It’s been a strange winter in Ohio. We haven’t had any snow (I don’t count the dusting) and we continue to have weeks with 40 degree temperature fluctuations. Indeed, the weather inOhiois at best fickle. With unseasonably warm weather typically comes one major request from the WarGameWife: get some extra cleaning done. What this actually means is, “Husband, dear, it’s time to get rid of some of your shit.” And deservedly so. I seem to accumulate a lot of shit.
The target of this cleaning session was our garage and our spare bedroom, both of which house varying amounts of my hobby supplies. What we came to discover these supplies really consisted of was sprues. Tons and tons of sprues. I used to be very good at clipping extra bits from sprues after I built the models. A melta gun here, some extra lightning claws there, all stashed away for a rainy hobby day where some kitbashing or converting sounded like a good idea. But not any more. Lately, my sprue cleaning has been terrible, and as a result they just started to accumulate. The thing is, I really didn’t know what all was there.
To my surprise and embarassment, the sprues didn’t simply contain extra shoulder pads, power swords, or Skaven shields. Turns out, a lot of these sprues were embarrassingly untouched. What does that mean? That means I had a lot of models I didn’t know I had, sitting in my garage and sprue drawer. How many? Here’s the breakdown of what I found:
- 25 Imperial Guardsmen
- 10 Tactical Marines
- 5 Sanguinary Guard
- 10 Space Wolves
- 5 Grey Knights
- 8 Ogres
- 20 Skaven Stormvermin
- 1 Rhino
- And a freaking Land Raider.
The WarGameWife found most of these, much to my dismay. There are a lot of great things about having a spouse that is a hobby enabler. She buys me models. She’ll play the occasional game of Malifaux. She puts up all of the ‘stuff’ that comes along with the hobby. But she also knows the approximate costs of everything. Her response: “You’ve got like, $300 worth of crap you didn’t know you had!” Thank god she only has an estimated idea, right?
But more to the point. I found a ton of models I didn’t know I had because my sprue maintenance has gone by the wayside. This wouldn’t have happened if I’d continued to clean and sort my sprues of all their valuable bits, and then thrown away the empty sprue shell. Due to my sprue sanitation laziness, I’d become a hobby hoarder. Now, I’m sure there are people that have more sprues lying around that I did. Hell, mine were pretty organized. But it was this exchanged that made me concerned I’d someday end up on A&E:
WarGameWife: “Why don’t you just get rid of the rest of these sprues?”
Irishman: “I will, I just need to look at all the bits on them first.”
WarGameWife: Looking at my already sizable bitz organization unit. “Don’t you already have a lot of bits?”
Irishman: “Yeah, but these are Grey Knight bits. I don’t have that many Grey Knight bits.”
WarGameWife: “But are you actually going to ever use them?”
Irishman: “I don’t know, maybe. I just can’t rid of them. What if I need a falchion in the future?”
WarGameWife: “You won’t. No one takes those falchions in a competitive Grey Knights list anyways”
That last statement is a complete fabrication, but it does mark the point I stopped listening to her and starting stroking the sprue like Gollum does the One Ring. So I purged. Two full garbage bags (only 20 gallon ones) of sprues. As much as I wanted to pluck the plastic treasure from each and every one of those rectangular gold mines, I didn’t, despite my frontal lobe’s repeated offerings that, “theWarStore will probably give you cash for those bits!” I trashed them all.
And now, I’m left feeling just a bit empty. I keep having thoughts like, “What if you just threw away an Apothecary arm or chest?” and “Where are you going to get more purity seals?” I did uncover a ton of models, about half of which I still have to assemble, but all my glorious extras are now gone. Practice safe sprue sanitation; it’ll spare you the inevitable heartbreak of throwing away piles of plastic.
One of the most common complaints I hear about the Horus Heresy series is that it’s too Legio Astartes-centric. I can’t deny that, for the majority of the Horus Heresy novels, this is true. The Horus Heresy is about the Astartes civil war and fratricide that shatters the budding Imperium. However, people that look at that aspect of the series and decide not to read are missing out on some great stories in which marines are not the focus. We saw this previously in Graham McNeill’s 
