An unfocused gamer is dangerous

Now that I'm back on the miniatures painting kick, as I noted in my last post one of the things I wanted to do was start focusing my miniatures collection on identified projects and start trimming off the excess. This tied in neatly with re-organizing my desk, which had become cluttered with stalled projects and half-finished miniatures. I'm a "pile and sort" kind of organizer, so the kitchen table quickly began to feel the stress of pounds of lead and pewter piled onto it as I began compiling figs from random miniatures cases, boxes, and other places I had left them "temporarily." Within about an hour I had to stop, as I had simply run out of room. What I was left with, was this:



Sadly, this pile doesn't include any of my marines for 40K, a High Elf army, Cogs and Red Blok for AT-43, a Confrontation goblin army, a box of Heroclix and one of Mechwarrior destined for repaints, my Malifaux figures, a random assortment of blistered Reaper figs, and a smattering of Epic and Heavy Gear stuff. As none of these listed items are painted any more than the stuff in the picture, none of this includes my painted figures either. And I haven't even broken out the terrain, a box of Armorcast stuff pristine in its stinky resin.

To say I was a bit shocked to see all of this before me would be an understatement. But the situation is obvious upon reflection. Without a regular gaming group and a dedicated system to play, the last decade of my hobby experience has been typified by a "Oooh, that's cool looking, I want one," and "Wow, at that price I better buy 5 Starship Trooper walkers." No, I don't play Starship Troopers, but I figured I could use them as something. They'd be great proxy armored sentinels, for instance, for that Imperial Guard army I don't own.

So, now that I can more clearly see what I own, I'll be assigning figures to projects, even those that are only vaguely formed in my mind, but the rest will be hitting the auction block in the near future.