I just keep moving, can't stop, won't stop grooving...

 This is going to be a bunch of introspective naval-gazing and philosophy.  Brace yourself or avoid as needed....

Coming back to a hobby can almost be harder than starting entirely from scratch.  Do you wipe the slate clean as if  starting anew, or do you try to leverage what you'd done before to get a head start, but at the risk of finding yourself stuck in a stale loop going nowhere.  And what if the context of the hobby has changed since you were last doing it.  Heaven forbid, what if *you*'ve changed.

So picture the scene: I have a man-cave of gaming stuff - terrain, figures, mismatched junk that I'll find a use for "one day".  That's fallen into chaos and looking like a disaster site, through virtue of being the room that stuff gets piled into "Just for now, till I can find a proper place".  Add a spare room to that which is only marginally better.  Marinade this in a sauce of five+ years of clinical depression and.... look I'm not a horder, OK?  The house may look like one of those you see on the TV in those documentaries, but it's not like I'm keeping 50 years of the TV guide and jars full of empty crisp packets or anything like that.

I'm reasonably sure there are no dead and mummified cats buried under piles of unwashed laun...... just a moment....

(sound of footsteps departing)

...

(sound of footsteps returning)

Yes, definitely no dead cats. Where was I?

But the truth is I'm not at a place where I can just grab a couple of armies, throw a green cloth and terrain down over a table and have a wargame.  I've got a lovely 8x5' table still setup, but it's gradually been repurposed as a painting station, workbench and general place-to-dump-piles-of-stuff-onto.  Boxes  of figures, painted and unpainted, aren't easily accessible and the same goes for terrain.  Long story short, there's a whole load of tidying, reorganizing and general Marie Kondo-ing that needs to be done.

Added to that, I've changed both physically and in terms of tastes.  Having a wargame table downstairs and all my figure, scenery storage etc upstairs wasn't an issue when climbing up and down stairs was a trivial factor.  And packing dozens of crates of terrain into the car to take to a club to run a big multi-player game is... so, so not a thing likely to ever happen again.  Suffice it to say since before the pandemic my mobility has been significantly reduced to the point where a journey to the end of the driveway to put the bins out is an achievement to celebrate.

That pandemic though has definitely been a double-edged sword.  Solo gaming has enjoyed a renaissance with a whole slew of games published specifically designed for solo play.  I've been gradually collecting a slew of them that I want to try - Five Parsecs From Home, Rangers of Shadowdeep, Space Station Zero.  They do trend towards the science fiction or fantasy skirmish genres playable on small tables, and that seems like a good modest goal to start with.

So that's sorted then.  Tidy everything up and organise it. Start playing small solo games.  End post....

Heh!  As if!

Things are complicated a bit by the fact that I've developed a liking for creating and crafting things, like terrain.  And worse, I have embraced the 3d printing revolution wholeheartedly.  The thing is, I've found the act of creativity and the tactile processes involved have been great for my mental health.  It started with building and preparing for a hypothetical return to face-to-face RPGs and a desire to put together the ultimate Dungeons and Dragons setup, with monsters and dungeon tiles and everything you could ever want.  That kinda segued into a growing fascination with the background lore to a certain megalithic space-fantasy wargame (Don't judge me!  There's a whole epic post needed to explain that one) and that resulted in about a dozen Really Useful Boxes full of mostly unpainted resin that has only served to exacerbate the existing storage/organizing/space problem.

The problem is that when you have a new technology like 3D printing that opens up the possibility to do... well pretty much anything, you quickly find yourself wanting to do pretty much everything.  I'm finding it a challenge not to get carried away with enthusiasm for the endless possibilities. And yet... it's exactly that enthusiasm that we need more than anything in our hobby.  To make us happy and to keep us sane.  Clearly a balance needs to be struck.  

I'm still wrestling with exactly where that balance point will be, but I'm continuing to work slowly but steadily on the sensible practical stuff that NEEDs to be  done, which is the tidying and organising, while still allowing myself a restricted field of things I might WANT to do.  For the moment that's restricted to making terrain and minis for a potential run of Space Station Zero games.  I could be sensible and insist I should be able to play the game with figures and terrain I already have painted and ready.  That would be absolutely true, but missing the point rather.  It's purely an excuse to allow some outlet for the crafting/creative urges, satisfying the WANT without impacting the NEED stuff too badly.  SSZ is a game on a sub 3ft board with a handful of minis per side, so it's not going to add more than a couple of Really Useful Boxes to the storage issue.

I guess the point I'm fumbling around here is this: Find out what things in your hobby make you happy, then allow yourself to do that thing.  Even if that thing isn't the core act of the hobby (i.e. moving little toy soldiers around a table rolling dice).  Maybe it's hoarding collecting figures, or worse the digital STL files that might bet turned into figures by a 3D printer.  Maybe it's painting, or modelling terrain, or writing erotic fanfic about your space marines. 

And just keep moving.  Even if it's a bit slower these days.