Happy New Year!

If a picture paints a thousand words, I reckon that graphic says it all. I am sure most of the globe is glad to see the back of 2020. The outlook for the start of the New Year may look grim, but the one thing we can be sure of is that the sun will rise again.

It is certainly not a year I want to repeat in a hurry. Here in New Zealand we plunged into a hard lockdown early in the pandemic and we shut the thing down, but tourism, one of our major sources of income, is in tatters. My work is in aviation an industry that has been utterly hammered. My employer reduced flying at one point by 95% of the schedule and 40% of the staff - many of whom I counted as colleagues and friends of twenty years - were laid off. We had a long overdue visit family in  Canada planned for August and that was quickly kicked to the curb as borders closed.

In late July we heard the sad news that a friend of ours had taken his life - we still don’t know why and never will. Days later, after more than 100 days without community spread, the virus reared its head again and we had a regional lockdown imposed that limited attendance at funerals to ten and we were denied the opportunity to celebrate his life. Then in October her indoors suffered a medical event that caused serious concern - thankfully she is well on the way to recovery now.

All that said, there have been moments of brightness in this dark year. Having eliminated community spread we are enjoying a level of freedom not seen in many other countries, including the ability for face-to-face gaming, open restaurants, theatres and bars, sports events and othe large gatherings and unrestricted domestic travel - something we have taken full advantage of with three wonderful short trips in the latter half of the year to parts of the country not previously visited. Thus far the economic damage has been less than forecast and the only two restrictions imposed on us now are the closure of our borders and mandatory mask wearing on public transport. But we can ill-afford to be complacent since a single slip up at the border could undo all our collective effort - fingers crossed that we can continue to keep this insidious thing at bay.

For me the highlight of the year was our highly anticipated annual wargames week away. This is perhaps the only time in the year that I get to totally relax and while it was a truncated event for me it still provided a few days of peace in these turbulent and stressful times.

Looking back at my gaming year, as I do at this time every year, it shows a downturn across all areas of activity. 

In terms of numbers of games I played a total of nineteen, down five on last year, but there was a good range across thirteen eras: 5x Napoleonic games, 2x American Civil War, 2x Dark Ages and 1 each of 100 Years War, War of Spanish Succession, Spanish Civil War, Modern Afghanistan, English Civil War, First Carlist War, WWI 1918, Crimean War, Western Gunfighters and War of 1812.

My scratch building efforts have been dramatically reduced, with just four small buildings for the Paraguayan War and, of course, my woods bases and swamps. Could it be that I am reaching the point where I have buildings and terrain items to cover all my gaming periods? I think not...more exciting scratch building activities are waiting in the wings and will develop next year.

On the painting front although the item count is still a respectable 1,100 plus items activity has been the lowest since 2015 and down 34% over last year. In part this is because of the strain that COVID-19 has put on international mail services, but largely because I have reduced the number of projects I am working on. While our economy has not crashed as predicted I think I have just subconsciously cut back expenditure. So what did come off the painting table this year?

There have only been two major projects: the American Civil War and Great Paraguayan War. I managed to add another demi-brigade to the French Revolutionary army and painted up half a dozen American War of Independence British figures that had been laying around. The remainder of the painting work this year was accounted for in the Crimean War expansions that were required for the game played at the Tarawera game in late-November. In detail the statistics are:

By item count there were 920 foot figures, 140 mounted figures, 7 guns and 80 scratch built items. 

As a comparison the following table shows progress for the last seven years.

So as the new year starts here’s hope for a brighter year, new projects with shiny new toys and great games. HAPPY NEW YEAR and stay safe.