real life

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Do You Even Kanban?

Posted by Comrade on February 2, 2023
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As I prepared my workshop for 2023, I went through the annual ritual of clearing and resetting my kanban board. In doing so, I once again reflected on how helpful and nifty this minimalist tool has proven to be over the ~5 years I’ve been using it.

At its heart, a kanban board is a super simple way of visualizing a workflow or process. That’s it – all the rest, the breathless blog posts and TED talks and online courses on how to maximize your kanban – is probably just ASMR for process geeks. I prefer to embrace the simple, diamond-sharp core of the kanban board: help me see what I’m working on right now, what stage it’s at, and what’s coming up next.

As you can imagine, this approach works perfectly for painting and modeling. It’s already an inherently visual hobby, so a visual planning tool slots right into the mix. Several friends in my local game group are engineers of varying sorts, and they introduced me to the concept of a kanban board a few years ago.

Here’s a look at my current kanban board. Literally it’s a piece of paper with 4 columns, each with a label suggesting successive steps in the miniature painting process.

Each project, large or small, gets a sticky note. If it doesn’t have a sticky note, it’s not on my radar and probably won’t get done. As projects move forward, you simply move the sticky note to the next colum, showing progress toward completion. The columns also suggest the tasks required for that step in the process, which helps me match up my desired hobbying effort from day to day. If I’m in the mood to do some painting, I probably won’t pick up by dwarf ram riders, because as you can see in the photo above, they’re still in the “needs assembly” phase. On the flip side, if I decide I want those ram riders in a game 3 weeks from now, I can see that I’ll need to dedicate some effort to moving them along to completion.

This approach also aligns with my current hobby interests. I’m no longer painting entire armies in a single go – those days are behind me. Nowadays I’m more likely to tackle a small group of models from a Kickstarter, or a batch of long-delayed reinforcements for one of my existing armies. So my kanban board projects are almost always small morsels, relatively easy to pick up and work on, with a clear end point that allows me to finish them up and move on to something else.

Anyway, this approach really oils my gears in a weird, lizard-brain sort of way. I’m really not a terribly organized person – I sort of thrive amidst low-level chaos – but this simple sheet of paper helps a lot. I’ll probably redo the labels one of these days, because I literally came up with them in about 5 minutes when sketching this out in Word.

My favorite part of using my kanban board is the “complete” column. I know you’re probably supposed to remove finished projects shortly after they graduate to the “complete” column, but over the last few years I’ve kept them there for the entire year, slowly accumulating sticky notes like a stack of dried butterflies, giving me a deep sense of satisfaction as my hobby achievements pile up slowly over the year.

I’d like to hear from you, gentle reader. How do you organize your projects? What tools help keep you on task, while also leaving room for the creativity that is so essential to our hobby?

Age of Fantasy Skirmish at C3 Game Con

Posted by Comrade on June 3, 2022
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Back in February I volunteered to run a game at C3 Game Con, a brand new local game convention in Corvallis, Oregon. As it was the first year for this event, I wasn’t sure what to expect. Corvallis is home to Oregon State University, so I knew we had a captive audience of students and young adults who were likely to check out an event like this.

The convention was heavy on anime, cosplay, RPGs, and board games. Age of Fantasy: Skirmish seemed like the perfect way to to give them a little visual spectacle and maybe rope in some new gamers.

I set up a basic four-player scenario centered on Bayard’s Holdfast, the nifty little dwarf fortress I painted up last year. Two players would command the dwarf garrison tasked with defending the holdfast. The other two players were in charge of undead raiding parties tasked with smashing through the defenses and sacking the charred remains of the fort.

As you can see, I had a round tabletop, which actually helped the scenario – I was able to plop Bayard’s Holdfast into the exact center of the table and then arrange the attackers and defenders around the perimeter.

My players were fairly new to miniature wargaming. Only Parker had dabbled in painting & gaming before sitting down at the table. I selected Age of Fantasy: Skirmish because it is a simple, easy to understand ruleset for people who are fairly new to this sort of gaming. I whipped together some unit cards for each player’s warband, and of course they got their own copy of the rules to look over before the game.

The game started with a general advance by the undead players. They had to occupy the courtyard in the fortress and outnumber the defenders by the end of the game to secure a win. They could also gain a minor victory by slaying the dwarf artillery crew, which started the game in an outbuilding far from the tower and had to hustle to safety.

The dwarven defenders quickly understood their role in the scenario, and they mustered a stout defense that saw their elite troops meeting the undead near the crumbling stone walls on the perimeter of the fort’s territory. Fearsome blows were exchanged as the undead forces gradually pushed the dwarves back.

But! The dwarves had an ace in the hole! If they could get their artillery crew back to the fortress in one piece, they could load & fire the mortar mounted on the parapets. Thankfully, they were able to achieve this goal by the closing turns of the game, and they rained thunderous devastation down on the undead that were swarming around the walls of the holdfast.

By the end of the game, the undead legions had reached the walls (in fact, the ghoul king shown here was actually able to breach the defenses and begin rampaging through the courtyard). However, the stout dwarven defenders had succeeded in waylaying or defeating the bulk of the undead warbands, which meant that the defenders had secured the victory. The surviving undead warriors retreated in good order back to their nefarious swamp hideout.

Age of Fantasy: Skirmish is a great game to try out with new players in a convention setting. It requires some prep work – I don’t think the game would have been nearly as successful if I hadn’t put in some hours making the unit cards and handouts. But the ruleset is solid and it definitely ticks the boxes in terms of what a new player will expect from a wargame experience.

And I’m pleased to report that C3 Game Con was a wild success! We had more than 500 attendees over two days, which was way above our expectations and suggested there’s a big demand for this sort of event in Corvallis. I’ll be signing up to run some games next year for sure!

A Thing That Must Be Said

Posted by Comrade on March 10, 2022
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The events of the last two weeks – Russia’s bloodthirsty invasion of Ukraine and the ensuing humanitarian crisis – have absolutely gutted me.

“Neighbors” – A digital painting by Polish artist Jakub Rozalski, published on March 7, 2022

Despite being an American, my life has intersected with Slavic culture and people in fascinating and delightful ways, for almost as long as I can remember. My mom (also an American) studied Russian in college, and I grew up using simple Russian phrases around the home. In college, I took courses on Russian language and history and ended up cobbling together a minor in Russian Studies upon graduation.

Around that same time, my dad (also an American!) took a once-in-a-lifetime job opportunity in Russia. He went alone while I stayed in the U.S. to finish school, and I had several wonderful, whirlwind visits to St. Petersburg and various Baltic states during his time living overseas.

More recently, I found myself living in a city in the U.S. that is a sister city to a good-sized municipality in western Ukraine – once again providing an opportunity for cultural exchange and learning through visiting delegations.

Simply put – I have learned to love Slavic cultures and have had many enriching experiences over the years. When I first got online in the 1990s, I chose the handle “Comrade,” as a harmless identifier in web forums. It pains me deeply to see Russia squandering all the progress it had made towards democracy and open relations with the West, and I am totally devastated by the loss of life in Ukraine. Слава Україні! 

If you are looking for a charity to support, the Sister Cities Association in my town has started a GoFundMe to support the humanitarian and relief efforts as refugees pour into the city of Uzhhorod in western Ukraine. Uzhhorod is a relatively safe area, and far from the war, and they have become a magnet for refugees fleeing the fighting in eastern Ukraine.

The Fires of Progress

Posted by Comrade on September 22, 2020
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This post is part hobby update, part real-life interlude. Come along, if you wish, and see how Comrade’s Wargames has been enduring the last, apocalyptic days of summer.

Some readers may know that I live in western Oregon, an area of the country that is beautiful, lush, and quiet — most of the time. Every now and then, wildfires come calling. This is the western United States, after all, and even though western Oregon has a reputation for being gray and rainy, the fact remains that most of Oregon’s climate is dry for a large part of the year. Global climate change is only worsening that trend, I’m afraid.

So, wildfires caused by lightning strikes in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains blew up on Labor Day weekend, fanned by an unusually strong wind system, and quickly grew to thousands of acres. These fires were unique because they began moving toward the Willamette Valley, home to the largest population centers in Oregon. Oh hey, I live there too. Right here, where the purple arrow is pointing.

So things were pretty dicey for a few days. Smoke and ash blanketed the entire valley, including my home. Here’s a look at my neighborhood on the morning of Tuesday, September 8. It looks like something out of a Resident Evil video game.

And here’s the accumulated ash on the hood of my car.

We watched the news nervously for a few days, and had our go bags prepped in case we needed to hit the road. But the fires stayed mainly in the forested mountain canyons and never ventured down into the major cities in the valley.

The air quality, however, was another story. For nearly two weeks, the air in my neck of the woods was worse than what you’d typically see in someplace like Beijing. Of course, the smoke and ash coincided with a visit from my mother-in-law, so we had to spend the entire visit indoors, with the HVAC running full blast to have a modicum of comfort.

Being trapped indoors for a week gave me an opportunity to putter around with another new hobby: food preservation! I have a little backyard garden, more of a garden patch really, and I was excited to try my hand at canning some food for storage. The tomatoes here came from my garden, and the peppers were a gift from my friend and fellow gamer John, who moved into a new home that had a backyard garden overflowing with produce (courtesy of the previous owners) and graciously allowed me to harvest some crops.

Take a look at my haul from John’s garden. Wow! Every color of the rainbow. What didn’t get pickled and canned has already been consumed by my family.

I am terribly proud of my meager pints of preserved tomatoes and peppers, and I plan to increase my garden space next summer. Please do me a favor and check back in 4 months to make sure I haven’t gotten botulism after popping these bad boys open.

Between fires and being trapped indoors and all this food prep, you might think I would have had zero time for my miniatures hobby. Incorrect! In fact, retreating to my workshop/office became an important daily ritual for me during this fairly stressful time. I managed to finish six of these fantastic chunky resin dwarf models from Scibor Monstrous Miniatures.

They are really tremendous sculpts, full of character, and perfect as elite warriors, thanes, sergeants, or lords.

For my army, they will hit the table as hearthguard, sworn bannerdwarves to King Nicodemus, the Anvil of Dawn. Huzzah!

See? I managed to squeeze in a bit of a hobby update amidst all this real-life stuff. There will be more to come soon, as the Year of Fantasy marches on!