Resolutions 2024: April Roundup

It’s one thing to set resolutions, and quite another to hold oneself to them. I intend to review my progress monthly toward each of the resolutions. Welcome, then, to our roundup for April 2024. Let’s start with a reminder of the resolutions and where we got to in March:

Resolutions Recap

Painting

Paint at least 4 Warhammer armies of approx 2000 points (Mar status: 0/4)
Paint an Underworlds Warband (Mar status: Complete! 1/1)
Paint two Malifaux crews (Mar status: 0/2)
Paint 2 starting forces each for 2 different skirmish games (Mar status: 1/4)
Take part in at least 4 club painting contests (Mar status: 1/4)
Paint 366 miniatures (Mar status: 152/366)
Paint more than I purchase or print (Mar status: on track!)

Gaming

Play at least 40 different games this year (Mar status: 18/40)
Play 6 games that I already own but had not yet played. (Mar status: 0/6)
Play at least 3 non-D&D RPGs (Mar status: 2/3)

Writing

Publish a blog post per day (Mar status: on track!)
Publish 6 items on DriveThruRPG (Mar status: 0/6)
Write 18 reviews (including Game of the Month reviews) (Mar status: 11/18)

So, how did March go?

Painting

It’s been a bad month for painting. Travel, work commitments, arthritis flareups, and general ill-health have conspired to deny me much time at all for painting. That left me sad in my heart and bloody sore in my joints. I did manage to finish some minis, though!

First up was this Chaos Dwarf Seneschal. It’s a print from Titan Forge. Was he a priority? No. Whatever, he’s done:

I’m a bit iffy on the colour scheme, but with a unit of 20 dudes nearly finished, I had already very much committed to it. It’s fine. It’ll do. I’m going to need to replenish these metallics soon, though!

Next up were a trio of Mancrusher Gargants that I needed to finish a list for a one-day tournament in Inverness:

The event went well. I won all of my games, though narrowly, and came third. It was a really great day, though I think it did contribute to the second of my flareups this month.

I then took a bit of a detour to something quite different and painted up the proxy Nagash/Merlin for my delusional Flesh-Eater Courts:

He turned out fine. He fits the theme and the model (from Raging Heroes/Heroes Infinite) scaled up really well to act as the great Necromancer. I feel I could have gone a tad bigger with the print, but he’s fine. I made him as big as I could at the angle I was printing I could have angled him a bit differently, but the height and width were starting to make that tricky.

I stayed on the Flesh-Eater Courts to do a terrain piece, the Charnal Throne:

This, again, is from Raging Heroes. I also printed off a template of the outline of the bottom of the official throne model to just make sure that this would be game legal, unlike my island-mounted Gnarlmaw. I think it turned out well!

So, what are the totals for this month?

Bought: 0 minis
Printed: 10 minis
Painted: 6

A bit disappointing, truth be told. I’d hoped to at least get a unit or two of my Slow Grow stuff finished.

This means that my totals for the year so far are:

Purchased: 29 minis
Printed: 77 minis
Painted: 158 minis

Once again, I should have finished the Skaven this month, and I did not.

The Slow Grow is… a mess. I’ve still got 20 models from march to do, and two units of 10 from April. May sees me having to do another unit each of handgunners and blunderbusses, meaning I have 60 models to do to catch up with where I should be. Oh, dear…

We’ll see how it goes!

Gaming

This month, I have not played a huge number of games, and most of what I played were old, familiar friends.

Apiary saw more play this month, as did Root, Lords of Waterdeep, and Apiary. I spent a whole day playing Age of Sigmar at a tournament. That was a lot of fun, and will probably be my last outing for the ridiculous Mancrushers list. I need to find something equally preposterous when the new edition hits.

Here’s the list of games that I had played already this year, before the start of April:

Century: Golem Edition
Architects of the West Kingdom
Sushi Go!
Warhammer Underworlds
Age of Sigmar: Soulbound
Traveller
Dungeons & Dragons
Santorini
King of Tokyo
Ticket to Ride
Warhammer: Age of Sigmar
Ark Nova
Arcane Academy
Robot Quest Arena
UNO
Root
Apiary
Dixit

I only actually added a couple of games to the list in April:

In the Hall of the Mountain King
Quadropolis

In the Halls of the Mountain King looked like something I wouldn’t like. Even as we were setting up, I was less than convinced. It’s a deceptively frustrating, wee game. In that regard it’s a bit like Tiny Towns. I enjoyed it a lot in the end, but it’s certainly a head scratcher.

My game of the month is Root. Root could have been any month, really, as it gets to the table a lot. I’ve also taken

Writing

I’ve managed to maintain my goal of posting a blog post per day. I’m happy to be doing well on that front. As far as April goes, here are the highlights:

Some podcast recommendations
A review of 10 Candles
Beyond the Dungeon, Part 1: Fate
Beyond the Dungeon, Part 2: PbtA Games
A review of The Fox Maidens
Some thoughts on Star Wars
A review of Scalzi’s The Last Emperox
A Games of the Month review of Root

It was nice to finish my reviews of Scalzi’s Interdependency series. Similarly, The Fox Maidens has been sitting waiting for a review of quite some time. How Root had not already been a game of the month, I’ve no idea.

Still no progress on any DTRPG material… I’m starting to really worry that this just isn’t going to happen this year.