Happy New Year and December 2025 review

Happy New Year! In this post, we will look back at December and most of 2025, so we will cover more than just the last month.

You can also listen to our year-end recap on the Games 'n Dice Podcast, where Dino, Benni, Gregor and I discussed 2025.

2025 was packed with activities. To give you a few highlights:

• Hosting another demo table at CONflict, including painting lots of terrain and a warband.
• Publishing my 500th (English) review on here!
• Getting featured on Warhammer Community.
• Visiting an event with our whole family opens up new possibilities for the number of events I can cover per year.

After my Manticore Knight from Warhammer Quest was featured on the Warhammer Community website last month, my interpretation of the Da Red Gobbos Tinboy was selected for the Community Painters post this month! I'm very happy about this!

I started my holiday with no review backlog (at least nothing with a deadline). There was a lot of Star Wars Legion activity here in December, and I'll pick up the StarGrave/Star Wars mashup in 2026.

I have some more Star Wars Legion kits that I bought second hand, and I'll share unboxings or built reports of them from time to time, including an AT-ST and the Party Bus. I also have a lot of 3D-printed stuff. This will all be covered step by step on here, including lots of terrain.

While we're on the topic of Star Wars... Lego Star Wars is one of my hobbies, and I mostly collect Galactic Civil War-era kits in play/minifigure scale. One of the few models I was missing was an Y-wing. There are three models in the right scale: the 75172 Y-Wing Starfighter from 2017, the 75249 Resistance Y-Wing from 2019, and the 75181 UCS Y-Wing Starfighter from 2018. As they are all out of production/end of life, buying second hand was the only way to get them. The 75249 was ruled out as it is not from the right era, and the UCS kit was simply too expensive. I considered the 75172 and managed to buy a used model at a reasonable price (well below face value).

I fancy proper Lego Technic sets, but they've been rare in recent years. You know, the ones with functions, alternate builds and a reasonable price per brick. However, they have focused heavily on cars. The only kit that actually fit my search criteria in 2025 was the 42209 Volvo Electric Wheel Loader, and the 42175 Volvo FMX Truck & EC230 Electric Excavator the year before. So, I went on Rebrickable and looked for MOCs/other kits to fit my traditional building schedule during the evening holidays, when everyone else is asleep.

I got a great deal on the 75389 Dark Falcon from the Rebuild the Galaxy range, but I didn't want to build another Millennium Falcon as I already have the 75257 Millennium Falcon. However, I found this amazing MOC of the Outrider from Shadows of the Empire by CreationCaravan (he is known for turning everything into a Millennium Falcon).

Very early this year, I secured the 75374 Onyx Cinder from Skeleton Crew with the intention of building it over the holidays. It just needs the Sm33, but I don't think we'll see that from Lego.

That was not the only Lego I built over the holidays, as I was the supporting act on all the sets that my kids got, building another few Speed Champions, Friends and City sets on top of those above.

Our event schedule for 2026 will be published on January 2nd and will include - among others - the new dates of events from 2025. Unfortunately, we missed out on some events, such as Spiel and Crisis, which were scheduled too close to other events, and Bitbox, which was cancelled. Never the less, we visited quite a few events this year and almost none of them were solo tours, which was a great thing and added to the overall experience of those. Beyond that, about an event every two months is very solid, but was only do-able as we did some of them as family trips.

However, here's a summary of all the conventions and shows we managed to cover this year.

ScenarioCon in January

Bembel Miniature Cup in March

Intermodellbau in April

CONflict Rheinland in May

RheinMainMultiversum in September

Radaddel in October

Tabletop Paint Meetup in November

Regarding next year: A few events have been confirmed. We have booked tickets for SzenarioCon on January 10th, and we are still coordinating our tables for CONflict Rhineland. Autumn next year will be tricky as many events are happening within weeks of each other, so it's almost impossible to attend them all. The next painting weekend is already booked for November, and Crisis is just two weeks before that. It's rather unlikely that we'll all get two full weekends off for wargaming in such a short period of time. I am looking forward to the Warhammer Dutch Open in April, which is the weekend after the pilot of a new retro format, the Chaosbunker Classics. But I'll share more details on that in Q1 of 2026.

As having a good time with your hobby often goes well with food, I want to share some of the things I've tried this year. I bought a Meater, tried out a few snacks and am looking forward to the chef's school seminar that my former colleagues gave me as a gift. As usual, since I no longer share them on the Chaosbunker channels, you can find them on dennismit2n.

Another 168 articles were added to the blog this year! That is even more than the 154 added last year. Almost half of these articles were reviews, which is a high number given that we had several items that were battle forces or army sets. For these, we combined an unboxing with additional reviews of the individual kits. Nevertheless, we surpassed 500 reviews with a special article covering the Fellblade for Horus Heresy.

Additionally, while our collaboration with Hachette on Stormbringer was interesting and fruitful, we have decided not to pursue Combat Patrol. Firstly, the German release is offset to the international release, so the novelty factor is low. These are not new miniatures, but rather kits that we have already partially covered here, such as the Tyranids and Space Marines from the 2023 Leviathan release. We therefore felt that the workload related to covering the magazine would not provide much value to readers. Still, it is a proper magazine, and if you are interested in the Combat Patrols, you can purchase them at a decent discount through the magazine.

In 2026, we will continue to write reviews, but we will widen the focus away from novelties towards other systems and products that might not receive the attention they deserve. We will also cover some topics of special interest. This will include items that are out of production and collectors' items, beginning with the second edition of Warhammer 40k in the first quarter of the year.

In conclusion, 2025 was an intense year; a lot happened behind the scenes. I changed jobs in the summer, which was an interesting challenge as I had to adapt to a new industry. My oldest friend, with whom I started wargaming all those years ago, moved back to his hometown, which makes it so much easier to meet up (no longer 7hrs but merely 25 minutes apart). I dismantled my 3D printer, the resin printing journey was impressive and intense, and if I have the opportunity to set it up again, I will. We went on some great trips and, as my kids and my friends' kids are getting older, it's becoming easier to coordinate hobby weekends or combined wargaming and family trips (like we did with Tactica in 2023). This is something I'm really looking forward to continuing in 2026. I will provide more detailed information on our plans for 2026 in the kick-off article.

So, all that's left for me to say today is: enjoy your New Year's Eve, and I'll see you again at the kick-off!