Sound the welcoming salute! Home at last!

Well, our ship is finally making port. We had to toss a few sergeants over the side en route to appease the gods of occasional misfortune and the goddesses of incidental encounters - perhaps we shouldn’t have named the ship “The Odyssey”. But at last we can see the shores of our homeland on the horizon and a warm breeze is coaxing us in an almost straight line towards harbour.

Hmm! Those shores look familiar, but there’s something a little wrong. I know we’ve been away for a while, but something has changed. I can’t quite put my finger on it. They’re definitely familiar cliffs, and I know I’ve seen that bay before with its threatening breakers. Probably we’re a bit further west than we thought we were.

Do you think we need to sacrifice a couple of sergeants to calm the waves? It wouldn’t do to crash out at the final moments.

That’s unusual, too. There seem to be dozens of small ships assembling nearby. Craft of all kinds, mostly rather worse for wear – tattered sails, mildewed hulls, the occasional broken mast, and crew who definitely look exhausted, as if they’ve faced months of struggle, desperate to complete some Ixion-like task in an endless purgatory of unattainable desire. What are they doing here, these strange people? There’s even someone with a badger on their shoulder.

They’re drifting around bemused, as if they’ve lost something, as if all meaning has drained from their lives, as if they’ve lost control of their small vessels, drifting aimlessly.

What is going on?

Wait! I don’t think this is the homeland at all. This island, so familiar, so full of sirens, lures, hazards and (very occasionally) charms, so deeply tattooed in my consciousness that I can feel blood seeping into my eye sockets, this septic isle we’ve just spent three months circumnavigating, this graveyard of sergeants – of course I recognise it! We’ve come full circle. We’re back where we started!! Oh, demon of the wandering island, when will you release me from this endless compulsion, this shackle of desire, this perpetual fate we all so clearly deserve?

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So here's a smugshot:

Challenge X has been great fun, but it’s surprised me in several ways. I had promised Curt that, unlike Challenge IX, I would not spend much time building up points and painting masses of figures, and I fully intended to do that. I set my target quite low (2000 points), hoping that would remind me to be more focused in my approach. My plan was to work on “aesthetic” pieces: command bases, artillery, vignettes, terrain – items that would enhance the battlefield - rather than paint masses of new units.

At the same time, I’d several armies where work had more or less been suspended since Challenge IX, so I wanted to pick them up again. I decided my basic approach would be to alternate between a set piece and a unit, to satisfy both urges. I had it all planned out, with about 3000 points of small units, command figures, artillery and terrain primed and ready to go. (3000 points, I thought, would give me enough leeway to butterfly between different projects over the three months and easily deliver the intended 2000).

And then along came Challenge Island, and that instantly wrecked all my plans. On reading the setup, it took me only moments to decide I’d attempt the whole island, even though at startup I couldn’t see how I’d deliver about a third of the location tasks, and very few of them mapped onto the figures I’d so carefully prepared for painting.

So I made a new plan. I’m a great one for plans. I find they’re a really useful guide to all the aspects of a project you could perhaps have got right but are actually totally failing to achieve. Which, when realised, usually means time for a new plan. I made a spreadsheet listing all the locations, their requirements and the items I had prepared which might fit that requirement. Then I plundered the collection for anything else I might have which would satisfy locations not already sorted. 

Here's the full tablesworth (lacking those figures that went to the For Joshua project):

I really loved delivering all this. It made me delve into areas of the collection I’d not touched for ages. It made me think about some things in different ways. It made me wonder why some periods and armies were very well represented in my collection (I’ve Napoleonics in several scales and for several theatres, for example) and others are completely unrepresented (I’ve nothing in Ray’s?? floppy hatted period, for example – nor, indeed, the Marlburian period which immediately followed, even though I’ve ECW and SYW armies). Why?

Anyway, I just loved that journey. Also, as a writer, I found the whole thing stimulating my imagination, too. Sander suggested there might be a book in my combined posts. Unfortunately, I don’t think that idea stands up with the actual materials, because it’s so specific to the hobby and the Challenge, but the idea of an episodic narrative took hold, and I had to think of some reasonably imaginative or potentially funny event for each posting, too. And it wasn’t enough to do this once: I so enjoyed the exercise I felt I had to do it all over again, travelling in both directions.

As there are 40 posts of my journeys, and around 25000 words of posting (of variable quality, it must be admitted), this additional task I’d set myself alongside the painting was quite demanding, too. Moreover, because I’d raided the collection several times to deliver the Challenge Island tasks, and I was using my return journey to force me to develop the “vignettes” I’d promised myself, the points value of the whole thing kept going up. It was clear to me as I approached the end of the return journey that I was going to have over 3000 points – and yet many of the pieces I’d originally planned for still glared at me from the tabletop demanding the paintbrush I’d promised them.

So I was also painting “Non-island” figures alongside my island tasks. These were mainly dribs and drabs of work – the Celts, for example, were started around Christmas, and only finished in the final week of the challenge, because I kept picking up one or two figures at a time whilst working on other projects, and painting just a stripe here or a shield there.

By the time the end of Challenge X approached, I’d clearly violated my promise to keep the mass painting down, but I had kept my promise to myself to produce a smattering of command vignettes. I’m really, really pleased by what I’ve achieved in this respect, and I can’t thank Curt (and all the minions, of course) for enabling this. Of course, we could do these things without such incentives, but would we? Would we?

The word which seemed to occur most frequently among the kind comments my work received was “mad”. It may, in fact, be a fair descriptor. Around hobbyist projects, I guess I’ve some sort of OCD (I first typed “OCR”, but my skills at optical character recognition are, in fact, quite limited).

Just to confirm that, here’s what I think I painted:

Terrain items: 30

1/700^th ships: 6

6mm: 293 figures and 57 vehicles/artillery

10mm: 78 figures (for Joshua)

15mm: 179 figures

28mm: 562 figures, 16 artillery pieces, 1 boat

Command bases and set-piece vignettes (included in the numbers above): 29

(I could show you the spreadsheet. If I had one. But, of course I don't have one. Who would keep a spreadsheet of figure plans and painting, of purchases and armies and completions? The very idea!)

All in all a wonderful challenge. I’ve loved everyone’s entries, been inspired by many, and learned a few things, too. And, unfortunately, identified two or three new periods or games I’m definitely never going to be interested in. No, absolutely no chance. Never.