Hobby goals, hopes and dreams for 2024

It’s a new year! Traditionally this is the time when hobbyists say ‘new year, new army’ and kick off a big project. I’m not going to do that this year, but I do have some hobby goals for 2024.

Hobby goals

1. Finish painting a useable 2000 point Kruleboyz army. This one is carried over from 2023, when I thought it would be something I’d get done by end February and ended up not finishing a single orruk model all year. It’s been a while since I totted up how many points of Kruleboyz I had painted, and they’ve probably dropped a bit in points since then as they didn’t exactly top the meta in 2023. But looking at the display cabinet there are a lot of orruks there, I reckon I must have close to 1500 points done plus an almost finished Gobsprakk, so this should be pretty easy if I can avoid getting distracted.
2. Paint a Middle Earth Strategy Battle Game warband and play a few games with them. This is going to be my first project of the year, I got a head start on it in late December and I’m hoping to have it done by end of January. I’m going for the Army of Thror, which is the dwarves of Erebor before Smaug came along and ruined their day. I’ve never played MESBG and I don’t have a great grasp on the rules yet, but I’ve heard a lot of good things and I know enough people who play that I should be able to get a few games in easily enough. I’m not intending to get deep into MESBG, rather I want to have a force that I can play casual games with when opportunities arise.

   

   Some of the dwarves I painted in December

   
   
3. Paint at least another 1000 points of Seraphon, so that I can field a 2000 point narrative army of Seraphon. This is probably my main painting project for the year, if all goes well I will likely end up painting more than 1000 points so that I have some options, but I don’t want to put too much pressure on myself so I’ll stick with reaching 2000 points as my goal. I’ve not got concrete plans for exactly what I’m going to paint yet, I’d like to get some fun conversions in there and I have a few ideas, but I also need at least another ten Saurus Warriors so I’ll probably start with those to get them out of the way.
4. Don’t start any new AoS armies. I have a whole bunch of ideas for armies I’d like to do, but I think this needs to be the year when I avoid starting new projects and add some stuff to some of my existing armies. In 2023 I very much felt the pinch of having a lot of armies but none that allowed me to field a full on competitive meta netlist, so I have a long list of things I’d like to paint to make some of my existing armies more competitive. I doubt I’ll get through all of these, but I’d like to do a few of them. The one caveat to this goal is that if a fyreslayer range refresh or a new duardin army drops in 2024, I’m absolutely going to start a new army and forget about any other projects I have in mind. At this point I’m reasonably confident new fyreslayers must be coming sometime in the next few years, and if/when they show up I don’t want to feel guilty about painting them. So I’m giving myself a get out clause for awesome new duardin armies, should they happen.
5. Keep up this blog, keep up my podcast, and be better at promoting both of them. I’m happy that I’ve picked up some momentum with this blog again after letting it slip in 2022, and I’d like to keep that going. It’ll probably be more of the same: mainly event reports and hobby updates, with maybe the occasional other thing thrown in if there’s something I feel opinionated about. One of my fellow podcasters pointed out that I’d totally failed to mention my podcast in my 2023 wrap-up blog, so I promised to mention it here instead. I suspect very few readers of this blog are unaware that I also have a podcast, but just in case, you can listen to be bang on about how badly I’m doing with OBR at the moment on ‘Three and Two: A Matched Play Age of Sigmar Podcast’, available on all good podcast feeds. We’ve managed over a year of podcasting now, and hopefully we’ll manage another one. I’m rubbish at telling people outside my immediate hobby community that this blog and the pod exist, so I’d like to get better at doing that in 2024.
6. Improve my hobby photography set-up, and practice taking shots of my minis. This is a two part goal: firstly I’d like to paint a few scenery pieces that I can use to pose newly painted minis on when taking photos of them; and secondly I’d like to spend some time practicing mini photography with my DSLR camera. I recently picked up a book of photo backdrops to use when taking pictures of my minis, which is great, except that I don’t have sufficient variety of things to stand the minis on to make sense with all of the backdrops I now have available. So I’d like to paint a few small hills or similar with different colour schemes that I can use for posing minis against different backdrops. The second part of the goal came about because I took my DSLR camera to A Crown of Salt and Shadow, the AoS28 event I went to in June, and had a lot of fun taking super close up shots of minis with my macro lens. I’d like to do more of that, and get some atmospheric photos of my minis. So I want to set aside some time to practice and play around with things and see if I can get better at this.

   

   I would like to take more photos like this one but properly in focus

   
   

As well as these goals, I have some hobby hopes and dreams which I can’t guarantee being able to achieve, but would like to aim for.

1. Don’t come last at Brotherhood. Brotherhood is an AoS team tournament, which I’m going to later this month with some friends from the Rollmodels community. Last time we went to Brotherhood, in 2022, we came last and I was pretty gutted. It’s very possible we will come last again – it’s usually an extremely competitive event. and I don't know about my team mates but I have a terrible AoS win rate recently – but I would very much like not to. 
2. Win an Underworlds tournament. Despite the above goal, Underworlds is the game that I play most competitively, and I did alright at tournaments in 2023. I’d like to win a tournament in 2024. This will be hard, because there are a lot of very good Underworlds players out there! But I think it's possible with some good fortune.
3. Get my Living City army back into a playable state. I’m putting this one here rather than in the hobby goals section because I still have very mixed feelings about this army and I don’t want to put any pressure on myself to engage with it if it’s going to make me sad. But if I can get myself to a place where I feel excited about the project, I’d love to get my ghost dwarf Living City army to a point where I can field a 2000 point army that works with the new Cities book and feels ‘right’ for the theme of the army. I don’t yet know exactly what that will look like, but I think it should be possible.

Right, now to forget about these goals for eleven months and then desperately try to remember what they were, like I did in 2023. Maybe if I run out of blog ideas in the summer I’ll do a blog taking stock of my progress so far or something. Best of luck to everyone else out there who has set their own hobby goals for 2024, I hope you smash it.