Another blast from the past.....the forgotten forces.....

To properly see the humour in this situation I hope you'll all indulge me in a longer than usual pre-amble to today's content.

As a veteran painter and gamer I found over the years that I make 2 distinct and separate types of hobby purchases; stuff I'm buying to paint and use in that game/tournament/con/league that is already scheduled, and stuff I'm buying because I think it's cool and even though I don't "need it" I'm sure I'll get around to it eventually (affectionately known by most gamers as their backlog).  And so my tale of confusion begins....
Around 20 years ago I was working in my FLGS when my boss informed me he wanted me to start pushing a new upstart game called WarZone.  WarZone was a 28mm sci-fi game set the dark future of the Mutant  Chronicles game universe.  As soon as I read the rulebook I was hooked!  It was like 40K meets the rapture with a cyberpunk ashetic laid over the whole thing.  I presented the book and promo materials to my in-store game groups and started taking orders, personally I was the most excited by the Imperial Army....unfortuantely....so was everyone else.  I realized the game was going to tank in our shop if we didn't showcase other forces and figures so I put aside the Imperial figures I had ordered for myself (knowing someday I would get back around to them) and instead painted up a Dark Legion (zombie, mutant, chaos-monsters) force so all my customers would have a force to play against.  The games were fun and I enjoyed my Dark Legion force (and got plenty of use out of it over the years) but I was still regretting not painting my Imperials.  After a couple of years I moved out west and found a new group of gamers who I hoped I could coral into WarZone....and they all wanted to play Imperial as well....so I painted a new Capitol Army and carried on.
Fast forward to last week.  While working on my Fallout project I cam across some remnants from my old Capitol army that I knew would be great for my friend Stan's NCR force, as I'm no longer at a place in my hobby-life where I have to get things done for a deadline I figured it was time to dig out my old Imperial Blood Berets and give them the paint jobs they'd waited so patiently for all theses years.  It took me about an hour to prep the figures

See, all ready to go!

 

 

 

Then I remembered I really should finish my Fallout mercs and that I would have plenty of time to paint my Blood Berets next week, so all I had to do was tuck these guys away in a figure case until I had time for them.  So, I dug out a figure case to put them and found this...

If it's unclear, that exactly what I just decided to do, only twice as much, already painted.

 

 

So not only have I already had this idea once, I had completely forgotten that I had done it.  On one hand I cursed my stupidity, on the other hand if I did paint the 7 guys I just assembled I would have a playable force almost right away.  I thought maybe instead though I should add some Golden Lions.  Just as I was about to start taking mold lines off a pristine fresh from the blister packs squad of Golden Lions I suddenly thought; "gee I wonder what else is in that figure case?"

Not completely finished but maybe another 2 hours worth of work.

 

So I guess the moral of my story is; if you've been doing this for 20+ years and you think a project would be cool....just double check and make sure it's the first time you're thinking that.

-Jay