Looking back and ahead.

Looking Back-

With the exception of a Christmas bummer (see my side bar) 2008 was a great year for me on the personal front as well as the hobby front. Personally my business is doing ok to well despite the economy, my wife and I had our second daughter in July and everybody is heathly and happy, what more can you ask for right?.

On Hobbying- I was cooking with a semi-prolific (for me) output of stuff this year, I easily painted over a 100 models, and built several hundred more..including tourney readying my Empire Army @ 3K, building my 2k Chaos Daemons both for WFB, around 100 Celt Barbarian Models for WAB, plus the Lord of the Rings models and Pirates I've done. I knocked out a whole bunch of terrain, including buildings, numerous smaller obstacles, my Hirst arts experiments, Built the physical structure and terrain for the better part of 3 tables..I now have 4 full gaming tables in my basement about, 2, 4X4's, a 4x6 and my 4x8.

On Gaming - I competed in 5 tournaments...one at our local GW shop, two at the Chicago Battle Bunker, The Warhammer Fantasy Championships at Adepticon and the Chicago GT. With my Empire Army winning two best appearance awards at the smaller events. I ran 3 full Mighty Empire campaigns for a total of 25 weeks of weekly campaign gaming. I played a zillion games of Warhammer too many to count..while squeaking in a few games for Legends of the High Seas, a single game WAB, and maybe a dozen Lord of the rings games.


On Blogging- The blog had a great year, 26,000 + hits since mid January. My daily visits right now are hard to pinpoint because those Talisman figure shots I took got cross posted stuff on table top gaming news. The exposure created like 1000 hits in 24 hours so my daily averages are kinda off...but my guess its somewhere around 100 of you on a average daily basis are stopping by here so that's pretty cool. I doubled my post output from 2007 and put alot of time into expanding the resources of the blog and "tried' to make it more interesting. I've met a lot great people through blogging and hope to continue to reach out to more. While I didn't do much more than record my own gaming exploits and creations, I hope that I did provide was interesting to my fellow hobbyist and will continue to be so.


Looking ahead-

Personally I'm striving to keep the ship right and sail straight ahead..I'm working on a "green overall" of my business when it comes to energy efficiency which is expensive time consuming but in the end well worth it. I'll have less free time at work this year..but since I have no plans for another child this year.I'm hoping they sort themselves out where I have hopefully the same free time I had in 2008.

On Hobbying- I'm going to continue to expand my current collections and paint more to round things out as fully playable. I'll continue to work on existing terrain projects and want to try to finishing everything that's WIP ( a tall order). No new game systems for 09", new models for what I already have- sure! but I am dialing back the spending this year.

On Gaming - Obviously as I mentioned- the official GW 2009 tourney scene is not what I was hoping for, but GW people tell me that they hoping to increase the number of events this year in the circuit so we may actually see a few national GW events with the proper standards show up.
unfortunately its probably going to be Las Vegas and Baltimore both which are most likely out of reach. As of right now Adepticon is only ticket in town for me, I am signed up for both WFB Escalation and the WFB Championships with my Empire so the first quarter of next year is going to be all about that. We've got a new campaign cooking up in January at our local store..new house rules and variations on the stock Mighty Empires game, looks like another good one.

I am also planning on hosting the first "Plastic Legions" tournament at my house in January, its only 8 players but its going to be fun..expect full write ups and reports on that. I actually figured out I could host up to 12 people (6 tables) at my place..so we'll see how it goes on the expansion of this idea. I have to add I am looking forward to getting way more Lord of the Rings gaming in next year as well as plenty of the Historical games.

On Blogging - I am doubtful I can double my output again in 2009 but you never know..expect more the same from me, with the addition of trying to get more useful articles posted..been thinking/ working on a painting article, an " army building" article for WFB. We will see if I can get these fleshed out enough to post. I like the idea of some my pals guest blogging here , hopefully a few of them can offer up some good stuff for you as well. Overall I'm not letting up on the Blogging here at Plastic Legions, while I can't pretend I am going to be a useful as say "From the Warp", I'm sure going to try to inspire you guys as much as I can and even give you a good laugh with an occasional foul mouthed rant!.

Happy New year guys.- John.

(I have resolutions coming, think about yours!)