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Hobby motivation in the wargaming hobby can be hard sometimes. I know that I’ve experienced it a little in the face of the current war in Ukraine, as the whole situation has soured me to the thought of guns and tanks. (I had been working on a Death Korps of Krieg army and decided to shelve it for a little while to work on something more fantasy instead–in this case, Turnip 28.)

But I also know some people–many people, in fact–are losing some of their hobby motivation because of displeasure with certain companies raising their prices and other shenanigans. While it’s not uncommon to see Discourse Miniatures expressing her displeasure at Games Workshop’s practices, even Chapter Master Valrak had a video up today titled “Falling Out of Love with Games Workshop.”

So it can be a hard time to be a wargamer.

The question then is how you find hobby motivation when there are so many reasons not to have hobby motivation? I’ve got 13 ways to get back your hobby motivation in wargaming.

1. Try A Different Ruleset

If you’ve been in the Games Workshop world for most of your wargaming career, you may not realize how easy it actually is to get into a new ruleset. Games Workshop is an incredibly rules-heavy and lore-heavy game world where there is SO MUCH you need to know, and it’s only worse under 9th Edition.

About two years ago I was invited to submit a book proposal for Black Library (for those of you who don’t know, I’m a New York Times Bestselling author) but I turned the opportunity down because I simply felt too completely overwhelmed by the amount of lore that exists in the Warhammer 40k world. There is just so much, and if you get anything wrong there will always be the rivet-counters who tell you everything you did wrong.

So free yourself from extensive rules and pick up a different ruleset. Want to still play with your Warhammer models? Then try One Page Rules. Want to get into historicals? Bolt Action is a phenomenal game. Want to stay in sci-fi? Go with Star Wars Legion. Want to relive the rank-and-flank of Warhammer Fantasy? Go with Kings of War.

There are literally SO MANY rulesets, and the further afield you go into miniatures agnostic games, you’ll learn that a ruleset will cost you $8 and you’ll get an entirely new world to explore.

2. Hobby Streak

I write extensively about the Hobby Streak which, for those who haven’t read my previous posts, is where you paint or hobby for at least thirty minutes a day and post the results on social media. The point of this is to get you doing something–anything–and creating habits. There’s no one judging you. You could post a completed model that you’ve been working on for a week, or you could post the partially assembled gray-plastic model that you’ve just started playing with.

I’ve been doing the Hobby Streak for more than a year now (Day 387 today) and there are times when I feel absolutely like doing nothing. There was the day when I was in a rollover car accident and I came home from the hospital at the end of the day and, unwilling to break the streak, I basecoated a sprue of Warlord Games American Civil war Epic Scale minis.

There’s a thing I recently learned about called (I think) The 1% Improvement Plan. This is about compound interest. If you increase your skill in something by 1% every day, then interest is going to be working in your favor: at the end of one year you will have increased in skill 37 times. Yes, that’s right. Not 37%, but 3700%.

If you’re at the bottom of your hobby journey and the hobby motivation you need isn’t necessarily something that you need other people to see (you have intrinsic motivation but no extrinsic) then consider starting an anonymous Instagram or Twitter channel. The thing about Hobby Streak is that you’re not trying to impress anyone. You’re simply trying to get into good habits.

3. Get Involved with Your FLGS

Getting involved with your FLGS (friendly local game store) is a great way to get involved. I admit that I very very rarely go to my FLGS to play a game, but I frequent the store well enough that the manager and I are on a first name basis, and she knows which armies I play, and she always handles the pre-orders that I get too FOMO about.

But the great thing about the FLGS is that they (if you have a good FLGS) are very welcoming about new people. Note that I’m not talking about Games Workshop or Warhammer stores, because at these places you are almost sure to get the hard sell. But a good FLGS is more than happy to let you wander the shelves and look at all of the things and they put on painting nights and game nights and events and they have boards where gamers can hook up with other gamers.

I frequent two FLGSs, and one of them has better prices than the other, but the other has much better hours than the other. (If I want to buy a model I want to buy it at 10:00am, not 2:00pm). But they’re both terrific stores run by people who are nothing at all like the stereotypical Simpson’s Comic Book Guys. Both stores run events, which I seldom attend because I’m an introvert, but I do enjoy talking to the owners and regulars who I see at least once a week.

Most important: if you’re going to hang out at your FLGS, make sure you buy stuff from your FLGS! One of the stores near me always has great deals on all their Games Workshop merchandise (at least 20-25% off) and the other one doesn’t, but I’ve made a habit of buying Games Workshop from one and paint from the other, just so that I can be supporting them both.

4. Get Into Kitbashing

If you feel your love of painting and collecting is starting to wane, then something fun to do is delve into kitbashing. There’s nothing that will spice up your wargaming hobby motivation than figuring out some interesting lore and then figuring out what kind of units would exist in that world. (Or, on the flip side, figure out some awesome-looking models and then try to figure out some lore.)

This is what I did with my Rock Badgers, a homebrew successor chapter of the Space Wolves who drove around in kitbashed Genestealer Cults vehicles. It’s very freeing and fun to say that you don’t care if it looks different, it still can be a joy. And sometimes you can say that it “counts as” something else–I said that my Achilles Ridgerunner “counts as” a Space Marine Attack Bike–or you can make up some house rules, like how I said my Goliath Rockgrinder worked like a Rhino that could only carry five Space Marines.

If you really want to get into kitbashing, and you’re not interested in Games Workshop, then let me suggest to you three games that I love/am growing to love. The first is Sludge, which is sort of “the apocalypse happened during the middle ages and everything looks like it lives in, well, sludge”. The second is The Silver Bayonet, which is “what if it’s Napoleonic Europe, except there’s vampires and werewolves and goblins?” And the third, which I am just now getting to, but totally falling in love with, is Turnip 28: “what if it’s Napoleonic Europe and the world is being taken over and corrupted by giant… tubers??” This last one is my first time really using Green Stuff, and it’s a lot of fun. Super weird, but a lot of fun.

5. Paint Something “Wrong”

Painting something “wrong” is a perfect way to get you out of a hobby rut and return you to your wargaming hobby motivation. There are the obvious things you can do, like when I decided that I loved the colors of the Space Marines Salamanders, but wanted to paint them on Sisters of Battle, and came up with The Order of the Malachite Grove. (This one isn’t necessarily “wrong” because in Warhammer 40k, virtually everything can be any color. That said, how about painting this Black Templar’s Emperor’s Champion to match my Knights of the Grail?)

But painting stuff wrong can apply just as well to historical stuff. There are always the “rivet-counters” (or I’ve also heard them called “button-counters”) who will correct you if a certain bag hanging off a German Waffen SS is painted the wrong color, but who cares? They’re you’re models.

One of my favorite models I painted was joining in the wargaming Pride Month #fabulousmarines2021 when I painted a Star Wars Legion tauntaun in the colors of the bisexual flag.

One of the biggest things you can do to get your hobby motivation back is to set yourself free from the notion that “this model has to be used in a game!” Make a model of whatever you want and paint it however you want. If it’s game-legal then great, and if it’s not, you still had fun painting it.

6. Reward Yourself with Something Extrinsic

As an extrinsic motivator for getting your hobby motivation back, set a reward for yourself. This can be anything, but some of the things that come to mind are:
1. Make a plan to attend a tournament, giving you the drive to have an army finished beforehand.
2. Decide that when you finish this last batch of models, you can start a new army.
3. Decide that you’re going to enter the Games Workshop’s Armies on Parade.
4. Make yourself paint two forces of a game you want to be a game advocate for (if you want to get people at your FLGS into Warcry, then paint up two factions so you can invite someone to play)
5. Reward yourself with a hobby vacation (or staycation). In December my boss told me that I hadn’t used enough sick days, so I took the first week of the month off and just spent a week painting. But it could be just as fun to book an AirBnB or even a hotel. I painted this guy in a hotel room by the light of the little crappy desk lamp because I didn’t want to break my hobby streak.

7. Get Involved in a Hobby Community (Patreon, not Facebook)

The wargaming hobby community is as good or as bad as you are looking for, and there are plenty of places where you can find wargaming hobby motivation (and there are plenty of places where you can have the motivation sucked right out of you by negativity).

In my experience, the best places to find good hobby community are Patreon Discord servers. Facebook groups are really iffy, and because they’re open to most anyone, there’s always some amount of trouble going on. Discord servers can be similar, but generally the Discord’s environment is fairly consistent with the personality of the person whose Patreon it is. Personally, I am on the Discord servers of Sonic Sledgehammer, Black Magic Craft, Midwinter Minis, Dana Howl, Discourse Miniatures, and Pete the Wargamer. These content creators’ Discords are about what you would expect from their on-screen personas.

I’d also recommend getting involved with wargaming Twitter. Again, this can be as pleasant or as toxic as you want it to be because Twitter is home to both the good and the bad. But I heard something once about Twitter that “Twitter is a place where you come to love people you don’t know, and Facebook is a place where you come to hate your friends.” I think that’s pretty true. Follow the right people, join in the conversation, and you can get reenergized with your hobby motivation.

8. Do Something You’re Not Going To Show Anyone

I put virtually everything I paint up on Instagram, but there are some projects that I paint just for me, or special gifts for people in my life. Last year at Christmas I gathered miniatures from three different fandoms (Luna Lovegood from Knight Models, Rocket and Groot from Marvel Crisis Protocol, and Boba Fett and Luke Skywalker from Star Wars Legion) and I painted them to the best of my ability and gave them as personalized Christmas gifts to my three children.

No one is ever going to see them, and I think that’s what I like about them. They’re personal, and because they’re personal it motivated me more to do the very best painting job I could.

9. Don’t Be Precious With Your Models

I have said this over and over on this website: don’t be precious with your models. Models come and models go, and if you’re an avid collector then the truth is that most of your models are going to end up in boxes on shelves and never displayed. I regularly turn over my models on eBay, which is one of the ways that I was able to fund my 648 models I painted in the last year.

I’m not going to be precious about every single model and treat it like it’s an heirloom that can never be replaced. Because of this, I feel much more free in my hobby motivation to try new paint schemes and techniques, and to try new armies, and to try new games. I am the Wargame Explorer, after all, and if I wasn’t continually trying new games I don’t think I could call myself that.

This isn’t to say that you should get rid of all your models or even most of them. It’s just to say “It’s okay to let something go, even something that you spend a long time working on.” I’ll never be able to replace the first minis I ever painted (you can see the video here of me searching my dad’s dirty basement for them) but I’ve also got two floor-to-ceiling bookshelves full of models, many of which are in Tupperware bins. It’s okay to let a few of them go.

10. Reach Out to a Content Creator

If you’re not feeling hobby motivated, then one of the very best things you can do is write a fan letter. I know this sounds weird. But trust me: as I said, I’m a New York Times bestselling author, and there is nothing that can lift my spirits more than getting a fan letter.

And if you’ve ever had someone write you back (let’s face it–most of the time they’re not going to write you back) but if they do, you’ll feel great. Nothing bad can ever come from writing fan letters (unless you’re a weird stalker. Don’t be a weird stalker.)

As I’ve reached out to people over the last year of running this website and contacted them about doing interviews, I have made so many contacts with content creators in the hobby, and nearly every single time it has been a lovely experience that rejuvinates me and makes me want to be a better painter/collecter/wargamer. If you’re struggling with hobby motivation, write a few fan letters.

11. Engage In Hobby/Gaming/Lore That You Haven’t Before

The way I see wargames, there are three ways you can engage with them: you can be in it for the hobby (the painting and collecting and building and kitbashing), you can be in it for the gaming (the rules and moving models around the tables and the tournaments) or you can be in it for the lore (the stories and fiction–or non-fiction–written about the models that you’re painting and pushing around the tabletop.)

So if you’re deep into one of those, try something else. I admit that I was NOT a lore guy until a couple of years ago, and there is so much that I have had to catch up on in virtually every game system. But having painted an entire 4000 points of Blood Angels, to finally read why Sanguinius was so cool? That was awesome, and it made me love my models more.

Or maybe you’re big into the meta and you collect the models that win tournaments. Maybe, if you’re struggling with hobby motivation, you can shake yourself out of that funk by buying and painting a model that you would never use in your tournament list because it just is so lousy–but it looks cool!

Maybe you’re a lore guy, and maybe that lore is the history of World War Two. It might be time to put down the books and start painting that British Eighth Army that you’ve read so much about.

12. Try a Different Scale

This can really change up your hobby motivation. Try something from a different scale. I remember (I’m old enough to remember well) when Games Workshop released Inquisitor models at 54mm. They were an entirely different kind of painting challenge, which meant that I had to try different techniques and I got different results. There’s something great about never being able to paint the perfect black dot in the center of an eye to suddenly being able to paint the iris, too. It expands your horizons.

But I wrote recently about Aaron at Project Wargaming who paints all sorts of scales of miniatures, from the 2mm Napoleonics to the 9mm American Civil War, to even bigger stuff.

I’ve dipped into painting 6mm World War II (and had kind of a miserable time) but I also got into painting 15mm Flames of War and thoroughly enjoyed paint all of those miniatures. I had to learn a different way to base miniatures, because my standard Vallejo texture paste and Army Painter Grass Tufts didn’t cut it the way they once did, but that’s just more hobby motivation.

13. Reach the Flow State

Finally, I’ll end with this: the Flow State. This is basically a theory of psychology about the mental state which is sometimes called “being in the zone,” where you’re completely focused and engrossed by a subject.

I made this beautiful graphic below. (thank you, thank you) And it basically shows a graph where your skill is across the bottom, growing better from left to right, and your challenge is on the side, growing bigger from bottom to top. If you’re low-skilled doing low-challenges you’re not going to be very interested and be in a state of apathy. If you’re moderately skilled, but with little challenge, then you’re bored. And if you’re highly skilled and moderately challenged, you’re in a relaxed mode.

On the top side, if you’re low skilled but moderately challenged, you’re going to be worried. And if you’re moderately skilled by highly challenged you’re going to have anxiety.

But if you can get into the perfect situation, where your skill level is equal to the challenge facing you, then you get into the flow state. You’re faced with a challenge that matches your skill, maybe even tests your skill, but doesn’t overtax your skill, and you enter The Zone.

So the takeaway is that if you need hobby motivation, maybe the problem is that you’re not putting yourself in a situation where you can reach the Flow State. Maybe you’ve bitten off more than you can chew and it’s just too stressful. Or maybe you’ve picked a project that’s too easy and you’re bored. By identifying where you are on this chart, you can get the perfect amount of hobby motivation.

What do you think? Where do you find your hobby motivation? Leave a comment!