the past and the future

Welcome back again..you really do enjoy my suffering eh...you sadists. I like it!

Well regular readers will be all too aware of my recent battles with motivation and lack there of.
Stuttering starts and failing drives have really been at the forefront of my hobby of late.

I had hoped to use guildball to push forward but like so much it has stuttered to a halt. At the moment it just seems to be the way of things and not getting enough game or in some cases 'any' games hits the motivational flow like a steam train.

A gem of an email popped up recently though and reminded me that next week i should be receiving my copy of Halo Fleet battles from spartan games. I am hoping that once painted i will be able to demo the crap out of it and get some local players interested...that the idea anyway!

But in the meantime and with one eye on future gaming events I have been pondering the merits of what to do with my limited gaming budget and time.
A chat with a friend last night as we made out way home from yet another sound trashing at football, got me thinking.

Realistically my time is restricted to games that can be played in a couple of hours tops..that includes setting up and putting away. On top of that my budget dictates that small purchases on a monthly basis are the best way forward. Hobby wise i have also come to accept that not getting to play will be the death knell to any project.

So this morning i put out a feeler amongst the twitter community for skirmish games and took on board a few suggestions. Mixed it with my own inspirations and the backwash of last nights conversation and did some pondering and broke the ideas down into Time+budget+gaming/hobby=success.

A lot of suggestions were made and some were good and some not so. One though offered by Mike Marshall piqued a little nugget of memory in the depths of my somewhat chaotic mind. The one was Dead Mans Hand by Great Escape Games.
I had heard of the game and seen a few pics about. So off i went surfing the various blogs and pages and videos.
 A chat with a friend yielded a general consensus of give it a go, so i broke it down into the equation above.

Time. Well the game seems to be fairly quick and easy to learn, has itself broken down into mini games , that could easily be spread over an evening or two. This nicely fits into being both a suitable gaming night game, and something i could pick up and play with the better half.

Budget. This is a big consideration at the moment. On a good month i can muster maybe £50 for the hobby budget. Looking at the game the basic get started set up is £20 + models. A bit of a trawl has yielded some fairly cheap and decent options, along with some friends already having the models too.

Hobby. The models themselves offer a wide variety with the multitude of manufacturers out there. Anything from cowboys and indians through to the doc and sheriffs of tombstone.
Inspiration should hardly be a struggle with all the modern westerns and a memory full of my dad watching the old ones.
Another side of the hobby of course..is terrain. The game requires a 3x3 play area...which should be fairly easy to come by and transport. For buildings theres plenty of options and most fall within my current monthly budget. I will more than likely set my eyes on the 4ground stuff though as it negates my inability to paint scenery.

So a lot of thinking and breaking the idea down has yielded a pretty conclusive answer. The only reviews of the game seem fairly positive and hopefully once i have a bit more of a table, it will be a game to garner more interest from the club dwellers in the future.

So, yeah...thats my thoughts. Hopefully nailed to the wall.