Peace Was Never an Option

  Well, it's been a heck of a week to kick off 2026. Not going to lie, it has knocked me back a bit from all those new routines I thought I'd kick the year off with. But! Let's proceed assuming that the world isn't going to end in the next few weeks. What are my goals hobby-wise for 2026? First up, it is my aim to get to at least 12 in person gaming events this year. One per month seems like an achievable goal, and I'm off to a strong start there! I am heading to the Across the Bifrost Team Tournament this weekend and will be enjoying two days of gaming alongside my teammates in the Thunderbolts! I'm excited to see if I can make my janky roster sing, and it'll be great to get some Marvel back on the table with some cool people who share my gaming mindset. I have also booked in a meetup with gaming friends in February where I'm hoping to play some Trench Crusade and test out the squad I painted over December. In March there's a Malifaux tournament I a...

As we enter 2026, I've taken the excuse to pause and consider how I spend my time, what my goals are, and whether I'm still happy with all of that. For the most part, I am! I have a good community around me, I'm working on a number of creative projects I'm really enjoying, and I have a vision for what my future looks like. The past few years have been pretty rough, but it's good to feel like I'm back on track. On that note, you can expect to start seeing some very different content on PWNAO over the course of the year, as I use this space to start rambling about the things I enjoy in life beyond just miniature wargaming. Wargaming still remains a big part of my life, though, and I'd like to put forward a case for something I don't see openly talked about in many miniature wargaming blogs or podcasts: namely, the case for being a loser. The competitive scene has really exploded in recent years, across all sorts of systems. This has been good! I've bee...

  Long time Goose fans may be aware that I went back to Marvel Crisis Protocol at least in part because Malifaux entered an open beta period as it moved from 3rd Edition to 4th Edition. I had enough difficulty figuring out the 3rd Edition ruleset, I figured trying to participate during the beta and filling my head with a bunch of rules that were going to change was not likely to help my long term enjoyment of the game. Well, Malifaux 4th Edition is officially here! And I decided to rejoin the Malifaux World Series and participate in a more casual online league (Unintelligible Barking, hosted by the Pack Mentality podcast) to try and figure out if Malifaux was back to being a game that I want to play. I'm not going to bury the lede: the answer is yes. Resoundingly so. Malifaux 4e has been an utter delight, with the majority of the changes that have been made making the game much more approachable compared to my experience in 3e. One of my great frustrations with third edition was th...

  Lured by the promise of incredible swag and more Crisis Protocol, I packed up my Midnight Sons and took a trip over to sunny Peterborough! This was apparently the first tournament that Rob had organised – and if I hadn’t been told that I wouldn’t have guessed. We had good communication in the weeks running up to it, the tables were great, the promised swag was top notch. Great stuff! Since the UKGT I have definitely been bitten by the tournament bug. I’ve joined a team (The Thunderbolts! We’re the good guys, probably) to take part in next year’s Team Tournament and I’ve committed to making my girl Elsa shine. In the words of Marge Simpson: So this tournament report will be followed up with some more in-depth thoughts about where I might want to try and take the roster next. Spoiler alert: I think there’s definitely some room for improvement both in my Elsa-playing and in the tools I have brought to bear. My roster was: The Immortal Hulk Elsa Bloodstone Wong Werewolf by Ni...

I’ve greatly enjoyed my return to Marvel Crisis Protocol – I feel like the game is in a great spot, and the proliferation of wildly different ways you can play most affiliations in the game and still hope to have success is great to see. That said, there is one aspect of the game that I find a little disheartening, and that’s the current extremely restricted list of tactics cards. I have stacks and stacks of cards from earlier in the game’s lifecycle which are now no longer legal for standard play, and I think this creates some strange list building pressure where the lack of good generally applicable cards means that you are evaluating characters much more highly if they can also bring an strong tactics card with them. It also means that in practice, the 10 tactics card slots are not always utilised well. Often I find myself taking the two restricted cards the roster has access to, a strong affiliated card, and then two character-specific cards or a character card and another affili...

  Powerscaling: Captain America, First Avenger Steve Rogers has three incarnations (to date) in Marvel Crisis Protocol, with Sam Wilson meaning that there are three different ways you can have Captain America lead your squad of Avengers! That’s a lot of Steve and a lot of Captain America, and I have to be honest, the thought of painting up yet another Captain America in the year 2025 was… exhausting. But of all the models in the second core set for the game, Violent Steve – or especially his leadership – was the one that stood out to me the most. I’ve now played a lot of games with Steve3, and whilst I’ve lost about as many as I’ve won, Captain America, First Avenger (Third Steve) remains, I think, the most interesting of all the different ways you can field the man who can, famously, do this all day. Whilst the man himself remains fairly generic, his leadership has proven to be a tool that just feels more useful the more I learn to use it So I’d like to talk about him! Which...