One Wargamer's Year

I always have a look at TGN's monthly gaming polls which detail how people are spending their money and what games they are playing with interest. I keep a spreadsheet when I buy figures, etc, so I can keep track of how much money I am spending and to keep it to around £50 a month. I'm not really sure how interesting this will be to people, but I thought I'd do some stats for the year March 2010-March 2011 to show how I've spent my money in the last year.

I don't tend to keep track of what I'm buying in the way of paints, knife blades, etc, etc. Only the major purchases for figures, scenic items and figure case, etc. This amounts to £660 in the past year.

First up - what games I've been buying things for:

The figures are perhaps a little misleading in that I started a project in the autumn to collect an undead Kings of War army and then bought some vampire counts bits and bobs so I could field them as VCs in Warhammer if I wanted to. So most of the KoW and Warhammer stuff represents this. The Misc category is tools & scenery bits mostly, but also odd figures for Governance of Technology, etc.

So I've already mentioned the Kings of War/Warhammer cross-over so I thought I would break it down by who made the figures, rules and stuff I've been buying. I've not labelled the >1% ones, but you can see it is the big four for me of Magister Militum, Games Workshop, Mantic and Corvus Belli who have had the vast majority of my money.

In terms of buying habits, I was personally quite surprised when I crunched the numbers.

I have bought a fair bit of stuff from Maelstrom over the past year, so I gave them their own category, but the other webstores and manufacturer's websites I combined into categories. I was quite surprised by the amount I'd spent on Ebay! The "shop" category doesn't really tell the whole story as I'd estimate I spent £100-150 on bits and bobs like paint in physical shops over the year, mostly in small purchases of £5-10, I also didn't record the paints and whatnot I bought at wargames shows, only the figures. So I think shows and open days actually make up a much more important part of where I spend my money than I thought.

And because every post really should have a picture of a model in it; here are some Kings of War Zombies, which are part of the 19% of my annual wargames spend at Mantic!

Let me know what you think of my spending - similar to yours? Am I frittering away my money on lousy games? Leave me a comment!