Monthly Archives: March 2024

So it Begins

Two months later than scheduled, the battle for Stalingrad will commence. My hobby room will be done this weekend. Currently, it looks like :

Yes a bit overwhelming, more than a bit really. But I have all day Saturday and Sunday; with nothing scheduled; I am going to fix it. It will be glorious.

How did I get Here?

A great question. As we were moving things, I was counting the thousands of items I had forgotten I even owned let alone ever used. Those have been going away. I started my TCG store (Red Desert Wargaming), and selling 90% of the magic collection. This seems like a lot by 10% of 140,000 cards is still 14,000 cards. I am keeping my reserved list items, all the dual lands, fetch lands, various staples, and building about 10 decks give or take 2 to 3 in every format. The rest buh by. Do I really need a playset of every modern playable card? Do I really need 88 copies of negate? No. I will most likely sell the bulk to my FLGS, while anything over .25 will get listed on my TCG Player Account. I should easily clear $40,000 total after everything is sold. If not a little more. In two weeks of sales, just duplicates I had in the office or laying around I have already moved $18,000. I still have to sort the colorless, lands, and multicolored cards, but I am comfortable with where I stand now.

Other items that I have moving on from, 3d printed buildings are moving to the attic. I have a really cool Mos Eisley/ Desert Town setup for 28mm. But it’s 3 big boxes. It will work great in the attic. Ditto my Tyranid terrain. I also have 15 ish generic buildings, a church, some brick houses, those will stay downstairs for use in the campaign. Many of the fancy building ruins, trees, roads, will stay as those get used on a monthly basis at least. Although I have like 3 boxes of trees, pine trees, jungle trees, normal trees, colorful trees, big trees small trees, palm trees, too many.

I do need to come up with a better solution for 8,000 15mm Napoleonics. Currently they are stored in white Ikea letter holders, you can see one to the right of the picture on top of the lone shelf. The entire left line of the room shelves is lined with the Nappys. It is too many. I have one of my bun racks set up in the attic to move them, iffffff, I can’t keep them. I would say they are my favorite period to play and favorite armies to paint, but space.

I have two big challenges facing me. DND Figures, 1000’s of them, and game pieces for other games. I keep a drawer for dice and tape measures and other basic wargame needs. It fits nicely in a small drawer. But games like Legion, Armada, MCP, XWing, Blood Bowl, that require special rulers or dice and especially tokens do take up a ton of space. Each one has a toolkit filled with things, Xwing and Armada have three each. I am going to put up a wire shelf in the attic for said pieces, but my attic is getting very full. So is the attic at the office. It might be time to admit I am hoarding.

As far as DND figures. It has been over a year since I last DM’d. I don’t have much desire to DM right now. My creative bug for DND just isn’t there. I love playing and I really love DMing, but the last group just burned me out. I may have to migrate the smaller figures to sheet pan trays to clean out drawer space, but the larger figures are legion. We own a storage facility, I just hate the idea of renting a unit.

Moving Forward

Goals for the weekend, a place for everything and everything it its place. Start with cleaning off the 8×4 table in the middle, and all walk paths. Use my label maker to label drawers. Items like a map shelf, bins for rollout battlemats, specific shelf sections for terrain. If I don’t know when I have used it, it can go away. Magic down to one wire shelf. Dnd down to 3 sections, drawers for each game system. I think it will take 2 or three passes to be good, but I am close.

Get all Warhammer Figures to the Warhammer storage area, its the attic office, literally every. single. army. I am a big fan and love to play and paint. They can all be in one place though. Have the hobby desk clean and ready for work. This means if its not used for painting or building its in a drawer or something. Not on my desk. This is a non-negotiable. I am fine with some projects under the table, but get the hobby space clear. I have already sorted all the paints.

It will be a ton of work. I have a good book on tape, the ear buds are charged. I’ll see you all on Monday.

“Review of General D’ Armee 2”

This is my very informal review of General D’ Armee 2 rules just published. You can purchase the rules through Two Fat Lardies. I have yet to play with the rules but I am very familiar with the first edition with well over 100 games in my belt and most of the review will be a direct comparison.

Conclusion
The rules are better laid out and organized for play. 2nd Edition is superior in almost every way.

The original ruleset was written by an engineer I think. An example;

Evading the following units must evade a charge.

1…..2…..3…….4…….

Procedure

Step 1….2….3…4…5…6…7…8….ect

In 2nd Edition the rules while functionally the same is easier to follow along and allows more nuances to be accounted for.

This basic change is similar across the entire scope of the book and might push General D Armee above many other Napoleonic rulesets.

Slightly More Depth

The rulebook is high-quality, with great color photos and decent organization. The font is a little more excellent to read. The basics seem far superior to the first version. Esspecially for beginners, what do I need to play, basing scale, etc. They are quickly introduced and nicely laid out compared to 1st edition. I absolutely hate the basing advice for cavalry. I still have no idea how I should be basing my cavalry regiments, how many bases a regiment should be, there are good details for infantry and artillery just cavalry is lacking.

The troop types and formations are clearly laid out and easy to find. Small tables are abound throughout the rules. I also like the example blurbs being easy to find as well. When I first started I remember the allocating brigadiers step was just a little confusing.

I enjoy the new setup for Corps Battles vs Divisional Battles. I do wish there was a set of rules for army battles as I really enjoy playing with more than one Corps.

In general all of the chapters are just better laid out for player use. The deployment chapter is a prime example where it clearly follows what players actually do. The first edition rules struggled to have relevant information where you actually need it. The 5th chapter is similarly helpful and laid out with references to the chapters for more depth. I do wish the PDF was hyperlinked to the same sections.

Chapter 6 hasn’t changed much in function just more clearly laid out.

Chapter 7 is not new persay. It sure feels new. There are some nuances that are different, but again love the layout, love being able to follow along clearly the steps.

Chapter 8 is where the rules do get quite dense. The basic steps are clearly outlined, but the 6 or so pages of extenuating circumstances and tables are a bit tiresome. I am glad the supporting units section was made more clear. I also like the new evade rules.

Chapters 9 to 17 follow the same formula as above. Some variations to the rules are of course going to happen, but as a whole much easier to follow.

Chapter 19 is welcome as an appendix. First edition had something similar, but this seems superior.

The last major thing I want to talk about is the cheat sheet or quick reference sheet. The rulebook is 118 pages long, the creator made everything fit on 4 pages. There is a ton of information that is clearly laid out and much easier to follow than first edition.

Basement Remodel/ Hobby Room Progress

Or lack thereof.

The entire basement has been fully painted. We do want to paint the stairwell going down. Most items are in the rooms they are supposed to be in. The Library is 100% complete, the Den is 95% complete (need a TV), the Bathroom is 100% and the Laundry Room is 100%. We are working on the guest bedroom, which needs all its stuff moved out, and then my disaster of a hobby room.

Wow, I have a lot of items. Working hard on whittling down what I don’t need. Two loads to the landfill so far of misc boxes, broken things, things I’ll never use. Filtering out single-use terrain vs more generic terrain. It’s a lot of work. Hopefully end of this week first of next week we will be complete, but soccer season is in full swing. I will probably take pictures to show everyone what I am talking about. One of my biggest hurdles is slimming down the MTG collection. I have been playing since Shards of Alara. I have 116,000 cards in my inventory; at least another 20,000 are not inventoried. Until Brother’s War, I maintained 4 of every Pioneer Legal card. The work and the amount of storage it required was too much. I am going down to 10 ish decks and hopefully 20,000 total cards in the inventory for use in EDH, Legacy, Vintage, Ect.

The worst part is over the years my organizing has gotten lazy. As it stands, all Pioneer cards are organized based on set, then set order. Each in a 1000 count box. Everything else is in 5,000 count boxes, one box for each color, plus one for gold, colorless, and non-basic lands, all cards alphabetized. I only use one type of sleeve, KMC Hyper Matte Reds. Every card gets double-sleeved. It makes it easy to move cards from one deck to another, and I try very hard to keep sets of 4 of each card. The problem is I wasn’t planning on Pioneer when sets like Theros came out. All the cards up to Amonkhet were mixed in with the general collection, plus things like trading. I have stacks everywhere……. I am alphabetizing my piles, then going through letter by letter and removing Pioneer Legal cards to go in their respective boxes. The blues took about 8 hours. Black (will be the hardest), Red, Green, Grey, Gold, Lands. At least another 45 hours……

My games this weekend.

I was fortunate enough to officiate a couple of MLS Next matches. As a whole, they went well for my first experience. The pace of the U17s really surprised me. It took absolute focus and pushed my abilities as an AR to the limit. I wish I had footage of three decisions. I am confident I missed where a player was trekking back, but it didn’t amount to anything. Another on a shot where I was 90% he was offside, luckily the shot went over the bar so my decision didn’t actually matter, had the ball gone in I would have flagged the player. The third resulted in a corner but I had the player onside hitting the line at full speed. Immensely difficult as a referee to get those correct.

I was happy with my performance, not my pace. It has been a long winter, and I am not yet in form to make explosive runs for 4 hours. Something the two matches really required. I wish I had pre-gamed with the center referee a little better. I think we could have had better communication to help on-field issues. I apologize for being very vague. But for these games, referees are frowned upon for commenting or putting anything in writing or on social media.

For the future, I need to push my sprint workouts a little harder. My Achilles has been bum since at least October, and I have been trying to rest it. It felt decent, and once warmed up, it didn’t bother me until the 2nd half of match two.