Review: Pile of Potential

Pile of Potential has been running for a few years now and I’ve been using it for a lot of this time. PoP is an organisational app that helps hobbyists manage and record their progress on their projects. It’s run by the good folks at The Hobby Room.

Ultimately, it’s nothing that you can’t do on a spreadsheet, but there are a couple of advantages to using the site. First of all it’s already set up. You don’t need to faff around to get your spreadsheet made and working how you like it. Second, the site is flexible enough to give you options in how you record your information. Finally, you can also share your progress very easily. Speaking of which, I’ll be using screenshots from my own PoP account for the purposes of this review, so you can also click here to visit the whole page, for context.

Organisationally, you are able to set categories, under which you create projects. Here, for example, are the projects that I’ve created under my Age of Sigmar category:

This is the view from the editing side, showing both my ‘public’ projects and the ones that I’ve got hidden/locked. The ability to hide stuff is good on two fronts. Firstly, you can simply choose to lock everything and not share anything. Second, if you do share things, you can hide projects that you’re still planning, haven’t started or are otherwise just not ready to share.

Once you’re into your individual project pages, you can toggle different options for your table:

I appreciate the flexibility of this. I personally don’t track the cost or purchased options because those would make me sad in my heart. Very sad. Oh, dear… I do like to track the point option, though. That’s how I structure and track my projects, so it makes sense to me to include those options. I don’t see any reason not to include the rest, but the option is there anyway.

So, then, here’s what a typical project might look like:

You can see here that I’ve got my Soulblight Gravelords. The bulk is built, as I have already shared my progress on this front. I have a goal clearly identified, both in points and in models, and the system is tracking both in a nice, visual way. It’s easy to use, with ticky-boxes for progress, and

The fact that I’m sitting with only 4.62% of models for that army finished is a bit grim. Let’s look at a happier set, instead. Here are my Maggotkin of Nurgle:

We like to-do lists. Specifically, it feels great to cross things off of a list, and to visually see progress on a project. Pile of Potential gives us that and lets up share it with others. I’d definitely recommend this to any hobbyist looking to manage their projects and record and report their progress.

You can click here to visit Pile of Potential.