My dice dragon is judging me. Last year I made a bunch of resolutions about getting back to where I was before I got burned out on gaming. I was trying to re-find my joy and spark with the hobby. Of the five resolutions I made, I failed all of them.

Now part of this is the fact that I don't enjoy most of the board games my group plays for a couple of reasons: either there are too many people so it gets overwhelming and loud or we've played the game so many times that it is boring. Sometimes, both of those are true at the same time (I'm looking at you, Red Dragon Inn).

The other part of me failing the hell out of my resolutions was the fact that I didn't put them anywhere but here. I never went back to that post to remind myself of what I wanted.

This year, I putting them with the rest of my goals in my planner so I can go back and refer to them throughout the year.

Without further ado, here are my 2024 gaming goals:

1) Paint minis at least 12 times this year (it doesn't have to be once a month, just 12 times). Just like last year, I want to pull out my paints more that once a blue moon. I know some of my issue with painting is the fact that I don't have new characters to paint for my role playing games, but that is no excuse for me to sit on a metric ton of unpainted miniatures.

2) Host at least two game nights or painting nights at my house. And this doesn't mean that I put the bug in my hubby's ear to invite people over while I become antisocial and write. I need to be an active participant for at least half of the time people are over.

3) Read and review the RPG books that are sitting and waiting for me to get off my butt and read them. I have some review copies that ended up being too old to do anything with for my freelancing work, but would be fine here.

4) Crack open at least two of my unplayed games. Just like my review copies of RPGs, I have a bunch of board games that were gifted to me when I worked for Geek & Sundry. In addition to that, I really want to introduce Wander to my group (I'm just giving up on painting them until I figure out if I can separate them from their bases to make painting easier).

5) Find another video game to play. I haven't really touched anything since I finished Pokémon Violet and am fiending. I tried out Party Animals, but just about threw my controller at how unintuitive it was during the tutorial (during the test fight when you have to knock out the other character and toss them over the side and I could never manage to knock them out close enough to the side to complete it).

6) Engage more with my role playing games. I've gotten very lax when it comes to gaming, especially with my long running Pathfinder game. I've gotten to the point where I only engage on my turn in combat instead of pushing the story forward for my character. With the switch to Hackmaster for a side story, it's made it so I'm more vocal about what my character is doing and I'm enjoying the heck out of it.

This year, I really want to make the effort to remember why I am a gamer. Hopefully these goals will help get her there.