TheChirurgeon's Final Road Through 2025

Hello there, Dear Reader, and welcome back to my final column in this series for 2025. It's been a wild ride to get here and I'm eager to close this particular series down and recap this year's series. Which isn't to say I won't just be back next week - The Road to 2026 is almost certain to start up next week, so "finishing" this series just means making a new banner and starting up again in seven days, but I'm interested in putting a cap on this one because I like looking back on things like this at the end of the year.

Five Years on This Road

It didn't occur to me until I was writing this particular article but I've been writing this series for five years now! That has to make this the longest-running hobby series of all time and if not, it's gotta be up there. I'm gonna Simpsons this bitch in every way - First by going more than 30 seasons, second by being absolutely washed by season 13, then trudging along for another 20.

Honestly it's crazy to have been working on Goonhammer for more than eight years now, and writing this column for five. We've come a long way from those early days of posting battle reports for the benefit of goons on the SomethingAwful forums. I still look back fondly on some of those early days, arguing with Wings about new 8th edition releases and attending my first tournaments. I went to NOVA two years in a row, then decided to start going to more competitive events, and then... COVID hit, and that was it for events for about a year. When the dust finally cleared and I had been fully vaccinated, I decided to start attending events and writing this column.

I've done a recap post at the end of every year, so if you missed any of the prior posts, you can find them below. They also usually include links to every post that year, so they serve as a good index of my entire journey.

By my count, I wrote 20 of these in 2021, 28 in 2022, 27 in 2023, and 44 last year. This marks 53 this year, both meeting a goal I'd set at the start of the year and also marking this as the 172nd article in the series. Maybe I'll comment on it when we get to 200. Or I'll forget. Hard to say.

FUN FACT: When I was writing this I went back and re-read my first post in the series, a missive written in July, 2021, shortly before Frontline Gaming's Lone Star Open event in Dallas. It's an OK post - fun to revisit to see that I've been on my Death Guard bullshit for five years now - but the most fun thing to read in that article was this pair of comments at the end:

That's Thomas "Goatboy" Reidy, a fellow author known for his art and his articles at Bell of Lost Souls. I was familiar with his articles and he'd been reading mine and we'd eventually meet at Lone Star Open, kicking off a friendship that has only become stronger over the last few years. Thomas is one of the bright, shining stars of this hobby and if nothing else, that writing this column led to our meeting has made it all worthwhile.

If you missed an article this year, here's the full list:

TheChirurgeon's Road Through 2025 - click to expand

Either way, that makes this more or less Goonhammer's longest-running and most prolific column as well, not counting things like Competitive Innovations which publish up to three times per week. And I'm not counting that because that wouldn't support the narrative I'm going for and also would mean giving props to noted Elf Player James "One_Wing" Grover. So wow, most prolific column! That's pretty cool, and I've enjoyed using this as a reason to push for a game or to make hobby progress every week. It's great additional impetus to get something done, and there have been weeks I haven't had time to do much but decided to get in a game or paint something just to have something to write about here.

Meeting My Goals for 2025

Back in my very first article, I set a few goals for the year for my hobby and competitive play progress. It's time to circle back on those and see how I did.

✅ Play 100 Games. I was at 97 games on the year going into my final RTT in December, and playing those three games put me at 100 on the mark. So I've logged 100 games. That's nowhere near the 200+ ceiling I've theorized is required for the highest levels of competitive play (see my article on this here), but it's definitely a step up for me and I can feel the benefits when I play my games. For the most part, anyways - the matchups definitely still matter and I still do plenty of stupid shit when I get impatient. Things to work on.
✅ Attend 10 Events. The World Championships was my tenth event, and with my final two RTTs, that makes 12 on the year. Easy enough, and I was especially happy to attend multiple events at Ettin this year, who throw the events closest to my house.
❌ Win Best Painted at a GT or Major. I think I came pretty close on this at a couple of events, pulling third at Clutch and potentially scoring a podium at Wardome if I hadn't left early, but I'm pretty OK with finishing 8th at the World Championships. I played a lot of Death Guard this year and that largely meant giving up best painted in search of a Golden Ticket. Easy trade to make, honestly.
❌ Win Best Painted at the 2025 Grand Narrative. Not gonna sweat this one; I didn't attend because I was at the World Championships. This was always mutually exclusive with winning a Golden Ticket.
✅ Win a Golden Ticket. Hell yes I did. My team went to Ottawa for the teams event, had an amazing time, finished second, and everyone who wanted a ticket got one. Amazing time, great event run by cool people, and I'd definitely go back.
❌ Log 10 games with my son. We haven't played much Warhammer. He's just not super into it. I'm going to log a game or two with him over winter break, but we've ended up playing much more HeroQuest instead, and I'm OK with that. I'll get him playing more next year.
✅ Help my son finish out 2,000 points. This was a bit of a cheat because we added a knight to his army, but we got pretty much to 2k points for him painted.
✅ 52 Articles. Well this one makes 53 so mission accomplished. It was a lot of work to get these done, but not so much that I regretted it or struggled. I think I'll probably set a similar goal next year but I won't be super upset if I skip a week or two for a vacation here and there. Probably aim for like, 50 articles instead.

Five out of eight isn't too bad, especially when one of them wasn't possible given I was attending the World Championships.

100 Games of Competitive Warhammer

I played one hundred games on the nose this year of competitive Warhammer. I won my first GT in August and a second RTT two weeks ago in December. I finished the year ranked 536 in the ITC which isn't the highest I've ranked but is pretty good given how much larger the field has become. In competitive events I finished 37-15-2 for a 68.5% win rate and I had a 5-0 run (though the last game was a teams draw) at Ottawa. So what did I learn?

It's a lot of time and work. I've written before about he hours it takes to compete - you can find that article here - but it bears repeating that playing 100 games and attending a dozen events takes a ton of time - and that's a bigger issue than the money. If you figure each a game to take on average 3.5 hours with set up and tear down that's 350 hours just spent playing Warhammer, not to mention the ten or so days spent traveling to the out-of-town events. Put in the context of American forty-hour work weeks, that's the equivalent of spending almost nine weeks putting in a 9 to 5 at the Warhammer Factory.
How to be less aggressive. This is something I've struggled with for years. I'm a "blast across the table and make a big crippling attack" kind of player and I struggle quite a bit with playing too aggressively, losing too much early and losing big when it doesn't work out. Over the course of the year I've learned how to pull back a bit and avoid giving up free targets to the opponent. To really understand when I can give something up and when I need to just let a kill or VP go in order to avoid making a bad trade. Playing Veterans of the Long War especially hammered this home - every kill often required multiple units working in concert, and you could just not afford to give up any units at low cost. It took some patience but I'd eventually learn that a turn 1 Area Denial was just not worth it with the army.On the flip side learning to bait out opponents in a similar fashion was very helpful and ultimately how I won some key games this year.
This is the last mountain. As far as "how good I'm going to get at Warhammer" goes, this is probably it - I've qualified for the World Championships and won games at the event, which is everything I wanted to achieve this year. Taking the next step - making it out of the group stage - requires an increase in skill, luck, and the right army circumstances I'm just not prepared to put in. Most of the top players I spoke to last year in that hourly cost of competition article were putting in something like 200+ games per year and I just don't have the time to do that and work a full time job and also be a decent husband and father. And I'm not even sure I want to, besides - I'm very happy with the progress I've made and I know that taking the next step ups the grind to a degree which is not likely to be nearly as fun as the journey getting here. And the fact remains that even if you're one of the best players in the world it's easy to end up not making it out of that group stage.When I started improving at 40k, a lot of it was driven by a need to be able to write credibly about the game for the site. When I was regularly playing in competitive events it became more about achieving interesting goals for the column. But now that I've accomplished those, it's not so much that the next mountain is too high but rather that I wasn't so into climbing mountains to begin with. Which isn't to say that I'm done competing - far from it - just that I'm not going to be trying to log 200 games next year.
There's more hobby work to do. I think I can do better than an eighth place finish at WCW, and if I go back again next year - not guaranteed if it continues to be at the same time as the Grand Narrative - I'll be trying to top this year's result and win either Best Painted or Best Overall. We'll see how it goes. If I end up at the Grand Narrative instead, I'll be aiming for best painted after a year off.

Hobby Progress

I painted quite a bit this year. It started early in the year, when I was on a terrain kick. I was inspired by Paulie "SkySerpent" Wallis' paint job on the new Volkus Terrain, and decided to paint some of my own. That would end up kicking off a larger project painting new terrain that I'd pick up again a few times during 2025, getting a few more key pieces done.

I have a few more pieces to finish up, including the final piece of Volkus terrain here, but my goal is to get a lot more terrain work done next year to finish up a second board in this theme. As much as I love my red Imperialis terrain I could use a bit of variety and I want to do something a bit more vibrant.

When Codex: Emperor's Children released, I was champing at the bit to get them painted. They're still an ongoing project - I put them on hold mid-year in order to get my Night Lords prepped for Worlds, but I'm going to pick them back up again in a big way in 2026. I'm immensely proud of the work I did on these.

I have a lot of work left to do on them but it'll be a work in progress, interspersed with my Night Lords. Speaking of which, they got some love this year, both before Wardome early in the year and before the World Championships.

After WCW I updated my old Army showcase article on the Night Lords, adding a fresh chapter to a story that's now almost 30 years in the making. It's worth going back to see it if you haven't - Army Showcase: TheChirurgeon's Night Lords. It's easily one of my favorite posts I've ever written, a miniature biography of my time in the hobby over the last thirty years. It's a love letter to the army that brought me into the hobby.

It hasn't been all chaos, though: I painted a fair amount of loyalist marines this year - most of them Space Wolves for my friend, SD47. SD47 is one of the key developers on Tabletop Battles, and is responsible for most of the app's externally-facing updates this year. Greg and I tricked him into playing Warhammer about ten years ago and got him into playing Space Wolves, and he's been stuck with them ever since.

SD47 is not huge on painting, and so I've painted more than a few of his models from time to time. I'm always happy to help him out with some new pieces, and when the new box released this year I painted the whole thing and took it with me to the Goonhammer Open to give to him. As of this week, I finally finished painting the Wolf Scouts, which released later in the year.

Credit: Robert "TheChirurgeon" Jones

I really don't mind painting Space Wolves - it's a good change up - and I like not having them around to take up space after the fact.

Then there were the odds and ends - a few models here and there I had to paint for various Codex releases or to field an army. That ranges from a Venomcrawler painted up in a few days to a Slaughterbound for the release of Codex: World Eaters. Plus, Cypher for my Chaos Space Marines and a pair of additional heavy blight launcher bloat drones to run at events this year. They've gotten a ton of use, so I'm glad I got them painted up in time for Tacoma this year.

It's roughly 85 models in total this year, not counting terrain, and that's a pretty solid number for me. It's on par with what I normally paint, anyways. Next year there will hopefully be more Emperor's Children and World Eaters but right now Night Lords are still on the docket until I get can get some games under my belt with the Nightmare Hunt Detachment. I'm excited to try that one out, even if my next event will be Death Guard again in a few weeks. My plan between now and then is to do some repair work on that army and improve their paint jobs, so stay tuned for that.

Final Thoughts

2025 was a hell of a year for me. This was the year I finally hopped into running Goonhammer full-time, and that's been a rewarding journey. I haven't regretted making that switch yet, and I'm hopeful that some of the things we have planned for next year will help us continue to grow and build the kinds of content and features people will be excited about. It's always great to go to an event and meet someone who's an avid reader of this column, and I love hearing from you about it. I think I only had maybe one bad game this year across all the competitive events I played - a new record - and that's pretty great too.

I'll be back next week to kick off a new year with the Road Through 2026. Until then, whether you're an avid enjoyer of my bullshit or you're that one weird, bitter Custodes player who was still furious about our review of the codex and read this column every week waiting desperately for an opportunity to try and dunk on me for not liking the Pacts rule, I've appreciated you showing up to follow along - thanks for reading. I can't tell you enough how much your support means, and if you're a regular reader and you haven't joined the Patreon yet, please consider doing so - we can only do what we do here thanks to the support of our Patrons, and more support means being able to pay more to our writers and make more content and features in our apps possible. After nearly two decades of working for tech startups whose sole purpose seemed to be "keeping the internet free by making it shittier," it's awesome to be working full time on something people actually like and enjoy.

See you next week.

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