Last summer, Dana Howl, one of my favorite YouTube creators, proposed the game of Shame Golf—a way for miniature painters to motivate themselves to get through their backlog of unpainted miniatures. It's not too dissimilar to the yearly painting resolutions they used to have on the old Warhammer forums back in the day, where you'd pledge to paint more models than you bought in the coming year. The main point was to make yourself accountable to the rest of the community, because it's much easier to let yourself down than let down a bunch of strangers on the internet.
I never really participated back in the day, mostly because my purchases tended to be more along the lines of "24 left arms, a chunk of a broken Chimera, and a sock full of Necromunda bits." Still, I liked the points system of Shame Golf, and the gaminess sort of appealed to me. And I'm always looking for more ways to motivate myself to be more consistent with painting. Besides, these days I play all the weird skirmish games. How often do I even make big Warhammer purchases? Seemed like an easy wind.
Turns out the last six months or so have been kind of weird.
That's not an entirely fair assessment. The last few years of plague, natural disasters, and civil unrest have been pretty peculiar. Still, due to personal stuff, I kind of dropped off the planet for most of last year. Plus, Games-Workshop for some reason decided to stop their tradition of releasing 90 percent Space Marines and instead made a bunch of weird skirmish stuff and Orky terrain. As primarily a Skaven player, I'm accustomed to only getting a handful of new models every decade, so I probably went a bit overboard. Probably.
Anyway, I started trying to tally my Shame Golf score, but I stopped counting somewhere around 400, which surpasses even my worst score playing the old PGA Tour Golf for DOS back when I was nine, so I think it's safe to say I lost. Still, with an even heftier backlog of plastic than before, I decided to start with a clean slate for 2022. Wish me luck.
