collection and have come up with a bit of an issue.
Essentially I think that part of the problem at least is lack of anywhere to play a decent sized game. For games like 40k, Fantasy Battle, Epic or many others, you need at least a 4'x4' board and preferably a 6'x4'. Sadly I don't have anything like that and I think I am finding at least part of my painters block coming from the fact that when the miniatures are finished and painted, they just end up on the shelf gathering dust rather than being put to use.
Yes I could go out and join a gaming group but my job means that I have very little spare time and for me at least, gaming tends to be something I do in a morning before going out to work or my fiance getting up. Unsurprisingly, there aren't many groups out there who cater to this!
In the past, this has never been much of a bother as I enjoy solo gaming and my 15mm scale gubbins have kept me entertained for several years with the many exploits of the Boar Company and their adventures somewhere on the border in Aeroth or Farpoint Salvages explorations of the frontier of Imperial space.
Boar Company
I think that part of the issue at least seems to have been that when I stuck to 15mm scale skirmishes, I could paint up a force in a day or two and get stuck into gaming straight away and each new addition would actually see action (in the case of the Boar Company, it resulted in an ongoing campaign that seemed to give each and every character a real personality of their own)
Crazed Cultists!
The problem seems to have arrived when I scaled up to 28mm and ironically down to 6mm as both need larger surfaces to play satisfying games! Yes painting them was very satisfying but I haven't played a single game with them and that seems to be putting me off doing any more!
For example, a good skirmish game can be played on a 2'x3' board like the one below in 15mm:
Skirmish!
The same cannot be said of a 28mm scale game in the same space. This has lead me to a bit of a revelation that may get me up and running again and that is the need to box up all my remaining 28mm scale stuff for the time being and concentrate on something that I know I will use. Therefore, I am going to dedicate June to a couple of projects that I have been thinking of for a while and see if I can't get a mini campaign or two played and also paint up some goodies too!
I may not be posting here much over the rest of May as I have rather a lot of work to do but watch this space as I have got a bit of a plan and will update it from the 1st of June!
Till then, All the best!
Sunday, 3 May 2015
Still Alive!
Hi!
Well its been a few weeks since I last posted anything. I've started writing a few articles on and off over the period but have deleted them in frustration. I suspect I have hit a bit of a painters block again which is a bit of a bind as I have several mini projects I would like to be getting on with such as my 2nd Edition 40k Ork army or my Syntha which have all languished for some time at various stages of completion.
The problem is that nothing that I have looked out to start painting over the course of the last few weeks has inspired me at all. Part of the problem has been that I have found myself almost irresistibly drawn the the classic Target Games ranges.
I'm talking about 1st edition Warzone and Chronopia. Both are fantastic rulesets, rich with background and flavour but both are now sadly out of production, the miniatures ranges associated with them similarly hard to track down. To make matters worse, the metal used for said miniatures had something in it that caused many of the surviving figures to come down with a bad case of lead rot making them pretty much unusable.
Yes some of them are still available from Prince August or ebay but I am loath to buy any of them as I fear I won't actually paint them. As with so many of the ideas I have flitting around at the moment, the prospect of actually painting anything is leaving me cold.
Maybe its just another patch of hobby blues but my usual solution of picking something utterly at random and painting it just isn't working and I am at a loss what to do. Maybe I should just take a bit of a longer break from painting but I suspect that I will feel much the same in a months time...
Apologies for the rambling on and hopefully my painting mojo will return with a bit of work but in the meantime, All the best!
Well its been a few weeks since I last posted anything. I've started writing a few articles on and off over the period but have deleted them in frustration. I suspect I have hit a bit of a painters block again which is a bit of a bind as I have several mini projects I would like to be getting on with such as my 2nd Edition 40k Ork army or my Syntha which have all languished for some time at various stages of completion.
The problem is that nothing that I have looked out to start painting over the course of the last few weeks has inspired me at all. Part of the problem has been that I have found myself almost irresistibly drawn the the classic Target Games ranges.
I'm talking about 1st edition Warzone and Chronopia. Both are fantastic rulesets, rich with background and flavour but both are now sadly out of production, the miniatures ranges associated with them similarly hard to track down. To make matters worse, the metal used for said miniatures had something in it that caused many of the surviving figures to come down with a bad case of lead rot making them pretty much unusable.
Yes some of them are still available from Prince August or ebay but I am loath to buy any of them as I fear I won't actually paint them. As with so many of the ideas I have flitting around at the moment, the prospect of actually painting anything is leaving me cold.
Maybe its just another patch of hobby blues but my usual solution of picking something utterly at random and painting it just isn't working and I am at a loss what to do. Maybe I should just take a bit of a longer break from painting but I suspect that I will feel much the same in a months time...
Apologies for the rambling on and hopefully my painting mojo will return with a bit of work but in the meantime, All the best!