Works in Progress (1) - October 2025

 In a manic late night paint session I had a thought. See, I have a tendency to start projects and not finish them. This is actually one of 3 of these types of post I've written tonight. (The others are scheduled out so as not to bog you all down.) I was thinking though, as one does as they dip their brush into their tea cup for the umpteenth time in the midnight hours. My desk is, and frankly always has been, a disaster. While coming to the sort of realization today that I don't game the way I used to, I was think I still enjoy collecting and painting. As a result, over the years I've gotten into these cheap plastic tubs to store work in progress "stuff." So besides the desk that looks like this

I've also got my "work in progress" shelf, that looks like this 

Each of those tubs, most of each of those drawers, and each of those cardboard boxes house some sort of "project I've started and not finished. Dating back frequently years at a time. 

At the risk of setting a 2026 goal, here in 2025 I have a bit of an idea. 

I want to take October (and most likely November) to try and just tidy up the workbench part of the desk itself. Whether that's remove, finish, or organize, I'd like to try and clean up the bench in one way or another. October (though there is very little of it left, 11 days at time of writing this) is nearly over but let's start somewhere. I would like to try and participate in the AHPC this year if there's room and I think this would be a nice way to get rolling into that. 

Then, Starting in December, I'm going to attempt to take one tub a month and do the same. Either Finish what's in it, box it up for long term storage, or get rid of it entirely.  I'll be using the Works in Progress project log to document it for fun.

As part of my, any progress is good progress mantra, here's some forward progress on Art, my second Cabinet Piece for the year.

 To be honest, he really just needs his eyes and base finished along with some selective washes to be good as done. This scale has a major benefit of being easier to paint in some regards. 

Some More Musings on Boardgames and My Yearly Hobby Goals

 This is a long, rambly introspective post about how the years been going. I've decided to leave the bulk of the post below the break so for those of you who aren't interesting in the boardgame/blog stuff can skip it easier.

Wild West (1) - Rebuilding the Town

 I realize that we may be reaching a point of diminishing returns on the "Matt decides to restart a project" scheme but here we are again. I've had old west stuff for a long time. It's one of those historical adjacent eras I really like, like pirates and gangsters. 

 Years ago I bought into some of the 4ground stuff but didn't ever complete the collection. Between how long they take to build and the costs it just wasn't something I ever completed. I added on a sarissa railroad station but was always missing some iconic old west buildings. 

Recently, after the success of the Fantasy ruins, I decided it might be worth revamping (replacing) my mdf with 3d prints. I already have a few figures painted, probably enough to run a game of some sort. 

After a bit of researching I settled in on the range from digital taxidermy. The kits cost around 40 bucks after conversion. I started by printing a saloon as well as a few of the "houses". After doing a little bit of googling, I've settled on wanting to print about 10-13 buildings in total to make a nice little town. The buildings run a hair on the small side but do fit nicely on the build plate. The saloon came as 6 parts and needed tree supports to print. I'm not 100 percent sure how much effort im going to put in to painting interiors but they do have interior details sculpted in. 

There's a pretty big range of stuff including scatter and such which is nice. The eventual plan is something like a Legends of the Old West campaign, though I have several rulesets to try including Dead Mans Hand, Rules with no Name, Shoot n Skedaddle, and What a Cowboy.

Napoleonics (7) - Spanish Silver Bayonet Unit and Clue Markers

 Next on the workbench is a unit of Spanish for Silver Bayonet. These are the metal figures from Northstar. They painted super quick. I think the only "new" color I've introduced to the Napoleonic palette is Hull Red from AK 3G. This is a nice red brown, more brown than red. A good addition to my suite of colors. 

I ran out of Army painter white and switched to vallejo white spray for the primer (and subsequently all the white details) and the result is a lot grayer but I think it worked great for the spanish to make them look a bit more "rag tag" 

These painted super super quick, probably quicker than the French. I managed to also get some Clue markers painted. These were just 3d prints from Thingiverse. 

The only other "official" models I have to paint at the moment are the 2 packs of Bandits but I may pick up some more stuff. We actually have a bit of a short battle report and some initial thoughts coming soon too. 

Fantasy Gaming (5) - Frostgrave, Warhammer Quest and Other Diversions

 A few of the guys have been musing over doing a short, 3-game Frostgrave second edition campaign day and as a result I've dug out all my old original Nickstarter stuff and slapped together two warbands. This is the first of them. I'm going to go with a Sigilist this time around. The Wizard and Apprentice are metal, the remaining figures from Frostgrave Soldiers 1. I went with close to box art for the wizards paint and themed it around that. So the wizard has a body guard themed in dark green with a matching rune and the apprentice has her own with a light green and matching rune. Its simple but as someone who doesn't name models for example I thought it was a nice narrative touch.

I've also been thinking about Dungeons lately, something we'll come back to. I did a tiny bit of digging and discovered that there are just a ton of resources available to print your own copy of Warhammer Quest '95. Now I've never played it and have no idea if its worth the hassle but I've been wanting to learn some of the equipment at work so figured this was a good opportunity to self teach

I mentioned dungeon crawls. I've been in the early stages of writing my own dungeon crawl ruleset. I'm not ready to share much in the way of details yet but after we got a bit of playtesting in the other day I am ready to share that it exists

I didn't manage to get many photos as we were pretty engrossed in the rules discussion. I'll admit I spent quite a while writing rules with place holder numbers that did not work at all on the first encounter. A quick on the fly adjustment though and everything started working perfectly. There will be more down the road but for now all you get is this quick little teaser. 

Dark Ages (1) - Start of SAGA Vikings

 So this was originally going to be the first of many posts about Pillage but we'll circle back to that. 

Below is a photo of the first unit of my new SAGA Viking army. 1 point of Hearthguard. 

And now a brief story. I picked up a copy of Pillage as well as the Anglo Saxon and Viking starter bags. In parallel to this I purchased SAGA 2, Age of Chivalry, Age of Magic, and Book of Battles. I was able to finally find a copy of Age of Vikings, so I figured in for a penny. I figured I could build the pillage sets and then expand into SAGA. On the same visit to my LGS I picked up a bag of the new(ish) Victrix Pagan Rus as well. Now here's where it all gets tricky.

I was originally going to try my hand at LBMS Dry Transfers but as of the time of writing this, the "tariff situation" has made it impossible to source them. Victrix is currently not taking US Orders and from my research no one in the US has enough stock to do a whole bag. 

As I started to build the Vikings I thumbed through the Pillage book and unless I'm mistaken I think I have quite a few figures. The book recommends 100 point learning games, 500 regular, 1000 mega. A chieftain (required) is 50 points with a shield and armor. I think you see my point. This makes the sets an amazing purchase if you're going to just play Pillage. 

It also really solidified my choice to just build a SAGA army and have access to stuff to play Pillage. Rather than build and paint a handful of guys at a time, I figured I'd just paint the 30-40 ish for a SAGA force and then cherry pick to play Pillage. If I can source a unit of Beserkers and combine the Archers in each set to make one unit of 12, I can make the following list:

Warlord
Beserkers
Hearthguard
Warriors
Levy

Which leaves me with enough to either make another Hearthguard or Warrior Unit if were not too fussed about the chain mail being sprinkled in the warrior units. 

So now that the units been built and painted, the question of shields comes roaring back into focus. I wasn't thrilled about the idea of freehanding the shields and was debating trying to make my own decals when, while perusing Koyote's beautiful Pagan Rus, here on Lead Adventure, he mentioned some 3d printable shields from Rodge (who runs the SAGA Thorsday Podcast). I printed about 25 to start. These have very slight relief and basically allow for a more paint by numbers approach. They mostly all curled while drying but seem to have dried and cured flat. 

First, masking taped on to an old filament roll and the backs are given a spray of Vallejo Leather Brown Primer

Flipped and given a light grey primer

And finally painted in place

I picked color palettes based off the shield transfers. They certainly get the job done. I'm just about done with the warlord and his banner bearer, I'm about half way thru the warriors already. I also 3d printed some saga dice to use but will go back and get the official ones if we end up getting in to it. 

I've got some real grand ambitions for terrain for this one but wanted to at least start the project log before I bog down it. 

Napoleonics (6) - Silver Bayonet Playtest

 So we played a game! Scott and I got together and I taught him Silver Bayonet. We played the first scenario from the book about hunting down a hobgoblin. The game was very quick and to sum up the action, we advanced, found the hobgoblin almost immediately and with a couple lucky rolls I was able to kill it and then I took to the hills. Pretty easy system with some neat ideas. My main takeaway is that I didn't enjoy Frostgrave because I found the D20 too swingy. This is a 2d10 system which works much better. 

We're going to get another game in soon and then probably start a quick 3-5 game campaign. Sorry for the lack of photos but I spent so much of the game referencing rules. I've learned my lesson. I had the ebook of the rules, plus new recruit for my list. It was a lot of flipping back and forth and scrolling. Needless to say I think I'll be picking up the hardcover.