Reviewing the Past Year

Looking back at the previous year, it's been full of interesting hobby activity, which I hope to keep up with some twists.
Today's post is a reflection on 2016 - I will publish the follow-up tomorrow.

Let us first consider the previous year's resolutions: it's quite evident that most of them had been fulfilled. Perhaps because I wished for less and could therefore do it?

• 6mm SYW: three and a half armies were completed: British, French, Ottoman and Russian, the last one from MDF figures. Very little gaming, sadly, which I'm trying to remedy next year.
• 1/72 tricorne: GNW Saxon army completed, along with the 120+figure big Strelets box down to two or three figures.
• 1/2000 pre-dreads: less gaming than I had wished for, Tsushima Russian fleet 100% complete, Japanese less so.
• 6mm terrain: lots of new scratchbuilt pieces, including an entire Ottoman village.
• 1/72 terrain: I've only started towards the end of the year, fortunately the pieces I required were quite simple and essential (except the big fort), therefore easy to make.
• Table extension is done, although rarely used.
• 15m WW2: the Forged in Battle Brits are still sitting on my table, the Hungarians are complete.
• 1/72 medieval: a big no, some 28mm Perry and Gripping Beast figures were completed.
• Nova Hungaria: this project was sidelined, mostly because of my acquired distaste towards the Sharpe Practice rules, which neither the ACW supplement nor the 2.0 version were able to remedy.
• Age of Sail: with the aid of TESCO, a few ships were built and one game was played.
• C&C Napoleonics: not purchased, lots of figures were bought and painted instead. Playing The Great War boardgame has piqued my interest in this again, but if I would ever invest in it, I'd rather buy 6mm figures and play on a square grid map, much more spectacular and probably cheaper, too, considering that the rules are available online.

Stuff not listed above:

Multiple hundreds of Napoleonic figures painted: a French army raised from scratch, a smaller Russian army from stripped figures and new purchases, and an Austrian contingent of creative conversions. The fun thing is that originally I wanted to use Lasalle, but I could still not meet the requirements for any army list, so I came up with my own rules to be able to play with fewer units on a smaller table.

I actually forgot to mention the 1/600 pre-dreadnought project, which has attracted a lot of attention and positive feedback about my scratch-building adventures.

In general, I think my homemade rules have improved a lot, and will still evolve over time and repeated play.

My only regret is that I've painted lots and lots of figures, but played only a few games. 17 posts in 2016 had the "gaming" label attached. I sometimes find the fuss of setting up a table, then packing everything up again deterring me from two or three hours of fun.
This is directly related to the contents published on R&C as well: it's become my regular approach to post fewer completed figures at once, usually in 3-4 day intervals.

2016 has also been the Year of the Bots, I've received incredible amounts of hits, usually from Ukraine and Russia. Fortunately, this did not affect the comments section under my posts.