Hobby Challenge: Rackham 2026 Bingo!

Now that the "Crôn-mas Miracle" painting competition came to an end, more on that probably in the next post, it is time to engage in a new painting endeavor. Brace yourselves, the bingo is coming!

A little clarification is in order. At some point during the early days of 2025 I started having an idea about hosting a painting competition of some kind on the 7 Hills discord server, as it seemed like a fun little community project and I could use the blog to host images of the entries and maybe get some of my non-Discord readers to join as well.

However, by the end of summer and just around the time when Shino's painting competition ended, it became clear that not a lot of people on the server enjoy engaging in painting "competitions" per se. It could be due to lack of time for hobbying, it could be the competition aspect, could be lack of motivation, could be all sorts of things. The same thing was also observable during the painting challenge hosted by Sweet in 2024. Either way, it got me thinking about trying to do something less competitive, but also requiring less effort from the participants while still somewhat motivating people to get things done.

Enter the bingo! I saw this idea back in 2017 over at The Rob Hawkins Hobby Blog and I've always wanted to give it a try. Basically, it is like one of those bingo cards, but instead of numbers you have tasks which you can complete over the course of one whole year. You do a task, you cross it off of the card. I think it's a very nice tool to have that can generate ideas for the times when you're stuck regarding what to paint next or as a general source of inspiration to start hobbying. I imagine that it can also be quite satisfying to cross off the boxes once you're done and that this in itself can be a way to get motivated.

Below you will find the tasks I came up with for our very own Rackham bingo and some basic rules!

The 3 golden rules of bingo:

1. A model/terrain/accessory/whatever can only count for 1 square (for example, you can't paint Aerth, Prelate-General and count him for both the "mounted model" and the "character" squares)
2. You get 5 blank spaces (a "blank space" means that you can create your own task and use it to replace one of the tasks that I created) 
3. Deadline is 31.12.2026.

I added the "blank spaces" rule primarily because the bottom row of the bingo is pretty niche and I understand that not everyone wants to do those. There have been some people on 7 Hills mentioning that they want to start their own blogs and podcasts or any other outlet where they can express their thoughts about Rackham games, so this was a way to motivate them to do it. I'd love it if I wasn't the only one with a blog on there, it'd be nice to have a blogging buddy. Similarly, maybe you don't want to buy miniatures outside your chosen army or don't own any boardgames (non-Rackham ones) or miniatures that have been sitting in your stash for a year (wow I wrote that with a straight face). So in case you don't want to do some tasks, you are free to create up to 5 of your own and replace some that I've created.

If this generates enough attention, there will be a channel created specifically for this on 7 Hills, so we'll have a place to further motivate each other and track progress. I sincerely hope many of you will join me on this little endeavor and hopefully I won't be the only one participating! If not, thanks for reading anyway!