Too Much and Not Enough? - Lamenting All the Games that I will Never Play

Once again, I struggle with the fact that I won't live long enough and don't have the space to complete all of the gaming periods and projects that are currently have on my to-do list.  I'm to the point, where it is really hard to accept that will never complete some of my current projects.

As I sat here this morning, arguing with myself about which gaming periods and projects to shave from my to-do list, the thought occurred tome," Just how many periods would I like to play?"  So I decided to make a "quick" list of all of the things that I would really like to game in miniature.

As I started to make the list, I excluded those things such as The Great War, and Franco-Prussian War that I am interested in gaming, but for which I don't  feel the excitement about researching and/or building the terrain and armies.

Anyway, to distract myself from dealing with the problem at hand, I came up with some numbers.  There is some repetition, where periods are represented more than once, in different scales, and some armies overlap into multiple periods/offensives/operations, but here are the numbers:

76 Periods
532 Armies and factions
106,200 Miniatures
24 Sets of basic Modular Terrain
41 Sets of Buildings and Terrain Details

Even if I had won the lottery in high school, or discovered that I was Howard Hugh's lost love child, I never had a chance.  Given that I insist on painting all of my own figures (and even making a few of them), write most of my own rules, and scratch-build almost all of my own terrain, I figure that I would need three lifetimes, free of work and family to get it all done.

Oh well, a moment of whimsy is over, back to the chopping block...