With another year behind me, I’m still looking forward, and 2024 has a lot of new things in store.  This year I’m doing a couple of different things to capture different elements of what I’m trying to do.  As usual, I’m going to have my typical list of goals, and they’re going to follow the usual SMART criteria, with a focus on specific and measurable.  In the past, these have been my typical resolutions, with rather few elements of, “I’ll know it when it see it” or “at least one is enough”, but this year, you’ll see this be more clear.  Conversely, I will also have some things that don’t meet the SMART criteria – they aren’t specific nor measurable; for these, you won’t see a progress bar, or me necessarily mince words on what it even means explicitly.  I’m calling these items “themes” as they aren’t really an achievable goal, so much as ideas that I want to keep in mind and guide some of my activities.  We’ll see how that works out and maybe it’ll be something I do again more often.

With that out of the way, let’s get to what my 2024 goals are.

Assembly Backlog

My assembly backlog this year is…  …large; it actually has more models in it than it ever has since I started tracking.  A lot of this has to do with trying to get into new miniatures games this year (Warmachine Mark IV and Warhammer Fantasy), but not actually playing them, nor building most of the models.  I’m hopeful that these stay relevant and that I can play some miniature games this year though.  Also, with the Kingdom Death: Monster Gambler’s Chest showing up this year, I’ve got some new monsters to build!  I’ve put together a couple for our current campaign, but I’m looking forward to putting together the others in the box as well.

Print & Play Miniatures Games

On the topic of miniatures games, I also have a few Print & Play miniatures games that I want to play.  One of my challenges with these is getting folks to play with, so this year I was proactive in finding folks that would be interested, so I can at least start plans to play them with someone.  The specific games that I’m planning to play as part of this are: Chibi-Tech SD, Grand Admiral, Hyperfront, and Pocket Tactics, and my goal is to print enough miniatures for us both to have a starting list (unless my opponent wants to do their own printing) and get in at least one two-player game.  I’m pretty excited about this one as it means playing with new models, learning new rules, and exploring the design space a bit more.

Play 52 Different Games

I have a lot of different games, but I don’t get the chance to play a lot of different games.  Most of this is opportunity cost, but this year I want to overcome that and play more games.  If I can play 52 different games this year, that means I’ll have played a new game once a week on average, and that’s pretty cool to me.  Expansions and game systems are a little tricky here, but I’m going to count different instances of the same system different games, i.e. Escape the Crate boxes, 20 Strong challenge decks, or different Arkham Horror campaigns, where expansions that add content or mechanisms but have the same overall theme and gameplay, I’m considering the same game.

Bus to Work

At the tail end of last year, I started bussing to work again, so I want to double-down on that this year.  It’s something I really enjoy and provides a lot of mental and physical health benefits to me.  This year, I want to bus to/from work more often than I drive or carpool.  This one is a bit of a narrow band based on my current practice (currently, Brooke and I carpool twice a week), but I think it’s well worth it.  I’ll be tracking how many days I use each method to get to work (bus, carpool, or drive) and we’ll see which one is the largest at the end.  I realize this one could end up in a no-win situation if the bus becomes an unreliable mode of transport again, but I’m risking it – even if I fail at the end of the year, I’ll know why.

60 Days Without Candy

This is another health-related goal, and I’m going to cut out candy for a bit this year.  In particular, I want to have a contiguous 60 day span where I don’t eat any candy.  This one could be easy, but I’m also not going to have a replacement effect here – there’s no point in dropping candy if I just eat cookies instead.  Over the last few years, my sugar intake (specifically in afternoon candies) has gotten a bit more than I would like, so this is an effort to cut back on that.  I’m planning to not only cut it out entirely for a while (that’s this goal), but I’m hoping to cut the habit so that candy is a nice treat, and not a daily consumption.

2024 Themes

Here’s the part of my resolutions where I’m going to be less specific and more idealistic.  I’ve got some directions that I want to steer my life, but they’re not things that I can necessarily point to and say, “I did that thing”, more “I’m pointed in that direction”.  This is important for me this year as I’ve been struggling with a lack of control in a lot of areas of my life that make it hard to move forward.  This is an attempt to write some things down and have a foundation to push forward, even if I don’t have a list of accomplishments to check off.

First, I want to be excellent at my new job.  After 12 years as the Ops manager, I’m taking a new position at NSIDC this year, and I want to come at it with the energy, skills, and abilities that made me believe I could do it well.  I’ve always felt good about my performance in my previous role, and I want to feel that way in my new role – I don’t expect to be perfect, but I want to come at it with the goal of excellence, and be the best at it in any way that I can.

Next, I want to be healthier this year in all the ways I can – physically healthier, mentally healthier, and emotionally healthier.  In the last few years, many of my choices have been “easier” rather than “healthier”, so as I’m steering my life this year, I wan to move the compass needle the other way, and make that effort where I can.

There are a lot of games on my resolutions this year – make miniatures for games, print and play games, just play games, but there’s one thing specifically I also want to do, and that’s love Warmahordes again.  I really enjoy a lot about Warmachine and Hordes: the fiction, the models, the gameplay…  …And yet it’s been over three years since I’ve played a single game.  I’m not sure what form this might take this year, but I want to do stuff that will refresh that enjoyment – building some models will help, playing some games will help, and I think even doing some things that are Warmahordes adjacent will help (things like the Iron Kingdoms RPG or the Five Leagues from the Iron Kingdoms variant I’ve been poking at), so we’ll see how it goes.

Lastly, I want to do more leisure reading and writing.  I’m not ready to set a specific goal for how much I’m going to read and write, but I want to start setting up patterns that will help me get there.

A lot of these themes feed into each other, and align with my goals for the year, so I hope that the sum total helps give my year a positive focus.