2025 in Review

It's been a fair few years since I last reviewed my hobby year. It's not that I haven't done anything, but the quantity was for a time rather meagre. I won't claim that it was truly massive last year, but at least it was big enough that I feel like talking about it a little. It was the first time in a while I painted a number of miniatures that required a second digit. Not a big one mind, but a non-zero one. I even played more than a few games. (Maybe even another number that would require a second digit, though probably still a small one.) All in all, 2025 was a good gaming year. Heck, I even finished a fantasy map, which I haven't done in a really long while. 

First, the games:

I played several games in my own basement with my friend Jay Bobson. I don't have photographs of all of it, but we played a little bit of everything: some modified Rogue Trader, some Pulp Alley, a bit of Full Thrust, and even some Victory at Sea.

In the middle of the Midwestern summer I traveled to central Illinois for a long weekend of games with Jay Arnold and his crew at Jay's July Jamboree. J3, as it's called, is a small, private event usually involving  between a half dozen and a dozen friends, and we've played everything from Battletech and Rogue Trader to What a Tanker! and Galactic Heroes. This year we played some Warmaster to Root. The pictures below show the Warmaster game, a fight against bugs in the jungles of Vietnam, and What a Tanker played with Quar. (What a Quar?)

August took me to the UK for games with a number of friends there at Bring Out Your Lead, where I had the opportunity to play Space Fleet, Warhammer Fantasy Battles (2nd edition I think), and the first edition of Necromunda.

Wargames Foundry is an almost magical place filled with classic wargaming miniatures for sale and on display for everyone's joy. Everywhere you turn you are greeted with things from the pages of White Dwarf from the mid to late 80s, and during BOYL you're also greeted with myriad new games that look perfectly capture that 80s look and bring it onto the gaming tables of the present day.

And getting to meet new people, and people I usually only get to see online is a special benefit. (I really need to get some pictures with my Midwestern friends, but that's a project for another day.)

Wargames Foundry is outside a town called East Stoke, which is in the general area of Nottingham, so I took the opportunity to spend an extra day in Notts visiting the Curtis Fell of Ramshackle Miniatures. At the moment I'm quite feeling his frustration with politically motivated restrictions on international trade.

But I'm deeply grateful he was willing to play one last game with me before I flew home.

As to miniatures, it was a pretty quiet year, but I did get a few space ships painted.

Since Warlord Paul was running Space Fleet at BOYL I decided to take my collection of space ships, and since cruisers are always in short supply I painted up two Imperial examples below, which I call Comitatus class galleons, and the big honking great galleon mystery you see in the center. The cruisers are Citadel sculpts, of course, but the big lady is the Novan Star Galleon from Vanguard Miniatures. More on her later.

As well as the pair of Tahti Hoshikaze class cruisers below.

Next up were a couple of interesting older sculpts, the one in the back originally from QT models in their StarForce 300 range, and the foreground example from the Citadel Star Cruisers range. The larger ship is maybe an inch and a half long. It's 


Next I painted two more of the old StarForce 300 shuttles.

Lastly, I painted up a freighter from Vanguard I've had sitting around in primer for years. These ships are glorious, but they are a bit of a pain to prime, as the resin from which they're painted somehow seems to repel the acrylics I prefer to use, even though I soaked the thing in a dish detergent solution for quite a while and scrubbed it rather carefully with a soft brush. Still, the results speak for themselves. Difficult or not, I love these things and will doubtless buy more when I can.

To add a little color, I mocked up a couple of space stations from pipes, trusses, and tanks out of an old plastic scenery kit. At the end of the day what is a space station but a bunch of tanks and trusses?

I forget how many of those I painted, but a couple of sprues worth, anyway. A large tank, several smaller tanks, and a half dozen or a dozen trusses. Just quick and dirty, but they do what they need to do.

Finally, I did paint a single fantasy miniature: a harper for the Oldhammer Forums Legacy Crew, which is an annual raffle that I've been helping to run for a few years now. The harper is a Eureka miniature, so she's just a tiny bit undersized relative to Citadel, even from the 80s, but I don't think it's anything beyond the range of ordinary human variation anyway, so . . . she's maybe a touch short. But hey, my real life partner is pretty short so that works fine.

And just because I can, here's the badges I cooked up from previous years:

So join the Oldhammer Forums, everyone, and you too can have a badge and a chance at winning a band of miniatures for the low low price of mailing a miniature you painted off to a stranger.

In conclusion that's ten spaceships, a harper, and a couple sprues worth of tanks and trusses. And maybe close to a dozen games as well. Not great, but not terrible. Once again I think I basically managed to beat once a month, if only just. Here's to having a better 2026. Happy New Year, everybody! May your games be filled with stories, your dice be filled with luck, your friends filled with laughter, and your lives filled with joy.