Welcome

Hello,
this is my first blog post. I have been thinking about starting a miniature game blog for some time now mainly to use as sort of hobby diary, but also to share back to the community which has been a great inspiration for me.

Short introduction

I'm Jaakko (also known as Jamopower in the dark depths of the internet), a soon 34 years old chemical process engineer from Finland. I have played miniature games since the year 1999, when we started playing Warhammer 5th edition with some friends with whom we had been playing role playing games for a while. It was love at first sight and I was seriously hooked on tin and plastic. After that it was mostly Warhammer of both varieties until I moved to Helsinki in year 2011 and found the local wargaming club, where I started getting influences of many other games. Also of course it helped that I started working full time around then and had bit better resources for all sorts of different games. First I started playing Infinity, and after that it got out of hand :) I now have armies/warbands for Middle Earth SBG, Dropzone Commander, Dropfleet Commander, Batman Miniature Game, Beyond the Gates of Antares, Saga and sizeable amount of Crusade era muslims and general fantasy models mainly for Age of Sigmar, but also for other skirmishes. All in all, I have around 1500-2000 painted models at home and the number is increasing fast.

Currently I have four main projects:

Middle Earth Strategy Battle Game
I'm quite of a late comer to the middle earth gaming. Never got into it when it was still big, but later found out that the game is great. The miniatures have always been some of my favourites and I have always been a big fan of Tolkien's work. We used to play Middle Earth roleplaying game  when I was a kid and later also the collectible card game produced by I.C.E. (still a great game). I first got some Haradrim for human cultists on my Age of Sigmar Slaanesh army and soon they became a real force. Now with the release of the new edition, I'm all in and there is some serious excitement on the game around here. I'm participating a tournament at the end of November, so I'm painting a Rohan army for that for counterpart on my mix of Mordor and Harad evil force. I'm also planning to participate on the GW Armies on parade with my evil force, but let's see how my schedule works out on that.

Finnish war 1808-1809
Perry miniatures released recently some Finnish Dragoons for Napoleonic period. I hinted about this to my friend, who is a military musician in the current Dragoon regiment and soon after he had ordered himself some Swedish/Finnish troops and I got some Russians, mainly Cossacks, myself to make a force for some skirmishing. The plans are to keep the project relatively small, but I'm about to do some wintery Finnish terrain to go along with the forces, that I'm really looking forward on.

30 Years war in 15 mm scale
I haven't read a lot of history and haven't been too into historical games, but during this year I have read and listened a lot of history books and podcasts. This has shown itself in increasing amount of historical miniatures on my shelves. From all the possibilities I decided to go with the 30 years war and chose the 15mm scale as it has always interested me and fits the big battles of the period quite well. I'll also probably do some small skirmish forces with 28mm minis eventually, but for starters it'll be 15mm and mostly Totentanz miniatures' great models. I'm planning on doing enough troops to have two forces available so that I actually get to play as the period is not so popular in this scale around here. Although there is some interest in By fire and sword, for which I can also use my troops.

Fantasy forces

I have human/order and undead fantasy armies that I build up every now and then. The armies are build from various models so that I can use them with any rules system. I have been mainly playing Age of Sigmar with them, but they also work for Saga, Dragon rampant, Havoc, etc. This was my main project last year, so it's bit at the back currently, but I have lots of ideas for these that I want to do, so I'll add an unit every now and then.

Also during this year I have painted a large army of 28mm medieval muslim. I had a small Saga force for a campaign years ago, which I started griowing to army size and now I have 200 models for the force. On the shelf (and in kickstarters) I also have some sci-fi projects, but haven't had the inspiration lately to do anything for them. But eventually I'll get back to them as well.




So that's short introduction of what is about to come. Watch this space.

-Jaakko