2025 Painting Log

I just managed to get these fellows varnished on Wednesday, so they’ll officially be my last miniatures of 2025. These are the models and terrain from Mantic’s Deep Space Pest Control advent calendar. I was in a rush to get these done so I went almost entirely with speedpaints for the models, and a simple black primer – drybrush – details for the terrain pieces.

I wish Mantic would do their terrain in a hard plastic — for the most part these pieces look great but a few of them are a little let down by the gushy soft plastic which just won’t quite hold its shape on spindly things like table legs.

The game looks a little more interesting than the Bar Room Brawl (Mantic’s previous advent calendar game, which I did last year). I’m hoping to get it to the table this weekend, if I do I’ll try to post a few action photos.

Models painted in 2025 final count: 267, for 14 different games (plus a bunch of terrain pieces)

Did I achieve my goals for the year? Sort of. I painted a lot of models, but my real goal was to get more games in. I had hoped to play 25 miniature games throughout the year, and I got very close with 4 games of Star Schlock, 3 of Senjutsu: Battle for Japan (but all three were before I painted the miniatures), 8 of Shatterpoint, 2 of Savage Core, 1 of Hairfoot Jousting, and 6 games of Mythic Battles: Ragnarok, although that might be cheating a bit as it was 2 different play-throughs of a 3-game mini-campaign. I also managed 2 games of Monolith’s Conan and 1 of Star Trek Away Missions, which do use painted miniatures but none that I painted this year.

I think I’ll still call it a win, even though Gangs of Rome was sorely neglected, as was 7TV, and my scheme to get back into Dead Man’s Hand didn’t happen. The four Reaper models I painted for our roleplaying group got the most mileage, being used every week in a campaign that went on for several months.

For next year I want to focus even more on gaming, so instead of doing a catch-all painting log I’m considering doing each game as a separate project where I’ll combine painting and battle reports. While painting is a lofty goal in its own right, I find myself often treating my backlog as a to-do list that just needs to get done, without much thought as to what I’m painting these models for.

Thanks for following along with me this year. I can’t wait to see what 2026 has to offer!

I said I would post some photos of Deep Space Pest Control if I got it to the table, so here they are.

The game is very simple but pretty fun for all that. One player is the turtle, the other is the cyborg rats. The turtle has to close 6 hatches before the rats do him in. Combat is simple dice rolls; range, movement and cover are via a printed hex grid map. It was actually kind of nice to only have to worry about tactical things like where to move, what order to close the hatches in, etc. without having a long list of special abilities and rules exceptions to think about.

My only complaint is that the terrain, which was the lion’s share of the advent calendar content, doesn’t really factor into the game. You are instructed to place the terrain in the red outlined areas of the map, which never change or move so they’ll always be in the same place game after game, and it tends to look like a jumble rather than an actual environment. It affects the game in that it blocks movement and line of site, but it might as well have just been printed on the map. Ah well, they are some nice pieces of fairly generic sci-fi scatter, I’m sure I’ll find plenty of uses for them.

Onward to 2026!