(Hobby) Things I did on my summer vacation . . .

 

Well, that was busy.

The absence of posting here on the blog has not been a reflection of lack of activity, but rather quite a lot of it.  Summer is always busy for us; we have the Cub in residence, and tend to try to cram in as much as possible, whether hobby related or not, while we have him.  That's meant a series of day trips, an actual, for-real trip out to see family before while case counts were low, and a mess of both figures painted and games played.  The one thing I didn't make time for was the blog, so there's some catching up to do.

(Hobby) Things I did on my summer vacation:

1) Introduced the  Cub to Dragon Rampant, who promptly introduced the Puddin' to same.  The two of them have now played more games of it than I have, facilitated by a hard copy of the rules from my esteemed sister.  They have free reign of my AoS stuff (providing they take care of it), and Cub has spent a good chunk of the summer painting up stuff from the big Reaper kickstarter box.  I'm pretty sure some LEGO unicorns hit the table at some point.

Puddin' unpacks her secret weapons.

2) Painting more ECW.  I decided "the hell with it", I like flags, and have been painting up some command bases for my shott wings.  Also painted dragoons for both Royalists and ECW, and the Pikeman's Lament forces are closing in on "playable completed", without having to fuss with unit upgrades to make up the points.  Starting to think in terms of making the jump to larger scale games, and what would be involved.

This needs more flags.

3) Painting (a bit) and playing (a lot of) 40k.  With Cub in residence, 40k has been the major game of the summer, and I've both been picking away at stuff (mostly Khorne Marines), and playing several games.  Cub's started up a small eldar force, and we've played some small games with those, along with the first two stages of the Glazier's Creek scenario (third might have to wait until the Fall).  We've a big game planned before he heads back to his mom's / school, but as we'll still see him weekends, this is likely to continue.

With berzerkers in charge range, the eldar are about to have a bad time.

4) Played some backyard games.  Not as many as I'd have liked, to be honest.  We've had an extremely wet summer, and backyard play kind of relies on having a dry environment.  Sunny days have been at a premium, and tend to end up being family outing days.  Add in some scheduling difficulties (lining up a free day for me, a free day with a potential opponent, and good weather), and it's been tricky.  Despite that, there was the PL game from my last post, and an AoS game with one of my before-times regular gaming buddies.

Love how this is starting to look.

5) Jumping into 28mm WW2/Bolt Action.  This was unplanned, but not totally unexpected.  I've played BA before, enjoyed it, and have always been tempted by doing it in 28mm.  The other day, we took a trip over to the "other side" of the province (as NS is a peninsula, this is about an hour by car) to check out the fossil beach, one of our usual summer trips.  Said trip usually includes a stop at the FLGS on that side, which more often than not has a discounted box of something that catches my eye.  Last time it was a big box of 40k chaos marines (which are now pretty much painted, thank you).  This time, it was a Bolt Action Soviet starter box at 30% off.  I've spent the last several days happily gluing my fingers together, watching campy films in Russian (with subtitles), and planning the downfall of the facist invader.  Add in that some of the local crowd are sticking a toe in - including a buddy doing Finns - and this has some potential.

The Fall, with all that it brings (kids back to school, work heating up, Covid resurgence) is looming rather threateningly as I write this.  Work meetings have started back up, and once Cub's back at his mom's I'll have a rather busy week rushing about getting ready for Fall term.  It's kind of hard to predict what gaming opportunities will be like this fall, what with the potential of a Delta surge, but I've continued to play Command and Colours on a regular basis via Vassal (which has been rather fun), and there's always painting and playing games with the kids.  Blog-wise, the plan is to do a more detailed post on each of the topics above.  In terms of hobby, I suspect the current usual suspects (ECW, Soviets, GW) will feature largely in the immediate future, but since I've got the attention span of a magpie, who knows?

FMB