Could You???

So, the other day a friend posted an idea for a New Year’s resolution/hypothetical question: Could you go a whole year without purchasing any new models for a whole year and put the money towards retirement.

His question had me wonder if I could do that for a whole year? And honestly, I am not sure if I could.  So, I asked myself on twitter about the same thing. I had a lot of responses, but one thing came through the most is why would I do that?  The main question and why would I have started me thinking about my hobby and what it has become.

Like most gamers, I love the new shiny things that companies put out and I have done some very big purchases over the last two years. That has led to many new games being brought to the table and lots of painting to still do. But as I talked with my buddy who posted the original question, we found that we were not loving what our hobby had become. It seems that our hobby had turned into hunting down the latest greatest thing or chasing expansions for games we hardly played. This seems to be driven by most game’s companies approach to their games, limited quantity releases. This causes gamers to rush out and buy it now before it’s gone from the store shelves or companies’ websites. This is certainly great for the game companies as it helps sales for them, but as a consumer it can cause financial hardship and creates gamers some stress about trying to get everything you need to play the game.

My group certainly is starting to feel this as we seem to be not playing the same game but bouncing from game to game. Now a little history of our group, for the most part, we all played the same game for years. It started with WAB and we had a vary active group with no less then 40 armies, we played each weekend and attended tournaments and hosted tournaments. But then as WAB died (thanks to version 2) we all switched over to Lord of the Rings which once again we had a good size following and hosted and played in tournaments, but then that too died thanks to the company “fixing” the rules which lead to them breaking the game. We then moved onto Flames of War which once again, same thing as the other two systems, which when rules changes made us jump ship to Bolt Action. Now after going through four game systems throughout the years, we did not really push Bolt like we did other games (probably thinking we would be moving to another system).

All these jumps to other games sort of wore some of us out, I know it did for me. Ironically, we started playing more variety of games, then another game company started to release new versions of older games with lower pricing. We all got excited and started picking them up and started dabbling with them and of course the game company started putting out releases quicker and we started having to feel like we had to get them all. My buddy made a bold announcement that he would get every Necromunda release that came out, as myself said ai would do that with Blood Bowl. But sadly, our pocket books could not keep up with this. We also started trying to get a rotation going of what were playing, but that too was hard to keep with all the stuff coming out almost weekly.

So now, we are all pretty much trying to figure out what we are doing, hence the question to start this topic. So, after thinking about it, I want to try to not buy anything new for 2020, I want to get back to just playing a few games I really like and, in a way, put blinders on to stay focused. I have a closet full of miniatures waiting to be built or painted. I want to get back to enjoying the hobby aspect of the games I play, not the chase or the hunt. I really think this will help keep my focus and just play games, although I am sure new things will be released for many of the games I am playing, but I will try to resist and only focus on what I have. I have already started to look at projects that have been sitting for many years to be started or completed.

I can already tell this is changing my attitude about the hobby, its almost freeing really when you have to re-focus back on what’s important and what is important about your hobby. I was watching a few buddies play Flames yesterday and I was thinking about all the models I still must paint for the game, something that I have not thought about in weeks. Plus there are a few things like painting up some Command stands for my ACW armies that I need to do to add variety for the armies. So it is already working.

Now as I pointed out, there are still a few more weeks left in the year, so I could go on a shopping spree now and not have guilt for next year, good thing I do not have a lot of extra funds lying around! So it will be interesting to see what 2020 has in store, stay tuned!

TK