Reflections and goals at the end of 2025

Months go by and the wheel keeps turning, the yearly cycle coming to an end. I'm not one to celebrate the end of the year much, but this time of the year does always bring me into a contemplative mood. A good time to reflect and think about the plans ahead.

When it comes to hobbies, 2025 has been a good year all around. Collecting, painting, writing, reading, somehow I managed to do it all this year. Well, everything except playing, but I like to tell myself that that one is reserved for next year. Let's break it down.

Painting has suffered a little bit, I managed to paint only 22 miniatures, out of which 14 were Confrontation sculpts, almost half of what I painted in 2024. This was mostly due to two factors. First and foremost, painting challenges. In 2024 I was part of one escalation painting league and one painting competition, which I talked about in this post, the one organized by Sweet. This year I only took part in the challenge organized by Shino, covered in this post, and the current ongoing Crôn-mas Miracle competition. All of this is to say that I think events like these bring out the best of me when it comes to spending time at the painting table. I find those challenges extremely motivating and I always try to go the extra mile, using almost every free minute of the day to hold the brush. 

Without challenges and competitions I find it very easy to slip into other hobbies or some other less productive forms of procrastination. One of the positives was that I spent a lot of that time writing here and, to be honest, I enjoyed this journey a lot. And what I liked even more about it was sharing it with the community. End of September with the "Lucky finds..." and October with the "Climbing the Monolith" posts were an extremely motivating time, since those posts generated the most views and feedback from the readers. I hope that I contribute at least a small part to our hobby space and seeing some of my articles getting lots of clicks is humbling and inspirational.

That said, I like that I increased the monthly publishing count in the last quarter of the year and it is definitely something I hope to keep doing in the future. A considerable effort has been put into planning out schedules for posts and pondering about the things I want to write about down the line, so hopefully this space can continue being valuable and entertaining to all of you. 

Overall, I think 2025 has been a tremendous year for the blog, definitely surpassing my own expectations and hitting some important milestones. I think it provided me with much needed focus and space to clear my mind and to realize which hobbies are important to me. I've mentioned before, I'm all over the place and have many things I collect and ruminate over, but this blog and the community made me understand just how important Aarklash is to me, how deep I want to delve into it further, and how I only barely scratched the surface. It will definitely put a lot of other hobbies into the back seat and some I might drop entirely for the sake of Rackham's worlds.

Speaking of other hobbies, another factor which contributed to painting less is time spent writing elsewhere and just being away from home a lot. I've been traveling back to Serbia quite often this year and every time that I do I run an RPG campaign back in my hometown which takes a lot of preparation, which is enjoyable nonetheless! I have another blog where I sometimes post about RPGs which is currently on an extended break, but I hope to lively up that place soon-ish, at least in order to mention the campaign I'm running, so I'll definitely advertise it here for all those interested once that happens.

All of this is to say that I need more structure to organize my painting time when competitions, challenges, or leagues are not happening. My Confrontation collection keeps growing rapidly and I dislike seeing it just sit there, regardless of calling it a pile of "shame" or "potential". The collection has easily quadrupled since the blog started and I don't think the purchasing sprees are gonna slow down any time soon, so the brush truly needs to see more use.

So, what are my goals moving forward and for 2026 specifically?

• Try to achieve, or hopefully surpass, my painted miniature count of 2024 - this means have at least 40 miniatures painted by the end of 2026, with at least half being miniatures released by Rackham;
• Figure out a good painting regiment in order to achieve this - aka stay motivated to paint even when no "events" are being held;
• Keep my focus on Rackham - reorganize all my other hobbies and stay focused on Rackham games primarily;
• Get some games going - my aim is to get Hybrid on the table first and make that a semi-regular activity, then slowly transition over to Confrontation;
• Write, write, write - ideally, I would love to keep posting here once every week, or once every other week, if I could keep up that pace for the entire year I will be quite happy;

I have a lot of other plans and wishes for the time ahead, but I want to keep these goals strict and achievable. All the signs point to 2026 being another great year and I'm looking forward to sharing that journey with you all. A huge thank you to everyone reading the blog and taking any kind of interest in my thoughts on here, the support and attention means the world. Hope you all had a great year and that the time ahead of us will treat you even better. See you soon!

Survival guide for the rabid collector

One of my previous posts about the moments when collecting made me sad and frustrated truly got me thinking. I've read numerous bad experiences from other collectors, not just among those who collect Confrontation mind you, and many of those make my lows completely pale in comparison. There are horror stories out there and I'm glad that I've managed to evade them in a rather wide swing.

But it did get me thinking regarding why that is. I don't consider myself all that lucky, persistent and patient more than anything else, and I'm also not one to toot my own horn above anyone else's misery and imply that they were careless and dumb and I was not. But I guess there simply is something that I'm doing that's reaping me rewards or at least making me not lose sleep over bad shopping decisions.

Contemplating all this got me behind the keyboard again, so here we are. Before delving deeper though, Drunes and Acheron galleries are done now as well!

I've mentioned a couple of times before, I honestly think that the Confrontation market is pretty stable and healthy, a fact which warrants to be repeated. When you consider for how long the game has been dead, it is surprising to find a lot of product circulating around at decent prices. Sure, you get some crazy spikes for some models or just clueless sellers on eBay trying to rip you a new one, but for the most part the community is keeping it normal.

As time goes on and product truly becomes scarce, some models do stop appearing so often, thus you either have to arm yourself with some extra patience or you have to bend the knee and go outside of the community for your purchases. Most people don't have the patience since life moves fast nowadays, so going out into the wild in search for loot is where accidents happen. 

It's worth noting that I've been collecting various things ever since I was a kid... Card games, RPG books, board games, the list is long and one might say that I have a problem, but all those hobbies have more failed stories than what I wrote about before. I lost money many a time, though never spectacularly since I've always been careful with spending, but all those failures gradually accumulated some worthy experience for evading monetary disaster.

Without further ado, here's the survival guide for the rabid collector, or simply how to be safe when venturing outside of the community safety and stepping into the world of various obscure online stores and websites.

Spend some time and do research. I think I spend a considerable amount of my time browsing the market, keeping tabs on past sales, active auctions, current offers, and then you kind of get a good sense of health when it comes to the state of the market. This is especially important if you are new to Confrontation and you learn what is rare and what is common. Similarly, the below image is a good guideline of the prices within the community, but venturing outside warrants some price increases unless you're lucky and the seller is generous. However, as I said, knowing the market and its past, you'll get a sense of what is rare and what is justified to be more expensive than what the list says.

On a similar note, and probably the most important piece of advice, stay calm. Rare things are out there. Rare things that are cheap are also out there. But often times if you see a rare thing for a low price, to the point where it seems too good... that's when you need to be careful. It's easy to be trigger happy, but it's also easy just to take a breath and think about it: either you're lucky and the item is just sitting there waiting for you, in which case congrats, or it is there because it stinks and others saw it and walked past it leaving it for the next sucker. In order to not be the sucker, keep on reading and thank you for the continued attention.

If you're on renowned second hand market websites (such as eBay or the French Leboncoin), always prefer ads with actual photos of the item in question, not just a "stock" photo. Stock photo auctions rarely end up being NIB or legit product, but if you do stumble on such ads which tickle your interest some of the points below will be helpful to verify it. Similarly, non-stock photos could as well be taken from other places on the internet and reposted, in which case it is an obvious scam. You'd be surprised how often this happens. If you are insane like me spend a lot of time browsing the market eventually you'll end up semi-recognizing past ad photos, so you'll get your sixth sense tingling when these reused photos appear. 

Read the ad description of the listing carefully. I've had friends collecting "Oldhammer" get burned millions of times buying loose miniatures which end up being recasts, simply because they haven't read the ad description which clearly stated that they are recasts. It did also happen to me once on an auction for an RPG book which stated in its fine print that it is a print-on-demand copy. That one is on me. Just read people, please.

Engage with the seller. If you have any doubts about anything, contact them. Ask for a photo of the actual item or ask some follow-up questions regarding the description if they can't provide an image. No photo for me is usually sus, but sometimes I might cave in either if the price is low enough or the seller is good with communicating.

Similarly, if the seller doesn't sound any alarm bells in your head and you end up buying from them, always ask if they have more product and make an offer regardless. In my experience there's always a high chance that they do and they just haven't listed it yet cause they are still debating whether to sell or they are going through a backlog of items. This obviously applies to sellers you consider legit.

All that said, if you're shopping on these second hand auction websites like the aforementioned eBay or Leboncoin, you're somewhat protected as a buyer and you usually have rights to file a claim or report the seller if you feel like the seller did you over when it comes to delivery or item condition, etc. These are things worth keeping in mind cause technically you can be a bit more relaxed on those markets.

The real hazard is on random stores on the internet and unknown low traffic online shops.

Always check if the store has other items from "live" publishers, especially those that are currently considered new. By this I mean whatever is fresh in other games that are currently in print. For example, at the time of writing this the Thunder's Edge expansion for the Twilight Imperium boardgame is popping up on most active websites, or if the store sells GW product it is easy to quickly check online what is their newest release and whether the store has it. This is a good indication that the store is still operational, since a lot of the stores where Confrontation or any other older game pops up are sadly defunct and haven't been updated in ages. A good tip for easy inspection is to check the copyright stamp on the homepage of the store, you know one of those "© 2017-2025" for example. If that latter year is like 2012 then I have some sad news for you.

Additionally, go into a bit of a stalker mode and check the social media of the store. If there are no socials for the webstore, that usually ends up being a red flag. If there are, check if they have recent updates. If they do have socials, but the last update was from some years ago, this could mean that they just stopped being active on there, yet other times it might indicate that they have shut down their operations and the store is no more.

Further into the store stalker mode, you can also check the store's contact page. If there is no phone or address listed, red flag in my book. If there is a phone, good, though I don't recommend you ring up international numbers, so be weary of the store's country of origin. Phone usually isn't the deal breaker, but having a physical address scores major points. If they have an address, Google Maps Street View is your friend and many times that can help you verify the authenticity of the vendor. But, keep in mind that many smaller stores did move to being fully online during/after the great plague of 2020, so the address could just point you to their warehouse or otherwise weird looking location where it is hard to imagine a store or gaming club. In the end, it never hurts to send the store an email, if they have one listed.

If the store has a lot of rare product, chances are that it is no good. Either a dead store from back in the day, some kind of scam, or just a recaster. The latter category has some pretty notorious or famed websites, depending on who you ask, so if you want to see a list of the known ones you can find that list on the "7 Hills" discord server. Personally I dislike recasts and just don't want to give them traffic from here, so I'm not going to list them.

Last, but definitely not the least, interact with the community. Chances are that you can find someone who lives in the country or state where a particular store is located, the player map is helpful for this, and just ask them if they've heard about the store or if they've shopped there before. This can obviously save you a lot of trouble verifying all of the above yourself.

And I think that is about it. This wasn't a super exhaustive list of all the things that you can do to be 100% safe, since technically there isn't a completely foolproof method for hunting rare things. You do need some luck, but some of these tips listed above are just little things you can do to minimize going utterly unprepared. It might seem like a bit of homework, but it'll keep you happy in the long run and at some point you might even end up enjoying the whole process of investigation, like I do. It's fun looking into the bowels of the internet and seeing what pops up. 

Do you have any special tips and tricks for hunting those rare pesky minis and avoiding traps? Drop a comment, I'm always interested in new tools of the trade.

Thanks for reading and remember, patience is a virtue. Happy hunting!

Hybrid and Hybrid: Nemesis

I'm a simple creature, a visual creature, and I imagine that we all are. We all like looking at pretty things, especially in this hobby, and I think we're lucky enough to be so extensively spoiled by Rackham and all their pretty things. I remember, at some point, searching for the contents of the Rag'Narok box and stumbling upon this post on the "Strange News From Under There" blog. And I also remember scrolling through it back and forth, enjoying all the gorgeous content inside the box.

At some point later in time I hoped that I would be able to view the same thing for Hybrid somewhere on the internet, but as far as I could see there was no such thing. The blog called "thecount" created this post detailing Hybrid via all the rules, Cry Havoc articles, and Hybrid unit profile cards in French, but that wasn't exactly what I was looking for. So, here we are now.

Hybrid & Hybrid: Nemesis

This is an attempt to create a simple visual overview of the components for both the Hybrid core box and the Nemesis expansion. Not a full review per se, but I will toss some words into it to make it a bit more interesting. 

Photo dump coming in, so you know the drill, click "read more" below to see the full post!

Collection round-up - November 2025

As before, a small note ahead of today's post. New miniature galleries are complete, this time featuring both Orc factions and the Lions of Alahan. I'll have to admit that this journey of investigating and uploading of the galleries has started bearing fruit. The whole process of diving into one specific army and being surrounded by it makes me somehow appreciate it more. Never in my wildest dreams did I think that this would be possible for the Lions, but I've grown somehow more tolerant of them. I've recoiled in disapproval every time I saw their models previously, but now I come to realize that there are some interesting sculpts within their ranks. Miracles do happen! Though I'm fairly certain that my disgust for Dwarves of Tir-Nâ-Bor will remain steadfast. We'll see soon enough!

Now onto the meat and potatoes. Previously when I planned out what I want to post on the blog as far as my collection updates are concerned I just wanted to show what I have from specific armies. Which, I come to realize, in the long run doesn't make much sense since I'd have to repost some armies over and over again as I acquire more, since let's be real, every army I have is not fully complete. So instead, now I decided to group my purchases and do a monthly summary of what I've managed to snag. And oh boy, this month was a big one!

November haul!

Big, beautiful boxes! And I would say a pretty important milestone achieved in my collection. Some would argue that AT-43 and Hybrid are the best things Rackham ever released, rightfully so. I haven't delved into either deeply enough yet to deny or confirm this, but finally holding them in my hands I can definitely say that both are insanely impressive. I plan to do more thorough posts for both games sometimes soon, so stay tuned.

The Damocles purchase came with an extra army book for Therians and the Operation Frostbite campaign book. I was extremely happy with the addition of the army book, since Therians are visually my favorite faction in AT-43. Not only that, but the box itself came with a few extra Therians, namely some Assault Medusae, a few Golem Specialists and two Nano Generators, which I forgot to take out of the box for the photo. Needless to say, a great purchase for yours truly, made even greater by the price tag on the whole lot which was a whooping 30 euros.

Hybrid and Nemesis both came unwrapped, but all the contents have been untouched inside. It was a bit steeper price tag, around 150 euros, but still a great deal considering that just the core box goes for that much at times and not at all in NIB condition in most cases. I think only the French version of the game is still available at Rackham-esque prices, which is extremely commendable thanks to the efforts of the French community.

The two Cry Havoc magazines and the Aarklash world book I picked up for crazy cheap, around 2 euros total. Sure, the CH issues didn't come with the gaming aids booklet and the cards, but just having them on hand for so cheap was worth it. Especially neat in my case is that both of these issues have some terrain building tutorials which I plan on recreating, so these will be workbench copies which might get stained and messy along the way. The extra Aarklash book is nice to have as a reading copy, since I've heard these have notoriously bad spines with pages falling out often if used regularly. 

And that's it for the month of November! As of this post, we're already a few days into December and I've already landed some hefty new purchases, plus I'm already writing several other upcoming articles, so a lot of things are cooking. Stay tuned and thanks for reading!

It's a Crôn-mas Miracle! Winter 2025 Painting Competition

Yes, you read that right! There is a new Confrontation painting competition brewing on the 7 Hills server. Technically it is already under way and running only until Christmas, but there's still enough time to join.

You only have to paint one miniature, the almighty Crôn The Undefeated. If you are wondering why that particular character, Crôn will be merciful towards your ignorance this time around. Head on over and read his entry in the Sessair miniature gallery and stop embarrassing yourself.

But enough yapping because we're short on time, here are the rules of the competition as written by Krillion:

***

Welcome to the final painting competition of 2025! 
Hosted by @Jeremy from End of the World
The rules are simple. Paint the best Crôn in all its Crônness glory. 
If you wish to participate please post a picture of your unassembled/assembled but unpainted/primered model no later than December 10th.

Your models will be judged on the overall Crôn-ness they display and how well they are technically executed.
Attempts to detract from the Crônosity of the model via needless conversions or head/weapon swaps may negatively impact your overall score.
This is an attempt to find the Crôntonic ideal of a miniature painted in just over 1 month.
There will be a prize for Best Crôn even though everyone here knows Crôn is already the best.

***

And there you have it. It'll be fast, it'll be brutal, it'll be glorious in the name of our UNDEFEATED champion. And yes, of course, I'm participating. And yes, I am a firm believer that all of us lucky enough to paint Crôn have already won. See you on the battlefield!

"THIS DAY WILL SEE YOUR END!"