Cold Turkey

[Deleted User]

After selling our house, I packed up my wargaming stuff, gave some 400 books away to charity and got ready for the move. That was six weeks ago.

We finally move on Monday to the new house but the gaming hiatus has been a strain.

The only salve for my gaming itch has been the internet (especially thanks to TWW).

I imagine it’ll be a few weeks before I can unpack, look at my figures….even start painting again. I *think* I can last…..

What’s the longest gap you’ve had in the hobby & how did you cope?

 

donald

[Mike]

Deleted User wrote:

What’s the longest gap you’ve had in the hobby & how did you cope?

About 10 years or so, the gap came about as I had other things to do, so it was not about coping as such.
I was quite busy doing other things, things that some young single men do.

[Steve Johnson]

Probably around 15 years or so, due to leaving Uni and then work etc taking up all of my time. Only when I was married and back in the UK did I venture into wargaming once again.

[deephorse]

Deleted User wrote:

What’s the longest gap you’ve had in the hobby & how did you cope? donald

My longest gap was 10 years, between the ages of 0 and 10.  How did I cope?  Pretty well really, though, of course, I had no idea what wargaming was or that it even existed.  More seriously, I took a three year break during my time at university, though I filled the gap by playing pretend ‘real’ soldiers in the O.T.C.  I’ve more or less managed to get wargaming into every week since then, and that’s a lot of weeks!

Play is what makes life bearable - Michael Rosen

[General Slade]

I gave up playing with toy soldiers when I went to university because I was hoping to get a girlfriend.  Thirty years later – still single – I decided I might as well start up again.

[MartinR]

I had a long break of about fifteen years in the 1980s and 90s. Just boardgames, RPGs and computer games in that period. Went back to minis in the late 90s, and at this distance of time I can’t recall the particular drivers. It was just changing life circumstances.

"Mistakes in the initial deployment cannot be rectified" - Helmuth von Moltke

[Deleted User]

A sad confession: when I packed up all my stuff, I left out a dice tray and some dice.

They’re next to me now. I roll the dice from time to time. Sigh.

 

donald

[Guy Farrish]

I have been through several periods of enforced wargaming inactivity, mostly through being in odd places with work, but I usually managed to hang on through reading, scribbling rules and scenarios and just imagining the games I was going to play when I returned to a stable environment. (Almost none of which ever transpired).

I confess, however that things got so bad in one posting in the 90s that I grabbed a free flight back to Britain to play an evening wargame with Paddy Griffith and then caught the plane back the next morning .

(I now feel incredibly guilty about the carbon footprint that game must have had.)

[Rhoderic]

I had a couple of 2-3 year hiatuses in my twenties. It wasn’t a matter of “coping” for me, either. I just felt that my life was going in a different direction then.

Longest gap that I would rather not have had at the time? There have been a few 2-3 month gaps like that, nothing worse. I coped by settling in to some good films, series, books and video game streams/VODs (mostly anything inspirational for my many different projects), and also by working out some project plans in my head.

There were other things I could have done, too. Read hobby magazines, watch hobby-related content on Youtube and Twitch, and so on. This might not work if you’re laser-focused on one “version” of the hobby (such as a combination of a single scale, period and game style) and your body rejects the 99% of hobby content out there that doesn’t fit that template. That’s part of the reason I strive to be a broad-spectrum hobbyist. So I don’t need to search for needles in the haystack as regards inspiration and tide-me-over material.

[Harry Faversham]

Just moved house myself, packed everything up on May 10th, next game this Friday evening… that’s the longest I’ve gone without a game in over 30 years.

"Wot did you do in the war Grandad?"

"I was with Harry... At The Bridge!"

[Mike]

Rhoderic wrote:

if you’re laser-focused on one “version” of the hobby (such as a combination of a single scale, period and game style) and your body rejects the 99% of hobby content out there that doesn’t fit that template

That’s me that is!
Though on the plus side it keeps costs low and projects manageable, but does mean focus can be a chore..

[Autodidact-O-Saurus]

I’ve had a couple year long periods where successive moves have prevented my hobby activities. (I actually rarely play games). The longest I’ve gone was six or seven years after being involved in gaming retail. Granted, I was suffering some pretty severe sight degradation at the time which really hampered a lot, too.

Self taught, persistently behind the times, never up to date. AKA ~ jeff
More verbosity: http://petiteguerre.blogspot.com/

[irishserb]

I’ve had two occasions when I’ve gotten quite sick over the years, where I was incapacitated for about three weeks each time.  Didn’t really do anything gaming related or much else besides trying to breath, find some foods that I could actually keep down, and get more than an hour of sleep per day.  Ugly times (though curiously interesting), but definitely no gaming activity.

[Author]

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