Are we there yet....

As many of you may have guessed from the last post...all is not right in the head of this demented wargamer.

But sometimes you need to smash head first into the brick wall to find the way around it. And so was the case the other night. Completely bored and not enjoying any of my hobbying I crashed into the wall....or more appropriately I sat wistfully watching my other half happily painting her tomb kings whilst I sat and pretty much surrendered.

The changes and flit flat from project to project has taken its toll and finally the straw broke the camels back and I got to a point where I was just about ready to quit the hobby out of frustration. So much money and time spent picking and putting down bits of armies that really didn't work for me.

But i'm here now...so something must of happened. In truth it was a bit of a hobbyist heart to heart with my better half. A long process of looking back of the last 6 or 7 years at whats gone wrong and where it went wrong. I wont bore you with the details... but suffice to say I had wandered into the land of being a collector rather than a gamer.
I don't know how many of you read white dwarf but this months carried an article that rang true with myself. But unlike the article, my desire to game was being killed by the collector in me, and the perfectionist painter.

So I executed the perfectionist painter, I know how to deal with that. Tabletop standard rank and file, top quality on the characters and centre pieces.

Dealing with the otherside was a little more difficult and for any of you suffering similar, here is what I did.

The 2 primary games I want to play are 40k and fantasy battle.
In 40k I fell out of love with the whole game. But conversations via twitter, with other people always leave me wanting to do a guard army. I think its the fact I can really get down into the mindset of a guardsman due to my own time in the army.
My forays with forgeworld models had left me very frustrated. So the only answer if I was to move forward was plastic.
So the decision made, I got a box of cadians and well...their all painted and based. A wow moment for me of late! Pics will follow when I can get better light.

Fantasy on the other hand...doesn't relly allow a person down into the mindset of the model from an experience point of view...well not unless you know your reincarnated from a medievil knight or the likes.
The process for dealing with this was a bit more painfull.
Dragged kicking and screaming through every army by my other half, she made mental notes on things like, my play style, which models I liked more and which armys I either wrote off, hmmm'd and haaaa'd about and which I was more positive about.
Then she showed my an empire hand gunner I had painted months ago, to be honest I loved the model and the colour scheme. At the time I wrote it off as well....I just do that to myself a lot.

So that decision was made too. However the fantasy army was decided with one stipulation. Due to my tendancy to get...bored... The army must be purchased, assembled and used and then painted as I go along. The idea, playing should inspire enthusiasm to paint.

You know...it might just work.