Tiny Plastic Spacemen

If you missed Part 1 of this post, click here!

So after deciding that finishing 2 armies and making a significant dent in my terrain stash is going to be the focus of my 2020 hobby year, the next step is deciding how to actually do it.

I’ve seen a lot of different ways to do this – for a few years, I actually organized a monthly ‘Oath’ painting challenge for wargamers on the Something Awful forums – but a gaming friend of mine (Mr Graham of the Clan Wigg, organizer of a series of narrative campaign weekends that I’ve had the honor and privilege to attend) has come up with something quite unique and frankly pretty ingenius! I present…

The Hobby Medal Challenge!

This is a monthly challenge where you choose 3 different challenges:

• one that is fairly easily achievable
• one that’s harder to finish but still doable, ideally expanding on the first challenge
• a bigger, even harder challenge that is just about doable, but with a concerted effort, again, ideally expanding on the other two challenges

These then become your Bronze, Silver and Gold challenges. For example, if you’re working on a Primaris Space Marine army, you could do something like:

• Bronze – build a squad (ten) Primaris
• Silver – paint the entire squad to ‘tabletop’ standard and base the squad
• Gold – add extra detail such as lens and gem effects and practice 2-brush wet blending on capes and tabards, to bring the models up to better than just ‘tabletop’ level

The idea is that you pick what best fits YOUR needs and time available. If you’re super busy running a full-time business, are a single parent, have 3 kids and also have another major hobby like rebuilding a classic car, maybe finishing a full squad of Space Marines to tabletop level wouldn’t be your Silver medal because there’s no way you could have time to do that… but it could work better as a Gold medal! It all depends on your own situation and what you want to achieve with your own models.

With that in mind, and knowing I’ll be away for half of January, here’s my Hobby Medal Challenge for January, 2020:

• Bronze – write up 2 lists each at 1500, 2500 and 3000 points for my Alpha Legion Horus Heresy army (I’m terrible at having organized lists for my armies)
• Silver – assemble and organize in KR cases or other transport boxes the models for these lists AND get them in my Google Sheets spreadsheet so they are digitally organized
• Gold – base, prime and basecoat the models for these lists (the models are probably 95% built, they mostly just need priming and basecoating)

We’ll see if that’s overreaching or just too easy. I’m away for a good chunk of this month so I think the best I can do is get things built and basecoated…but we’ll see!

So that’s it! In addition to my own models, if you want to book an army, unit or model to get built, customized or painted (or all 3!), get in touch!