No Game Room? No Problem: Real Life Hobby on a Kitchen Table.

The biggest challenge I face living in an apartment and being a keen miniature hobbyist is space. I see some of the most amazing hobby/game rooms on the internet with all the lights, paint racks, display cases and of course storage for all of these creations and I get immediately green with envy.

It doesn't help that I seem unable to stop buying miniatures, paints and all the other paraphernalia that I need. Seriously how many different paint handles do I need?. I used an old pill bottle with some blu-tack back in the day and that did the job.

I've become an expert at stacking my closet like some life size version of tetris which is great until I need the thing I put in first. It's a vicious cycle. 

Add in the attention span of a goldfish and jumping from project to project because you saw some cool basing reel on Instagram and thought "wow I gotta do that" and before you know it your backlog is getting bigger and bigger.

The reality of my world is that the most accessible space is the kitchen/dining table for games/hobbying.  I've become good at set up and strip down because I can't leave my stuff set up permanently. You almost have to have a schedule to fit in some time when it won't impact the rest of the family. Gone are the days of marathon painting sessions with the odd toilet break here and there.

This is not me complaining because you have to adapt to the situation because some hobby is better than no hobby.

Space the final frontier

When I first started playing tabletop miniature games, Warhammer 3rd edition was the big boy on the block. Coming from a D&D background, I wasn't interested in historical games, so its massive "rank and flank" fantasy battles were perfect. My army of choice back then was undead and chaos, specifically Khorne. Back then, I was a teenager living at home with a garage big enough to hold a makeshift table made from two old doors and trestle legs. It was the ideal setup for grand games with heaps of models.

Fast forward to today: I live in a much more compact space, and 20 models is about the maximum you will see in a single game. The kitchen table now hosts skirmish-level games instead, which is great because the genre has exploded in popularity.

To be fair, smaller-scale games are just easier to manage. They require fewer models, less terrain, and perfectly suit a haphazard schedule like mine. To be honest though, recently it's been more painting than playing. For example if I finish work early I'll try and get in 30 mins or an hour of painting before dinner or maybe on a slow Sunday afternoon.

This is the first post I've written for my blog and I want to be still writing stuff about my beloved hobby in the future, so many of these adventures start in a blaze of glory then just as quickly fizzle out. I don't want this to be the case even if only a handful of people ever see it.

This is going to be a space where I share my love for painting and collecting models and using them in games.

If you feel inclined let me know about your hobby journey. Was it skirmish games or massive army battles in your garage?