2025 has been a year of conclusions. Professionally, it’s been manic. I’ve taken on new responsibilities, become a proper manager again and taken on a shiny new even more senior job title. Personally, with the big milesone of “buy a house” complete, the year felt a bit like catching up, making the house my own and discovering all the ways that it’s actually quite hard to do DIY. Professionally in the other direction, last year I published Hypersteel Nightmare and this year, Epigram has had to go into a bit of hibernation for the second half of the year as Evie departed to co-run the studio at Modphius and I had to prioritise the day job.

That’s not to say I didn’t do anything. I declared 2025 to be the Year of the Bigature, and not to spoil the rest of the article, I did three of the four projects I chose at the end of last year (and whilst I’d love to do the fourth, it’s a whole thing). I switched to an electric car! I did a lot of hobby!

But first, a few highlights.

• I painted 135 miniatures in 2025 (a 44% reduction on 2024) but this is belied by Year of the Bigature
• I painted a Legion Mastodon, a Reaver Titan and an Ork Stompa
• I sculpted over ten miniatures
• I attended two conventions and four events
• I added 11 new pikachus to the collection
• I listened to 36 audiobooks (and 3/4, as I am near the end of a thirty-eighth, but it’s not done so it doesn’t count)
• I gave one (very well recieved) conference talk and wrote one (also well recieved) article

So, as has become tradition, lets recap the year month by month:

January

Start the year as you mean to go on, and I did most of the assembly on the Mastodon. You can read more about that hateful process in the Year of the Bigature article on it. I also built two Sabres (small resin space marine tanks) which were much nicer and did the first of my Word Bearers inductii conversions (these are marines who want to be posesses by demons). Importantly, I also did the first tests of my then-new metamould technique and cast the first M36 resin mechs using my shiny new pressure pots. A few kinks to work out, but the technique showed promise.

This month I listed to books one and two in N.K. Jemisin’s Fifth Season series, as well as the non-fiction Quantum Drama. Fifth Season is excellent, but very heavy going. Quantum Drama is a skillful retelling of the history of quantum physics, both from the scientific and the personal sides.

Feburary

Hobby-wise, Feburary was tank-heavy. I finished assembling and started painting the Mastodon and friends, and converted a pair of new characters for my Word Bearers: a corrupted herald and praetor built from the Zardu Layak bladeslaves.

I started sculpting the first of the two Hypersteel miniature sets I completed this year, with the Reave Killcar (pictured). I am still very happy with how this turned out.

Book-wise, this month had the conclusion to the Fifth Season trilogy in the Stone Sky, Brian Merchant’s non-fiction Blood in the Machine, and then an Ursula K Le Guin marathon starting with The Eye of the Heron and then books one and two in the Gifts trilogy.

Blood in the Machine is the standout here. It’s got it’s flaws (you don’t need to keep calling industrialists the tech titans of their day) but it significantly reshaped my outlook and became the kernel for my Pycon UK talk.

March

I finished the Mastodon and friends, alongside thirty-two infantry in time for the GHO. You can read more about that in my Sack of Tallarn Retrospective, but I won two awards: one for the mastodon and one for the army as a whole. That was most of the month, but I did also paint ten French partisans and start work on the Star Trek Ambassador-class model I would later abandon (which you can read about in my bigature interlude).

Book wise I finished the Gifts trilogy, read the Weinersmith’s A City on Mars, Mary Robinette Kowal’s The Martian Contingency, Adrian Tchicovsky’s Shroud and Ursula K Le Guin’s Planet of Exile. A City on Mars was entertaining, and a bit of a bucket of cold water. Very little of the information in it was new to me, but being hit in the face with all of it collated together to reinforce why space settlement is hard bordering on implausible was sobering. A must-read for any scifi author.

Shroud I want to mention because I often quip that Adrian Tchicovsky only has a few plots he shuffles around to write his books, but Shroud and Alien Clay are fundamentally the same plot (academics are put to forced labour/conscripted by a fascist theocracy/fascist technocapitalist superstate and sent to an alien world to study/terraform the local fauna/planet and discover intelligence where they thought there could be none and are subsumed/superceded by it), and Shroud is just better. It’s almost as if he finished Alien Clay and then went “hey, actually this is a better idea”. I don’t resent it, they’re both excellent books, and he did write other books between them.

April

You’d think after painting all those tanks I’d be a little tanked out. Nope. April saw me build and paint three more land raiders for my ultramarines as well as an additional rhino. These got their paintjobs started this month too. This month I also started the first part of the Reaver titan build with the carapace mounted megabolter and converted some sniper recon marines from the now-OOP Forgeworld MK IV recon marines, which I belive to be some of the best space marines ever made. And pictured above, I also played some Adeptus Titancus!

I also finished sculpting the Reave starter set for Hypersteel Nightmare and started sculpting the Compact miniatures.

Onto books, I listed to Adrian Tchicovsky’s Guns of the Dawn, and then Miles Cameron’s Artifact Space and then the Arcana Imperii short story collection Beyond the Fringe. If there is one reason I listened to fewer books this year than last, it is Miles Cameron. He, under his three pen names, has written a book a year (at least) for nearly thirty years across fantasy, scifi, historical and military fiction. And I really like the things of his that I’ve read. Artifact Space (the first in the Arcana Imperii series) is a hard scifi story about alien contact by a militarised merchant navy in a truely excellent political setting. His books are also fiften to twenty hours each.

May

May was UKGE month! And another GHO! So I finished painting my ultramarine reinforcements to turn them from a drop pod list to an armoured assault list, and had a blast at the event. No awards this time though. I also started work on some WWII-era french town terrain, but that’s a project that’s stalled a little.

I frantically pushed to get the Compact miniatures sculpted and moulded, but in the end focused on having more miniatures cast for the Reave side after running into mouldmaking and casting difficulties. UKGE was excellent, each individual day was better than any other convention I’ve event exhibited at. Massive thanks to my friends Rich Nutter and Richard Coates for their help during the event.

Book wise, I listened to Deep Black by Miles Cameron, Against a Dark Background and Feersum Endjinn by Iain M. Banks and City of Illusions by Ursula K. Le Guin. I’d done a culture re-read last year, and re-read these two this year. Banks really was taken from us too soon. One can only hope that he was picked up the good ship Ordinary as she left the solar system.

June

Squats for June! I attended a Necromunda event and rushed to get an Ironhead Squat force ready. Love these models and they were a great opportunity to indulge in gratuitous hazard striping. The event was massive fun, the first time I properly played Necromunda.

Otherwise, I got a bunch of stuff on the Hypersteel store, and started work on the Reaver proper.

In the realm of audiobooks I listened to Neil Asher’s Gridlinked and Ursula K Le Guin’s The Winds Twelve Quarters. Gridlinked was a bad book. I did not enjoy Neil Asher’s characterisations, except for one side character, and this hurt the book signifcantly. It’s honestly put me off the rest of his bibliography, which is a shame as Audible loves to try and recommend them to me.

July

July was a month of two halves. The first half was almost entirely Reaver assembly, and the second half saw me paint a Chaos Space Marine boarding patrol. This was a really fun little project, and pushed a bunch of techniques I’d used elsewhere to make a nice cohesive little force. These were for a RMRO (a gathering of the rollmodels discord server friend group) in Bristol, although I didn’t end up playing Boarding Patrol whilst I was there.

Sadly though, this month marked Evie’s departure from Epigram Games, which you can read about in the State of the Epigram blogpost I wrote at the time.

Books wise, July saw me listen to Mirrored Heavens by Rebecca Rowanhorse, Throne of the Crescent Moon by Saladin Ahmed, Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu and started and abandoned its sequel The Dark Forest. Mirrored Heavens is the third and final(?) book in a Mesoameriacan fantasy series I adore, and Throne of the Crescent Moon is an islamic fantasy novel that could absolutely become a wonderful tentpole blockbuster film. Where the Between Earth and Sky series is by turns dark and serious, Throne of the Crescent Moon is jovial and action oriented.

Three Body Problem I tried to read in 2018 and bounced off of it because I felt that somehow it combined two quite good halves into a whole that was less than its parts. Re-reading it now in audiobook form, I realised I’d stopped just before it properly integrated its two halves, and finished the book eager for more. This was a mistake. The Dark Forest takes everything good about the twin narratives of Three Body Problem and hits them with a mallet. I bailed about the point we are introduced to the wallfacers, and one of them gets whole chapters dedicated to him abusing his powers to ask the UN to find him his dream waifu. The less said about that, the better.

August

The month began with the RMRO, which was a lot of fun, and then my hobby time this month was entirely occupied by the reaver. I didn’t finish it in this month, but a large portion of the work was done. You can read more in part two of the Year of the Bigature series.

Whilst I was working on that, I read the Red Knight and the Fell Sword in Miles Cameron’s Traitor Son cycle. This is nearly forty hours of audiobook in a fantasy european-ish world and I loved it. A bit grim in places, and a little more sexual violence than I’d like (but not nearly Game of Thrones level, not even book level) but this cemented Miles Camereon as one of my favourite authors.

September

More reaver! Titan painting will continue until morale improves the titan is complete. (Who am I kidding, I love painting titans). I had hoped to have it done before the third GHO of the year, but sadly not. It was doubles, and I was attending on a comp ticket as a spare player. Heresy 3e is a lot of fun, even if it has its issues.

I did finish Vocat Cataegis for the end of the month however, and even had time to paint a bootleg space marine.

I read Titandeath by Guy Haley, Tolkien and the Great War by John Garth and On Vicious Worlds by Bethany Jacobs. Titandeath is excellent, and even very good when held to regular book standards rather than grading on the Black Library curve, and a nice accompanyment to the final hours of titan painting. On Vicious Worlds though was a massive letdown. It is book two in a trilogy, and suffers from being what would have been one or two exciting chapters extended to an entire book, revealing the structural issues with the book’s setting and characterisation. The big mystery from book one has been solved, book three hasn’t been set up yet, and to quote from my Audible review, every character has been hit repeatedly with the stupid stick. Highly regrettable.

Unrelated to miniatures, I gave a talk at a conference! It requires no technical knowledge, and it’s about the Luddites. You can listen to it below:

October

October means Orktober and I started project three of Year of the Bigature with a highly ambitious Stompa conversion. Maybe going straight into a massive project like this from the off was a bad idea, but lessons have been learned. I built it, and even started the paint job, but didn’t finish it in the month. You can see the unpainted version above, and there will be more information and photos in the upcoming Year of the Bigature Part 3 blog post.

I also took Vocat Cataegis to Armies on Parade, but due to transit issues and a mixup about timing, arrived half way through voting. This hurt my standing and I came third. But I got to talk to a bunch of people about it and people love a Large Resin Child.

This month also saw some work on miniatures for photography for Hypersteel Meatgrinder, but also my dayjob was in full cruch mode at this point, so my ability to focus on three things at once was a little damaged.

All of this was soundtracked by the Dread Wyrm by Miles Cameron, book three in the Traitor Son cycle. This is thirty hours of audiobook. Hold onto your hippocras, because it’s a loooong book and I loved it.

November

I did comparatively little hobby in November. I made a secret santa gift, I got a start on the Chaos Dwarf Hellsmiths of Hashut Warhammer Underworlds warband as a tester for a larger hellsmiths army, I started on some bloodbowl miniatures. But the dayjob kicked my backside and I needed time to recover.

I did move my hobby desk indoors into my office though, and organised my paints, shown above.

Book wise, I finished the Traitor Son cycle with A Plague of Swords and The Fall of Dragons by Miles Cameron. Over a hundred hours later it felt strange to be done with this series, but well worth the time.

December

If November saw very little finished hobby, December ended on a bang. I finished a new 2’x2′ display/demo board for Hypersteel Nightmare/Meatgrinder (which will get its own blog post in the new year), I finished three sets of display infantry for Meatgrinder (courtesy of Vanguard Miniatures) and even finished (today!) the Stompa. And did all the regular Christmas things. And took time out to rest.

And also I published an article in the online magazine Rascal about how Austerity Killed Narrative Wargaming (and statistically your nan). It’s behind a paywall, but I think it’s well worth a dollar or better yet at least a month’s subscription to the site if you enjoy wargaming and roleplaying games. This article started as a joke in the rollmodels discord server, and then I was comissioned to write it, and now you can read it. How good is that?

And did it listening to There is No Antimemetics Division by qntm, Whalesong by Miles Cameron and 80% of Cold Iron by Miles Cameron. There is No Antimemetics Division is the serial numbers filed off version of an anthology of SCP short stories written by qntm, which I loved, and the non-SCP version is a massive improvement. Existential horror, now set in middle England.

Looking to 2026

I write this on New Years Eve, and the end of the Intercalendarum (my friends objected to me continuing to call it the interregnum on the basis that the king of England is very much still alive, and I hate Betwixmas as a word), and I’m pretty happy with 2025 all things considered.

My Epigram goals were largely derailed, but there’s a limit to what I could have done about that given now doing it solo and the day job being the thing that actually puts food on the table and minis on the workbench.

As a result, I’m going to be a little more conservative in setting goals for 2026. I have some lofty plans, but they will remain quiet until either they are inevitable or I have an interesting story to tell of their failure.

For a theme, I had been tempted to declare 2026 the Year of the Even Bigature, but committing to spending £1500 on a Warbringer Nemesis (plus goodness knows how much on a custom display cabinet to hold the legio) feels like hubris. Instead, 2026 will be the Year of the Community.

I’m running a weekly hobby night this year, with an eye to doing a Warhammer 40k 4th edition campaign/league/thing starting late Q1 or early Q2. If there’s one thing I missed in 2025 it’s playing more games, and whilst I have to acknowledge that it’s collecting and painting that form the backbone of my hobby, I do miss games. And for a variety of reasons, 2025 has been a year in which my social circle has fragmented. I want to do something about that in 2026.

So here’s my goals for the year ahead:

• Publish Hypersteel Meatgrinder, the infantry expansion to Hypersteel Nightmare
• Publish Able Artemis under the Epigram brand
• Make a Year of the Bigature Zine to give away at events
• Run at least twenty hobby salons over the course of the year
• Write at least three blog posts about the hobby salons and the 40k campaign
• Finish an AoS army and play at least ten games of AoS
• Build, paint and finish at least two more Bigatures because I really, really love them.

Bring on 2026!