A quick shout out this Friday that BoardGameGeek’s monthly photography contest is up and looking for your thumbs! I have my Batman image entered so check it out if you like it and want to see it and other great images.
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Life has gotten quite busy lately as we are moving so my posts will be a bit briefer as we go through all the packing and hoop-jumping that is involved with relocating, even when it is only a few miles away.
In addition to cutting my typical rambling down, I’ve decided to reign in my hobby spending a bit until things settle down. Never content to just make a budget, I wanted to instead try an experiment: no new games until 2019.
I’ve seen resolutions pop-up where gamers decide to not buy any games for a year and aside from just reveling in the self-regulation, I haven’t seen much of a point unless you are truly have financial issues. I feel that if you can afford it and it brings you happiness, then you should not be ashamed of consuming heavily into your favorite pastimes.
For me, it’s an experiment to see if what I have in my collection is enough to keep me happily occupied for the rest of the year. Or if there are things in my collection that I thought I would enjoy given the time but upon further evaluation, are just not that interesting anymore. So this experiment is also a sort of extreme culling of my collection to figure out what really belongs.
I won’t be going cold-turkey as I’m not cancelling any existing pre-orders or Kickstarters and I still may pick up the occasional figure or unit for my minis games but I won’t be adding any new systems or rulesets to the field or picking any new games or game expansions. I also won’t stop buying pimping material as that is kind of the whole reason I’m here.
We’ll see if I can keep this up as I already see some interesting projects coming up that I would normally be interested in. Below are some of the upcoming games that might cause me to fail this experiment.
Pacific Rim Extinction
This game by River Horse games is coming to Kickstarter soon. I’m a big fan of Pacific Rim and have been wondering why the property hadn’t made it into the board game arena. Now we see why.
Monsterpocalypse Miniatures Game
I’m not the biggest fan of Privateer Press and their questionable sales strategies but I just caught wind that Monsterpocalypse will be returning. This time they ditch the blind booster drafts and pre-painted models. It’ll be interesting to see if that hurts them in the launch.
Fireball Island The Curse of Vul-Kar
Also coming to Kickstarter is the reboot of the kid’s classic, Fireball Island. This is probably the game that would get me to break my resolve depending on the Kickstarter offering.
Confrontation Resurrection
In yet another Kickstarter, this reboot of the Confrontation franchise has me intrigued. The models for the original game set the bar in figure quality so it’ll be interesting to see if nostalgia can float this enterprise.
From the look of things, it sounds like if I just avoid Kickstarter altogether, it will be easy to maintain my resolve. Only time will tell…
Andy
Thanks for the heads up on these. I’m really interested in the Pacific Rim Kickstarter campaign and very disappointed in the new direction of the MonPoc one. I already own most of the original MonPoc stuff, and it makes absolutely no sense to buy it all over again (because they say it’s incompatible) AND have to assemble and paint it myself. Bad move. This will flop.
Christian
Yeah, it is interesting… I had some MonPoc back in the day but I’ll have to wait and see on this. I haven’t played a game from PP that I’ve liked in a long time outside of Warmachine/Hordes. I also saw their preview video showing off the sculpts and for all that effort needed to get something to a playable level, they weren’t that inspiring. I think I’d much rather throw cash at GKR instead (and that genre is filling up FAST). I like that they are ditching the blind boosters but that was also a way to increase production value without increasing price (since self-imposed rarity schemes drive sales higher).
Russ Spears
I commend on your attempt to curtail spending and thus enjoy what you have. I’ve gone the same route with minis – paint what I have instead of buying more to paint. I finally went through and discovered I’d bought minis and games-with-minis-to-paint over the years that gave me 2000+ unpainted minis that at one time I’d said “I want to paint that”. After my jaw was lifted from the floor I picked a game (Walking Dead, how many times have I said you’re my inspiration) and concentrated on painting those. A week ago, I finished painting the WD minis (125 via retail, I was too late for KS).
With my bragging out of the way, I’m looking forward to you (re)discoveries. Hopefully that’ll include some Gaslands – those templates want to see some action!
Christian
I’ve been checking out your paint list since the New Year and felt the same way when I saw how many Zombicide minis you needed to get through. I think that amount of naked plastic staring me down day after day would make me dump them in the bin. It’d be totally different if I was crazy about the game but it never really did it for me so I think keeping it in plastic for the occasional casual dicefest is a good call.
Your Walking Dead work is great stuff and getting through that set is impressive. It is so damn satisfying to see so many painted minis in a game.
I’ve been boxing up all my games for the move and it’s funny because it made me want to dig them out even more. I also have some big new games coming in later this year like Song of Ice and Fire and Joan of Arc though the latter is supposed to be at the tail end of Q4. Song of Ice is delayed as well so, in a way, that is good as I’d like to push deeper into Walking Dead and Test of Honour AND Gaslands 😀