Von's Frugal Year: Month The Second

Spending Less?

Financially: going well. Ish. £33.50 expelled this month, including the WoW fees. Could have been and arguably should have been less, but the board does look pretty good and it was a lot of fun to make. I also really needed that new paintbrush, but spending £1.50 on it does not appear to have made the world end.

Emotionally: I got a little bit wound up the last-but-one time I played Warmachine. The whys and wherefores aren't as important as the conclusion: that Warmachine is not an evening game. It's too easy to mess up a game of Warmachine because you're tired and making mistakes, and if you're like me and can't just let a mistake go, or have an embarrassing tendency to repeat mistakes, and start taking your poor play out on your opponent... well, it's better to avoid the problem in the first place by not playing Warmachine when you're tired.

Temporally: Couple of afternoons spent painting/priming Warmachine minis that have been sitting on the desk, stripped but otherwise untouched, couple of weekends spent on the board, couple of days lost to Warcraft. Balance achieved? Maybe.

Gaming More?

Three games of Warmachine, one of which was a bit of a write-off: four four-hour WoW sessions, and I managed to remind some old school chums to invite me into their guild so I have some people I actually know to play the allegedly multiplayer game with.

Plans?

Well. Okay. I have a confession to make. I might be about to break one of my original resolutions after a trifling two months.

See, here's the situation. Dave has a WFB army which he's not using very much, and so it just sits there, ignored, unpainted and unloved. Shiny also has a WFB army which he's not using very much, which is a shame because he's a good laugh to play the WFB with and there's a new Skaven book out, which would inspire more mad Shiny conversions. I have a battlefield in my house, suitable for playing smallish games of WFB (it's too small for regular 2000 pointers with two horde armies, but it'd do all right for... well, maybe up to 1500?), of the sort which I prefer to play anyway (and damn to the depths anyone who babbles about how it's not Proper Warhammer if it doesn't have a Lord choice).

You can see where this is going, right? At the very least, I'm planning to open up my house to the lads so that Dave has an opportunity to get the 'game more' part of the Frugal Mission off the ground again, and so that one of the nicest chaps I know gets to play some more games with the figures he already owns. At the most... well, I've been off the Warhammer wagon for about a year now and I'm beginning to feel the urge.

The plan is to avoid buying Games Workshop kits wherever possible, given the number of smaller companies selling cheaper models; to aim for an army that's actually sized for the small games I enjoy playing rather than the big ones I keep finding myself pressured into; and to look for figures that can pull double duty, either being used for other game systems or in multiple armies within WFB. I have another post brewing about the ins and outs of how that's going to work, which figures from which suppliers are involved and how not being able to play in Offical GW Events is actually an advantage of this plan, but I have to go to work now, so it'll need to wait for a bit.

There will, of course, have to be sacrifices made to make this plan possible. No 10mm gaming yet. No Hordes army. A much tighter rein on Warmachine purchases (I foresee one big block in May, when the Cryx army book comes out, and then that'll have to be it for the rest of the year). I may well skip a few months of Warcraft (probably for the best anyway). No new roleplaying books (again, probably for the best: still haven't got that Dark Heresy game off the ground).

I do think it'll be worth it, though.