The sun has risen on a new year, and so I am taking my customary look back on the annum that just concluded.
2021 began with a burst of energy as our local gaming group rallied around our nascent Frostgrave campaign. This nifty skirmish game was a great focal point for our painting and terrain creation efforts.
We played probably 6 or 7 sessions in the spring and summer of 2021, some of which ended up on this ol’ blog. All featured the beautifully painted miniatures and terrain that you’ve come to expect from Comrade’s Wargames. Here’s a rundown if you want to check in on the action:
Frostgrave was great fun and we all became fairly adept at navigating the gameplay and post-game campign advancement. And the campaign is not over! We’ve all still got our wizards and our campaign rosters, so I expect we’ll explore the frozen city again in 2022.
2022 was also the year that I started putting some structure around the haphazard collection of fantasy models that I had been referring to as my “little-C chaos army.”
See, I had always loved the idea of collecting an army comprised of black-hearted humans in dark armor, equipped with a variety of brutal instruments of war, aided (but not defined) by a supplemental force of vile demons. A chaos army, but not one tied to any particular setting or universe, that I could plop down for a game of Dragon Rampant, Kings of War, Age of Fantasy, or countless other Warhammer-type games.
I had been collecting units and figures for a few years now, always thinking I’d paint them up and create a semi-coherent chaos army suitable for the grand battles that played out in my imagination. It seems I did that very thing in 2022! Here’s a rundown of what I painted up:
The whole pile of awesome evilness hit the table last month in a big game of Age of Fantasy. Check out the battle report here, and share in gory glory of a chaos victory!
I’ll do a post in the next few weeks showing off my complete chaos army in more detail.
2022 also saw the launch of our own mini-convention: MAJESTICON! This homegrown weekend o’ gaming came about because we were all sadly unable to attend a previously scheduled convention back in September, due to the arrival of the delta variant.
So instead, our local gaming group planned a weekend of game sessions to hopefully capture some of the excitement and fun that comes with attending a convention. With food, too! It turned out really well and it’s my hope that Majesticon will be back again in 2022. Read all about it in these two recap posts.
2022 was also a year where we steered hard back into the One Page Rules family of games. Honestly, OPR fits our game group extraordinarily well. We are a group of casual gamers who are not super interested in chasing the meta or achieving victory through list building. We are far more interested in creating a cool shared tabletop experience with our nicely painted toy soldiers and terrain.
And that’s what OPR provides with games like Grimdark Future and Age of Fantasy. Both are delightfully simple clones of Warhammer 40k and Age of Sigmar, with strong-yet-concise core rules mechanics and well developed army lists, backed up by an attractive array of original 3D figures.
Here are links to a couple of battle reports that give a good overview of the strength of the OPR system.
And lastly, 2022 was the year that I dipped a toe into teaching others how to paint and create terrain. I became an instructor through a local community center here in town (the inimitable Majestic Theatre, long may she reign) and ended up teaching three courses in 2022: two introductory painting classes and one terrain building class. All were well attended and I am planning more for 2022.
It is really rewarding to give back to the community and help others learn some skills and/or just find a little confidence to try something new. There’s something different about sitting in a room with some new friends (masked up, of course) that you just can’t get from watching a Youtube video.
I’m hardly a professional — in fact, I’m probably a fairly pedestrian painter overall, but I have the benefit of lots of experience (decades, really) and a fairly outgoing den mother type of personality, which makes it easy to mentor new hobbyists. If you’ve ever considered running your own painting classes, I highly recommend it.
Heading into 2022
So there you have it — my 2021 in a nutshell. Goals for 2022 include doing a big writeup on my chaos army, tackling my biggest single piece of terrain yet, and doing another burst of work on my Death Guard army. (It’s already largely complete and very playable, but I’ve got a few extra units I’d like to add before I’ll call it done.)
Happy New Year – what’s on your list?
Comrade's Wargames 
A nice round-up and great to see the minis and games! 🙂 I haven’t got a firm list of stuff to do, more of an idea about the things that seem most likely to get done!
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