My daughter and I spent an afternoon in the shed - she painting her toy Hogwarts into a medieval monastery, and I pottering around finding and painting some LoTR models - I found 9 Easterlings from 2022 which brings my total painted LoTR for the year to 344.
The Hogwarts may not win any modelling competitions but it's not bad for a 9-year-old occasionally assisted by dad. Here's what it originally looked like:
As part of the deal, she had to help me paint some barrels I found in a box before I helped her with the inside.
They aren't to scale at all, but it kinda looks OK from distance. Maybe a medieval inn or manor house?
Finally, I managed to paint some Rangers as "Blackroot Vale Archers" and Prince Imrahil and some random Fiefdoms dude who will be a captain for them. Along with 4 more Guards of the Fountain Court it brings my total of LoTR in 2023 to.... 10.
OK, just 335 more to go this year to beat my record...
In other news, my Battletech: Game of Armoured Combat arrived. The mecha minis are great but the rules are just as clunky and awful as I remember. Back to scratch building my own rules I guess...
As I was disgusted with the $50+50 postage price of Spectre:Operations I decided to make my own game, and bought two rulesets with the money I saved. Since they were $40 and $45, I actually "earned" $5. Or that's how I explained it to my wife...
Both purchases somewhat have my kids in mind. As we are reading Redwall, Burrows and Badgers looks interesting. While my daughter likes the cute models she was asking about pirates (I do have some nice Black Scorpion metals) and my son was asking about sailing ships as we have been playing Sea of Thieves together on PC. I've dug out a copy of Fighting Sail (the least clunky sailing rules I own) and some Tumbling Dice 1:2400 which haven't seen the light of day since 2018.
The second is I have been cleaning out old minis by the simple expedient of handing them to my son. Since we are reading Rosemary Sutcliffe's Beowulf he has come into possession of some PSC vikings with the warning I regard them as annoyingly breakable, so his viking dudes flimsy weapons may not survive long. Thus I bought a copy of Ragnarok: Heavy Metal, a game which seems almost impossible to obtain a review or playtest (or perhaps my Google-Fu is weak). For a game with several follow-up expansion books, it seems pretty unknown. Like Burrows & Badgers, it is also a skirmish, narrative campaign system about vikings who collect and level up god powers after said powers were scattered about after Ragnarok. Hopefully they are winging on their way, and Australia Post doesn't lose them like my $90 skateboard trucks *shakes fist*.