Scorched earth? Send in the druids...

Another month, another radical shift of priorities.

A combination of real-life serious-business type stuff has necessitated a long, hard look at What I Own and What It's For, and most importantly, Whether I'm Using It.  This consideration has brought to light certain essential truths about what I play games with, and why.  The short version is that I've recently come to realise that getting back into WFB was a grave error, and so my Warriors of Chaos have been shown the door.

My Skorne have also gone - while I enjoyed playing them, I did not enjoy painting them, for reasons which have been explored previously. M'learned colleague Neal was good enough to take them off my hands, and since he enjoys uniform colourschemes and resilient, stand-up-and-fight forces more than me, I think he'll enjoy them.

The Chaos Warriors, who cost me £60 in three lots, have been sold off for £93 in two, thanks to the local Tale of X Gamers and an apparent high demand for cheap Beastmen on eBay (must be something to do with them being best in units of forty-odd and costing £15 for ten).  I did also part with a GW figure case in the process, but I've had years of loyal service out of it and see this as an opportunity to liberate myself from buying and cutting so much custom foam for the cases, and look into cheaper storage solutions for models not in the current away game force.  Admittedly some of that has gone on long-considered new Cryx toys, and a little more was eaten by postage and packing costs, but I've still turned a net £30 profit on the exchange.

The Skorne, meanwhile, were straight swapped, along with the case foam they live in and a pile of my old No Quarters - while an excellent mag, and improving all the time, it doesn't have infinite rereadability, and lugging them up and down the country every time I move house was becoming tiresome - for a Circle Orboros army, mint and untouched in its boxes.


Circle still fulfil my original goal of having a Hordes faction, they give me an alternative to Cryx that still plays fast and tricksy, the way I like, and they offer a much broader variety of 'looks' than the Skorne do, with great big hairy barbarians and armoured, uniformed paramilitaries and robed druids and big stone stompy things all sort of co-existing together and encouraging me to paint by offering me variety.  Oh, and they'll fit in with my terrain collection a lot better than the Skorne did, and allow me to use my neglected Nyss Hunters across two game systems, since they'll hire out to both my main factions.


As far as getting into a new force goes, acquiring a whole collection of stuff like this means that the limited-toolbox-at-the-start, which I talked about last time, is less of a factor, especially if the collection happens to include some known expensive/good stuff and the job-lot nature absorbs the cost of buying that on its own.  Its being unassembled and unpainted, from somebody else's hobby dead pile, where it's lain neglected for a good two and a half years, is a bonus, and trading it out for something they'll get more enjoyment out of than you will is even better.

So, monthly review: I've gotten rid of some belongings which were frustrating me, replaced them with stuff I'm more interested in and excited about, and I'm £30 up on the trading process, which covers March's bus-fare-club-entry-and-chip-run budget very nicely.

This time last year was when it all started to go wrong, of course, but this time I appear to be consolidating rather than expanding, and that's a good thing.  Almost all my hobbying has been self-financing, and I have a lot to be going along with, so the temptation to spend more money is offset by the 'in progress' pile.  So far, Von's Second Frugal Year is a proper bobby-dazzler.

Von's Frugal Year: Months The Tenth and Eleventh

Whoops.

I don't know what happened there.  I fell off the wagon a little bit over the last few weeks; in fact, I've fallen off several wagons, and you may take your pick as to which one I'm most embarrassed about.  There's the 'updating the blogs, ever' wagon, the 'take photos of stuff you've Been Painting so you can infect the Internet with those instead of writing real content' wagon and the 'you're supposed to be spending less as well as gaming more' wagon.

A review, then, of sorts:

I bought a Skorne starter box back in October.  It was not a particularly considered decision - well, it was and it wasn't.  It was, in that I'd been agonising over which Hordes faction I wanted to play for ages, and it wasn't, in that I bought them at the end of a tournament that I hadn't done too well in and which left me in bad need of a change of pace.

The Skorne bug has bitten me hard: I've played a lot of games over at Dice and Decks in Ross-on-Wye (lovely little club, very friendly people, and we've got them playing Warmachine now, he he!), and I even won a little battlebox tournament a couple of weeks ago.  I'm trying to pace the Skorne expansion so I don't end up with more stuff than I have the money to buy or the time to paint, and so far it's working.

I have been rather less satisfied with the Tyranid project, which I bought into when I started running a school club and have yet to play an actual, proper game with.  Perhaps I should have waited for a week to see how much stuff the kids were bringing in and how much time we had to play before I bought a thousand point army.  Perhaps I should also have considered how many mould lines I'd have to clean in between the fun parts of doing a new, mostly plastic army.

The point is that I've dropped £150 on new models in the last eight weeks, and that's a bit out of sync with this Mission that I'm supposed to be on.  I'm also having slight storage trouble with the new models - everything fits in the display cabinet just fine, but if I move house again, we'll have an... interesting time of it.

By the way, I'll probably be moving house again quite soon.

It might be time to declare a purchasing freeze and think about liquidating some assets, if you'll permit me to drop into Kennedy-esque business-speak for a moment.  In the meantime, I have some Tyranids to file the mould lines off...

Von's Frugal Year: Months the Eighth and Ninth

Well now.  Here we all are.  It's been a while, hasn't it?

It turns out that getting a new job and moving house at extremely short notice to take up said job can occasionally lead to a mild case of No Blogging Time, especially when your home Internet isn't up and running, your place of work forbids access to blogging sites on principle, and every free WiFi sign you see transpires to be a Lie (I think my newfangled triple-layered security suite might be a bit too secure, since it doesn't want me to do ANYTHING on the Nets at all).  Naturally, I've coped with this reduced ability to read/write about gaming on the tubes by actually doing some gaming (shocking) and spending some of my brand new money (irresistible), so here's how it's been going on:

Spending Less - well, from late August to late September I had no time to really spend any money or, for that matter, money to spend.  October has, so far, been spent making up for that; I've shelled out a tenner on a trip to a Warmachine tournament up in Kidderminster, which you can read all about over on the other blog, and while I was up there I confess I spent another thirty quid on a Skorne starter box for that Hordes thing, fancying a change from my Cryx but not particularly wanting to give up the Warmachine/Hordes system entirely.  I've also been spending about six pounds a week on nights out at Dice and Decks, a gaming club in Ross-On-Wye run by some very nice lads who have just started playing Warmachine.

Gaming More - oh yes.  Weekly games of either Warmachine or Warhammer have become the norm; since most of my Warmachine opponents are brand new and still at the battlebox stage, switching to a new faction and relearning how Hordes works has been a nice levelling experience for our games.  I don't plan on starting an epic horde of Skorne or anything; just a nice little army that I can add odds and ends to as and when the fancy takes me.  I've been to one tournament, which was... an experience... and there's talk of doing some at the club as well (a battlebox round robin job in November, and a 25-pointer early in the New Year).