Eternity Projects

I’m going to focus on a couple of things now that I’m mostly settled – frequent, small updates to my blog and painting. There’s some other things, like having friends over to play A&A: War at Sea, playing WWII Online or spending time with my family, that I will continue to do, but I hope to write a quick update to the blog and paint something every day. I just need to make sure I keep the blog posts down to 10-15 minutes to write so it doesn’t take all day. I’ll have to split longer, more involved thoughts into multiple posts.

Onto our topic. Eternity Projects are either a project people plan that will take an eternity to complete, or projects that hold the wargamer’s interest so strongly that they can continue to work on it to the exclusion of other periods and scales. This is something Stange Vistas’ has had on his mind. Inspired by the likes of Phil Olley and Alte Fritz Strange Vistas wanted to start an eternity project of his own and is apparently struggling.

Eternity projects are not for everyone. I cannot think of a project that could consume me to the point where I wasn’t constantly tempted to start something new. Alte Fritz loves the Seven Years War. He seems to love everything about it, so he doesn’t get bored and isn’t as tempted as the rest of us. This is a valid approach to the hobby, but since it really comes down to a wargamer’s core personality, I don’t think it should be held up as the paragon of hobby virtue. There are ways to mitigate the hobby butterfly while still being true to oneself.

As an aside, I have a one-year-old daughter. It occurs to me that the term shouldn’t be hobby butterfly, but hobby hungry hungry caterpillar. On Monday, the hobby hungry hungry caterpillar painted a Warhammer 40K Space Marine, but he was still hungry. On Tuesday, the hobby hungry hungry caterpillar painted two WWII British Commandos, but he was still hungry. On Wednesday, the hobby hungry hungry caterpillar painted three stands of Baccus Early Imperial Roman Legionaries, but he was still hungry. On Thursday, the hobby hungry hungry caterpillar painted four Khador Winterguard, but he was still hungry. On Friday, the hobby hungry hungry caterpillar painted a Napoleonic British Line Company, a platoon of Flames of War Italian rifles, a 120mm Knight Templar for a competition, a Starship Troopers Warrior Bug and a Centradi Space Cruiser. That night he had a terrible hand cramp.

Coming soon, how many figures to paint in a batch and ways to mitigate project overload.

Tyler – @coyotebd on Twitter