And what a year it has been! Let’s look at what I accomplished:

Painting

You can see my achievements in the Vis Bellica 2020 Painting Challenge gallery, but in summary I managed 1,726 points; down a bit from last year and the year before but still my third highest from the seven years that the challenge has been running. I think this year’s score was down a bit because I’ve been concentrating on Ancients and English Civil War (ECW) i.e. lots of infantry and cavalry but no vehicles.

I had three main projects, all in 15mm: my English Civil War collection, a Marian Roman army, and a Classical Indian army. All three went from no figures to enough to field an army for a game, with the ECW collection actually being enough to field both sides. I put this down to the new GW Contrast paints: being able to achieve the same effect as layer painting with one coat of paint made a huge difference, especially when painting horses.

Other than the three main projects, when lockdown first happened I made a concerted effort to clear some of the half-finished projects from the lead mountain. These were mainly the odd sci-fi unit, and included some of Khurasan’s excellent 15mm figures.

I also managed to bring some half-finished Ancients armies up to scratch for To The Strongest (TTS): including the Hoplite Greeks and the 100 Year War English.

So, on the whole, a good year for painting, with enough on the painting table in terms of extra Marian Romans, extra Alexandrian Macedonians and extra Classical Indians to keep me occupied until I decide on my next project. I also want to add a few more ECW units to my collection, and I have a whole load of Onslaught Miniatures excellent Grudd on their way as well.

Gaming

With 42 games played in 2020, this has been my most prolific year by a long way. These broke down as follows:

• Ancients: 21

• Fantasy: 1

• Pike & Shot: 14

• WW2: 6

I put this huge increase down to two factors. Firstly, I played a lot more games based on the Big Red Bat’s grid-based system i.e. To The Strongest and For King & Parliament (FK&P). These are a lot quicker to set up and play than my usual TooFatLardies company-sized systems (I Ain’t Been Shot, Mum (IABSM); Charlie Don’t Surf (CDS); Quadrant 13 (Q13)) so I could sometimes get three separate games into one session.

I still love playing IABSM, but it’s an hour to set up, 3-4 hours to play, then an hour to take back down again: a real commitment as opposed to playing TTS which I can get done from start to finish in two to three hours.

The second factor is that we had Daughter #1’s boyfriend staying with us for the three months of lockdown over the summer, and it turns out that this excellent young man really enjoys wargaming. He’d never tried it before, but took to it like a veteran, and having an opponent in the house and ready to play anytime makes a huge difference.

All I need to do now is get him trapped back here again for January!

Shopping

Way too much money spent this year! well, I say that, but it was all very worth while.

Most of my cash went on the raw lead for my new armies. Particular kudos for excellent miniatures and service from:

• Magister Militum as a source for

  • Hallmark for ECW

  • Baueda for Marian Romans

• Museum Miniatures for Classical Indians

• Peter Pig for ECW

• Khurasan for ECW Scots

And not forgetting the faithful stalwarts of:

• Warbases (anything bases!)

• GW (Contrast Paints)

With an honourable mention to Boontown for terrain basing materials as well. All the above are highly recommended as a source of wargaming goodies.

Further kudos to the following who took up my suggestions and produced:

• Museum Miniatures: a two-horse chariot for their Classical Indians

• Onslaught Miniatures: some engineer/artillery crew and high command space dwarves to complement their Grudd range

• Warbases: for supplying all sorts of custom bases for me

Writing

Embarrassingly, nothing published at all this year: the pressures of real-life work taking over. Although COVID and Lockdown meant there was much less business around, you had to work extra hard to even get that over the finish line. That means my last publication remains the early war Blitzkrieg in the East Part 1: Japan for IABSM, published October 2019.

On the plus side, however, I have 8½ scenarios of a planned 12 finished for an ECW fictional scenario pack for FK&P. I had intended to knuckle down and get them done over Christmas, but it will now be later in the new year that they are ready.

My plans for the new year also include the Allied equivalent of the Japan blitzkrieg supplement…but so varied are the forces involved that I think it will be real effort to get it done.

This Blog

About 22,500 page views this year: up from a low point of 20,000 in 2019, but still not as high as the peak of 32,000 we received in 2018. Not sure why that is. Could be something to do with the fact that more oomph from TFL goes into Chain of Command and Infamy! Infamy!, with IABSM, CDS and Q13 left to largely fend for themselves, so there’s less interest in the marketplace in the majority of our content.

That said, there’s been a lot of TTS and FK&P After Action Reports (AARs) on the site, featuring the games I’ve played in, which I’ve promoted on Lead Adventure, Facebook and the TTS forum. Maybe it’s something to do with not posting pointers to my AAR on The Miniatures Page, but I felt I should support TFL in the contretemps that happened between the two earlier this year.

I also read somewhere that blogs are going “out of fashion”, replaced by Facebook posts, but I can’t think that that is true: here the content is presented in an easy-to-read format and is easily searchable, as opposed to FB groups which, once a few days have passed, seems to consign their content to the void!

I’ve also stopped putting direct links from the TFL Painting Challenge posts to the individual galleries. I know they are nice to have, but adding them to an update post could add 30-45 minutes to the work involved, and I’m already spending 2-3 hours a week just processing entries.

If anyone has any ideas or content that they’d like to see (which also fits in to the site as a whole) then feel free to comment or drop me a line.

The Painting Challenge

Talking of the Painting Challenge, this continued strong in 2020, although we only had twenty-six entrants this year, down from thirty-three in 2019.

Still, lots of excellent work submitted, and I know how much of a spur it is to those who do take part from the lovely comments and e-mails I get throughout the year. This year, I even met up with one entrant from the States, who happened to be on holiday in Edinburgh at the same time I was.

The Painting Challenge will continue in 2021: I’ve just got to convert more individual-page AARs into blog-post AARs in order to free up some space on the website (limited pages, unlimited blog posts!)

Conclusion and 2021

Which brings us neatly full circle. In conclusion, a good year for my wargaming hobby despite COVID, lockdown, pressures from work etc. I’m hoping that 2021 will be equally productive both in terms of games played, figures painted, scenario packs published and blog posts written.

Finally, a Happy New Year to you all, and thanks for your support over the last twelve months.

Robert Avery