The bad news is that I have added nothing to the New Model Fund through eBay sales since my last update a month or so ago. I've just been so busy with painting and modelling that I haven't had the time. At least I haven't bought any models so the fund hasn't depleted.
The good news is that I won second place in my works fantasy football league and pocketed £150 for my efforts. Nice.
As I mentioned in my previous NMF blog post I plan to spend a lot of this cash on Planetstrike goodies. This will make a refreshing change for me in comparison to my previous gaming habits.
For many years I just bought stuff willy nilly, with no structure to my purchases. As a result I've ended up with a truly staggering number of models across a number of factions and game systems. I've been trying to reduce my spending on gaming over the past few years (for as long as this blog has been running) as well as trying to discipline my purchases, and therefore I've been behind the curve on most Games Workshop expansions.
I just couldn't afford the Cities of Death terrain nor did I have the time to dedicate to it so it passed me by, despite my passion for it. This happened again with Apocalypse which I love the concept of but I just haven't been able to sink any time or money into it. I did put a couple of superheavies together but it's now two years after the initial release and I still haven't played a single game.
The problem is that to get the most out of these expansions I'd need to be in a position to spend some money on terrain and/or models when they are released and I'd need to dedicate some time to preparing and playing them.
I'm really skint at the moment so finding money to spend on new models and terrain is a real problem. It's even harder to justify when I have a lead pile that would probably reach from the Earth to the Moon if the models were laid end to end! My solution has therefore been to stop spending money on new models and concentrate all my efforts into completing what I have. A very sensible aim, but...
I'm probably unusual amongst gamers in that once I've set myself a task I find it very difficult to break from it. I don't hop from one project to the next, starting one army then dropping it in favour of another on a whim. I'm very focused and don't like to go back on promises I've made to myself or to others.
At the moment I'm locked into a cycle of finishing a full army of each 40k faction every year. While this is a good way of reducing my backlog of models and saving me some cash at the same time, it always causes me a dilemma when an expansion comes out. Do I abandon my project partway through to concentrate on the expansion or do I stick with my plan? Do I spend some cash I don't have in order to jump on board? It doesn't help that I'm a slow painter so I find it difficult to keep up with the pace anyway.
All of which is a rather long winded way to get to the point where I can explain how the stars have aligned for me in relation to the Planetstrike expansion.
The first is cash. I suddenly have £150 I didn't have before and it isn't allocated to anything else. I can spend it on whatever I like. Guilt free money comes along so infrequently for me that it is always a major event!
The second is that my current project, painting 2000 points of Blood Angels, is almost complete. I just have two units left to finish and that is very achievable in the few weeks before the release of Planetstrike. My next project will be Orks, which I will start on soon after my marines are done but I anticipate that they will be a far easier army to paint. I'll be painting Goff Orks and I won't be lavishing the detail on them that I have done on my Blood Angels. Even if I lose a month or two at the start of the project while I get Planetstrike done I should easily be able to complete them on time. So I'm going to have some time.
The third thing in my favour is my gaming table. I built it using foam inside a wooden frame so that I could carve out terrain like rivers, a beach and a trench system. I finished three out of the four boards and they have served me well for years. I flocked them green so I could use them for WFB or 40k. I never did get round to finishing the trench board but I had promised myself I would when I completed my Blood Angels. You can see the table in this battle report.
Lo and behold, years later, Games Workshop release Planetstrike with a plethora of terrain such as bunkers, barricades, craters and minefields which will go perfectly with my trench system. I could even add the trenches to my existing boards to make an eight foot by four foot table and play an Apocalypse game on there. The new expansion will give me the kick I need to finish my board and terrain. It might even get me playing some actual games again.
I've had a trawl through the Games Workshop website and here's what I plan to purchase:
- Planetstrike book £15
- Imperial strongpoint £53.85
- Skyshield landing pad £23.50
- Blastscape craters £11.75
- Mines, bombs and booby traps £11.75
I'm really looking forward to the coming months and I'll be blogging it all on lone pilgrim.
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